Hii, hey, hello! How are we today? I hope the answer is well! Welcome to, or back to, my blog, the random collection of thoughts & experiences that I felt pertinent enough to blast out to all corners of the internet & beyond. Today I want to discuss a topic very near & dear to me & to a lot of my fellow independent musicians. The topic of shows.
If you’re new here & you hadn’t caught on to the fact that I do music either from the site name itself; CharlieRogersMUSIC.com, or the myriad of single release pages or posts that you had to scroll through to get to this blog page, well I guess now you’re all caught up. Yes, I do music, I’m a singer-songwriter & have been, professionally, for about fourteen years now. I’ve seen a lot of things come & go in the music industry, I’ve seen a lot of growth, decay, & everything in-between & I consider myself fairly well versed in the inner workings of it. I understand that to the outside world, or at least those who are not familiar with the industry that it can feel like this fantastical dream hellscape where managers want nothing more than to screw you over, labels want to strip artists of their souls, we “sell songs,” & streams & shows make us money. I want to focus specifically on that last bit, not the streaming part, we don’t have time for that clusterf*** today. We’ll be focusing on shows my dear lovelies.
It used to be, back in the day, that artists made revenue from three main sources: physical or digital album/single sales, merchandise sales, & ticket sales. That first one has basically gone by the wayside, unless you’re big enough to sell vinyls, which are currently outselling all other forms of physical media. The second is often dependent upon the third, the reel-in followed by the ‘upsell,’ but again, that is often entirely dependent upon your size & how large an audience you attract. The same I guess can also be said of ticket sales. So baring that in mind going forward we’ll begin to disassemble this lovely little Catch-22 that so many smaller & independent artists find themselves in.
For starters, to get a song produced these days will set you back anywhere between $1.5-2K minimum. That’s just for the song. Then you have to pay for a photoshoot, potentially graphic design, etc for album cover & assets. Another $300 minimum probably. After that, if you want to hire a PR firm, there’s another grand a month. Distribution of the song will probably cost you around $15-25. So just to put professional sounding, polished, well marketed music out, you’re looking at around $3,000 dollars total. Let’s say you want to put out a single every month & a half for the next year. You’re looking at around $26,560 a year just for single releases ((1,500+20+300)x8+(1,000x12)). Again, these are just rough numbers & if you have the ability, the friends/connections, &/or know how, you can potentially cut some of these numbers way back. In each of these stages of production every one else, with the exception of the artist & the songwriter (though some bigger name songwriters charge just to show up in the room), but the artist is the one who is out the ‘x’ amount of dollars just in the small hope that they have an asset that people can take away & attach to or so we have something to ‘market’ ourselves with. We’ll make maybe $0.89 if someone buys a download of our song or the $.00014 for each stream we get on it, but that’s about the extent of our revenue coming from the song itself, unless of course it goes viral. God willing.
Okay, now we’ve got all that out of the way? We get it? Are we starting to see the money pit that is being a singer-songwriter? You know, the people that create one of the few things that we as humans consume almost daily; music. Us & farmers man haha, entirely necessary from a societal standpoint, but the least paid. Okay. Moving onto why I brought us all here.
I often encounter people who are fans of mine, or at least claim to be to my face, who ask me the same question every time the topic of my music gets brought up. Say it with me my fellow artists; “when’s your next show?” & I always have to give sort of a half answer to this. Let’s get into why.
I would love nothing more than to be constantly playing shows. The stage is one of the places that feeds my soul & performing, in all honesty, is my favorite part of the job. But to perform to the capacity that I want to & in the way that I feel I shine the brightest also, once again, requires a good deal of capital. Let’s break that down.
We’re going to go with Nashville standards here, because that’s what I know best, but I will include a bit on touring as well. To book a venue you first have to get the contact information for the venue’s booker, often times they will ignore you no matter how often you call or email. In the event they get back to you it’s typically a game of tag swapping dates which are always booked by the time they finally get back to you following your response with the dates they sent you in the first place. A lot of times venues will have either a bar minimum, $1-2K that the artist is in charge of covering if the venue doesn’t make that in alcohol sales, &/or a buy in (artist has to buy a certain amount of tickets, up front, then try to sell them themselves), &/or a venue ticket split (this could either be a certain amount of tickets required to be sold before the artist sees anything from it or a percentage of the tickets sales, try for the former always.). So that’s the money pit just from booking a show in town.
