I built my first tour in South East Asia in 2006, before most booking agencies in the West would even consider Bangkok, Manila, or Kuala Lumpur as tour stops. That tour — an indie Swedish band playing Manila and Singapore — wasn’t planned as the start of a career. It just turned out to be one.
A year later, a French post-rock band I was touring became the first French act to play Baybeats in Singapore. Between 2009 and 2017, I worked as a promoter and facilitator in Bangkok, bringing artists like Mogwai, Kings of Convenience, Damien Rice, Explosions in the Sky, and Death Cab for Cutie to Thai audiences — years that taught me more about how this region actually works than any amount of research could have.
Smallfish grew out of that experience in 2016. Since then, I’ve toured independent artists across Southeast Asia and Far East Asia — including multiple placements at Zandari Festa in South Korea, one of the region’s key showcase platforms for niche and emerging acts — worked alongside major labels including Warner and Sony, organized concerts and showcases, spoken at industry conferences, and built relationships with festivals, promoters, and music export organizations across the region that most artists spend years trying to access on their own.
One tour still stands out: three weeks through Japan, South Korea, China, Hong Kong, and Malaysia with an Estonian act — five flights, four long-distance buses, three long-distance trains, and a headline festival offer in Vietnam that came in a week later, purely because word of the band’s live show had spread between promoters who’d never met them.
What Smallfish is now
For most of that time, Smallfish operated as a traditional artist management and consulting agency — working one artist, one tour at a time. That knowledge shouldn’t only be available to the handful of artists I can work with directly in a given year.
Smallfish is becoming the practical resource I wish existed when I built that first tour in 2006: country-by-country guides, real numbers on costs and fees, honest assessments of which markets are worth an artist’s time and which aren’t, and interviews with the promoters, festival directors, and label executives actually running these scenes today — not recycled advice or theory from people who’ve never booked a show in Bangkok or Hanoi.
Consulting is still available, for artists who want direct, hands-on help building and running a tour. But it’s no longer the only way to benefit from what two decades in this region has taught me.
Start here: Browse the Asia touring guides →