By Petr Klyuev, Co-Founder of ArtGoArt (AGA)
For more than fifteen years, I have operated on both sides of the industry. I played intimate acoustic shows for a handful of listeners. I stood on festival stages in front of thousands of people. I toured with bands, worked with promoters, managers, venues, and organizers across different countries.
Despite all the changes the music business has gone through, one thing has remained surprisingly unchanged: gig booking still feels stuck in another era.
Think about it. Today we can order food, book flights, call a taxi, reserve a hotel room, or even buy a house from an app. Yet finding and booking an artist often still depends on personal contacts, endless messages, spreadsheets, phone calls, and information scattered across multiple platforms.
As musicians, we rarely talk about how much energy we lose in this process. People imagine that an artist's life revolves around the joyful act of "creating music." In reality, many independent musicians spend a significant part of their time acting as unpaid managers, salespeople, accountants, marketers, and administrators.
Sometimes it feels like making music is nothing more than a side job.
The problem becomes even bigger when an artist moves to a new city or a new country. I've seen talented musicians have to rebuild their careers from zero simply because they lost access to their professional network. Not because they lacked talent. Not because they lacked ambition. They simply lacked infrastructure.
And infrastructure is something the creative industry rarely discusses.
- We talk about talent.
- We talk about streams.
- We talk about algorithms.
But we rarely talk about the systems that help artists get discovered, communicate with clients, manage availability, and actually get booked. That realization became one of the reasons we started ArtGoArt.
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For us, the goal was never to replace managers, agents, or the crucial relationships that power live entertainment careers and livelihoods. Music will always be built on trust, chemistry, emotion, and personal human connection. But chaos is not something your career should depend or rely on, and it shouldn't be the degault solution just because something better has yet to come along.
We started in our backyard in Europe. We started to build the infrastructure that we would want to use ourselves, not just another marketplace vulnerable to over-saturation. That meant incorporating: open calendars, direct communication without endless calls, booking management tools, financial safeguards, and moderation that helps both artists and clients feel more confident throughout the process.
Today ArtGoArt is still in Beta, yet more than 120+ artists from across Europe have already joined the platform — some emerging, some established. Seeing them share the same digital space is perhaps the most interesting part of the project. And we're getting a ton of data and feedback that's influencing where we go next.
Because the future of the creative industries does not only belong only to stars, it belongs to all working artists, and it's important to make sure power is balanced between artists and not only in the hands of gatekeepers. When an ecosystem can accommodate creators from all levels of success, that future becomes possible.
If artists spend less time chasing information, availability, contacts, and payments, they gain the most valuable thing of all: time to create.
Petr Klyuev is a musician, songwriter, and entrepreneur with more than 15 years of experience in the music industry. Throughout his career, he has performed both as a solo acoustic artist and on major stages across Europe, including tours with the band LSP. Having experienced the realities of the live entertainment business from the artist's perspective, he became one of the Co-Founders of ArtGoArt (AGA), a European platform designed to simplify artist discovery and booking.