Next up you have to pay a band. Each member will probably want a minimum of $200 for the gig, they also may want an addition $50-100 per rehearsals. So if I play guitar & sing, hire out a lead player, a bass player, & a drummer there’s about $750 in band fees. Once again, everyone but the artist is getting guaranteed pay upfront.
Now let’s take this show on the road. We’ve got our four piece band, already getting around $750 total for the show but now we’re traveling. They’re going to either want a per deum (an allotment of money for them to spend on food on the road) or they’re going to want you to cover food. Let’s set that at $50 a person, per day & we’re doing two days. An additional $100 per person. Now we’re up to $1,050 for a single out of town show. Now we’re have our airfare to consider. We’re flying Southwest in this hypothetical & just going about an hour & a half flight or two an away so $50 each way. Additional $100 per person. Up to $1,450 for a single show that is coming out of that unsigned artist’s pocket. Lastly we have to get a hotel for the night, everyone needs their own bed, & we’re going three-ish star here. $150 per room, keeping nice round numbers here, times two, $300 total. So. We’re now up to $1,750 for that one show. While we’re at it let’s throw in an additional $250 just for random expenses along the way; Ubers, a missing cable, a capo, sound/lighting fees from the venue, your own food, etc. All of this is fairly base level but we’re now up to $2,000 just to travel with a four piece band for two days, one show, & one of the band members, the artist, still isn’t getting paid. All of this is also without the potential pr you’ve spent to promote the show, 20% a manager would take, or the 10% a booking agent would take. The manager only taking a cut of whatever the artist might make or the over all “booking” fee for the artist if they’ve been paid to come in & the same goes for the booking fee if the agency got you the gig.
Now we’re going to do a bit of addition. We’ve already established that eight singles a year would average round $24,560 annually. We’re going to cut that in half, do four quarterly singles, but remember PR is monthly. We’re now down to $19,280 ((1,500+300+20)x4+(1000x12)). Now let’s say you play three full band shows a month, two out of town & one in town, don’t want to over saturate the market. That’s $4,750 for the month just in band fees. We now have ourself a grand total of $76,280 that we as an artist have taken as a loss with zero to no guarantee of making back.
$76,280. Paid out. For one year. Releasing a single a quarter & playing three band shows a month. That’s just the financial side of things, that’s not even touching the social side.
So, when you ask us “when’s your next show” I always want my follow up to be “if I book one, do you guarantee me that you’ll come? And while we’re here making that guarantee, do you guarantee that you’ll also bring at least ten people who will also bring at least ten people so that if I charge $10 a ticket that I’ll at least, potentially, break even?” You see, that’s the big kicker. We get asked, repeatedly, when we’re playing shows. Then we book one, promote the hell out of it, & all the people who asked us to play the show are miraculously no where to be found.
I don’t mean to sound jaded, truly I don’t, but this is a topic of discussion that I’ve had with many of my fellow artist friends of late, some of whom are even, by most measures of their progress, doing fantastically. It is so common that we book a show & 9/10 take it as a loss on top of the loss we’ve already accrued simply making the product. If you want your favorite small artists to succeed, to play more shows, to actually make a living, for the love of God, attend their shows! And pay for a bloody ticket!
Again, I make this blog out of a desire to spread awareness & help those of you who don’t live the artist life understand what we sacrifice temporally, financially, energetically, just in the hopes of being heard. Promote unsigned artists to your friends, your family, get them to listen to their music & spread it around. GO TO THE SHOWS THEY PLAY!!!
If you have any questions I’d be more than happy to answer them in the comments, but for now, I hope you have a fantastic day/night/whatever time it is!
As always, much love to you all,
-C