I looked up how much money musicians get from one show and smaller names get ridiculously little money, while big acts make seemingly way too much.
I saw fans bitch about My Chemical Romance’s ticket prices and decided to do some calculus.
Let’s calculate their Dodger Stadium show July 26. Price starts at 117 dollars. Dodger Stadium’s capacity is 56000 people. Let’s say 30000 will show up. Calculating and ending up with 3,5 mil. dollars. At minimum. Half of that goes to stuff. 15 percent of what’s left goes to promoter. Around 1,5 million left. Split five ways and 300k goes to each one. Is it true? Or I am wrong in that?
ELI5 How much money musicians make per gig with attendance of 500, 2500, 25000 people.
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Don’t forget that the tax man passes by that income too.
Multiple times.
Tax on the tickets, tax on the wages tax one everything.
Not as much as that.
You have to factor in everything, this is venue costs (which also includes venue staff, security, power, facilities etc) then the tour costs (equipment rental, crew cost, insurances, travel, accommodation, food, work permits, any additional security etc.)
Then you have Ticketmaster/booking agents fees are taken aswell.
There’s not much money in touring (hence the markup on tour merch) and you’d think “well, they’re charging more for tickets they must be making a lot”, no. The increase of cost reflects the increase price of venues and their costs, booking agents costs, record label fees, the production costs and so on.
Most artists make above a living wage unless they’re mega successful (like Taylor Swift, blink 182 and probably yes, MCR) because they can get better rates on venues and costs and also demand more in there own cuts of the sales.
Happy to be told otherwise (with cases and facts)
Source: used to tour in local bands and spoke with some larger bands in the metal community who we supported and got the low down.
They make a pittance on ticket sales. The real money is in merchandise and corporate sponsorships
As someone who mainly goes to underground metal shows, I regularly see guitarists and vocalists selling t-shirts and CDs after their set on stage
It’s a hustle, through and through
it really depends on the artist’s deal. small shows (like 500 people) might barely cover travel and crew, especially for openers. mid-size ones (like 2500) can be decent money if they sell out, but there’s still a lot of cuts—venue, promoter, staff, etc. big stadium shows sound huge, but only headliners with strong negotiating power actually take home the big checks. everyone else just gets a slice of that giant pie.
Bigger acts like MCR probably have a considerable crew they bring with them, which means more people that need to get paid than just the band members. Roadies, drivers, merch people, a sound guy, etc.
Live music is really one of those “it takes a village” types of things.
If you’re not like Lady Gaga big, you’re really not making very much money at all.
I’m in a growing metallic hardcore band and while the band sustains itself, we haven’t had to pay anything in directly in quite some time, none of us have actually made money off of the band. We pay bills working our day jobs and take time off to tour. The band has paid for meals on the road, things like that, but none of us is getting paid for music.
If we didn’t sell lots of merch we wouldn’t be anywhere near even that level, but fortunately for us we usually do pretty well in that regard.
They all have different deals. Some are flat rate, some are door deals, some are flat rate + bonuses. It all varies on the show, the artist, the promoter, etc…. There is no across the board pay for all artists.
Flat rate deal: they get paid a set price agreement to perform the show.
Door deal: they get paid a % of the ticket sales (this is partially why service fees are so high,the venue can milk more money out of the fans without having to give a cut to the artist.) a door deal could be something like 70/30 where 70% of the ticket sales goes to the artist and 30% to the venue. Some will work in the food/drinks and other times the venue gets the whole food/drink sales.
Flat rate + bonuses: this is where a flat rate is agreed upon but if the artist sells X amount of tickets they get a bonus on top of the flat rate. So if an artist is paid $2500 for a show and manage to sell 80% of the venue they might get a $300 bonus and then do a full sellout they get a $800 bonus.
One more I just remembered is an “or” deal meaning they have an agreement for a flat rate or something like 75% of each ticket sold. So whichever one is larger at the end of the night/weekend of those 2 is what they make. So if you have $100 tickets and the artist gets a flat rate guarantee agreement of $60,000. But they end up selling 1000 tickets which would be $75,000 (from the %75 per ticket) so they would be paid 75,000 instead of $60,000.
But all these numbers vary from artist to artist and venue to venue.
My band play mostly bars. We usually get payed in entrance fees ($10 for every person in attendance) and the biggest audience we’ve ever played for was about 200 people. After the cost of getting ourselves and our equipment to the venue, a burger each and a cut to the sound guy, we earned a profit of roughly $200 each, after basically 20 hours of non-stop work