Financials around artists & concerts etc

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Forums › Finance and wealth management › Financials around artists & concerts etc

DamageInc

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#303485 13-Feb-2023 14:30

Hi all, just a general query around the title.

We've just had Ed Sheeran tour the country & this got me wondering about a few things:

When planning tours do the artists seek out venues or do venues seek out the artist?

Does the artist hire the venue or does the venue pay the artist to perform?

What % of $$$ do artists get from ticket sales, merchandise etc?

Anything else anyone knows about the industry that would be interesting to read??

Thanks in advance for any information on the above.

Pop! OS

John19612

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#3036002 13-Feb-2023 14:35

With your username I'd have expected Metallica to be the example.

I believe that for points 1 & 2 the artist seeks out the venue and hires it. For point 3, this is really the major reason for touring - artists are getting very little from album sales these days so use tours for a large part of their income. I believe that the merchandising can bring in vast sums of money.

floydbloke

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#3036011 13-Feb-2023 14:44

DamageInc:

4. Anything else anyone knows about the industry that would be interesting to read??

The whole industry is full of 'middle-men' trying to get a slice of the pie and they're quite happy to fleece the fans of every cent that they can. (Ticketmaster is the main one that springs to mind.)

Did Eric Clapton really think she looked wonderful...or was it after the 15th outfit she tried on and he just wanted to get to the party and get a drink?

DamageInc

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#3036013 13-Feb-2023 14:45

lol yes Metallica should have been.

Thanks for the reply. Be interesting for ticket sales also. Was watching an Ed S concert on YouTube and Ed was on night 3 of 5 at Wembley Stadium.

90k people x 5 concerts. Staggering.

Pop! OS

DamageInc

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#3036016 13-Feb-2023 14:46

floydbloke:

DamageInc:

4. Anything else anyone knows about the industry that would be interesting to read??

The whole industry is full of 'middle-men' trying to get a slice of the pie and they're quite happy to fleece the fans of every cent that they can. (Ticketmaster is the main one that springs to mind.)

Yes unfortunately I do read this on the net, sucks to be honest for the artist.

Pop! OS

Handsomedan

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#3036037 13-Feb-2023 15:23

This article goes some way to explaining the mechanics of touring

It's aptly titled, "The Mechanics of Touring".

Key Players in the Touring Industry

Artists and Managers

Artists and their managers are the crucial elements of the live business. As we’ve laid out in our Mechanics of Management, manager’s role is to build and coordinate the artist’s team on all sides of the music industry, and that, of course, includes the concert business. The artist’s management usually takes part in the initial route planning, helps the artist pick the touring team, and serves as a bridge between the live entertainment and all other sides of the artist’s career.

Booking Agents

The job of the booking agent itself is very easy to define: the agent represents the artist across the live industry. Their goal is to book the tour and sell the shows to the local talent buyers, finding the venue and negotiating the price. The booking deal is usually pretty straightforward: “an artist A, represented by the agent B, commits to play an N-minute show in the venue C on the day X for a $Y. ” A good agent is the one who’s able to get all those As, Bs and Cs right — so that the venue is sold out, but there are no fans left without a ticket; the artist gets paid well, but the promoter doesn’t feel cheated, and so on. While the deal is relatively simple, it’s hard to nail all the details — especially given the fact that the show are usually booked from 8 to 24 months in advance, depending on the scope of the venue.

Promoters

Promoters are the side of the live business that funds the tour and buys the shows. The landscape of concert promotion is complex, and promoters themselves come in various shapes and sizes. To make it a bit simpler, imagine that promoter is a middle-man, connecting the concert space and the artist to put together a show. You can start building that bridge from either side, however.

Tour promoters set out from the artist side, contracting musicians to perform a series of concerts, paying for rehearsals, audiovisual production, covering the travel expenses and so on. Once the show is ready, tour promoters, working closely with the artist’s booking agent, either rent venues themselves or subcontract (read: sell) the shows to the local promoters (or a mixture of both).

Local promoters, in their turn, embark from a concert space. Affiliated, or at least connected with local venues and performance spaces, they buy gigs from the agents and/or tour promoters to own the ticket sales. An art-director of a small club, a local group of party promoters, a team of the major US festival — all those event promoters of different scope would fall into that category.

In that context, the role of the agent becomes clear. If promoters are the middle-men on the side of an artist or a concert space, the agent is the middle-man between the middle-men, who builds up the network of promoters (on both fronts) and artists, serving as a liaison between all sides.

However, some of the biggest tours today can be put together without the agent’s involvement. One of the main shifts in the live business is the consolidation of tour and local promoters under the umbrella of entertainment conglomerates, with the most notable examples of Live Nation and AEG.

Essentially, these companies have grown their operation to the point where they can build the bridge from both sides, internalizing all the processes. They both produce the concert tours and own (or, at least, establish partnerships with) a vast network of clubs and arenas, providing venues for the tour. Live Nation, AEG and alike can now create centralized international tours, offering artists 360° deals. However, touring under such exclusive promotion remains reserved for the artists of the top echelon — so most of the shows out there are still put together in collaboration between the tour promoters, booking agents and local partners.

Tour Managers and Technicians

Tour managers that stay on the road with the artist's crew are the oil that makes the wheels of the tour spin. Even a nationwide tour involves extremely complex logistics, and it becomes exponentially harder to manage the travel as the tour passes onto an international level. For the first-tier acts, staying on the road with the artist crew, technicians and 30 trucks worth of equipment can cost up to $750k per day. The goal of the tour manager is to make sure that the money doesn't go down the drain when the artist’s bus breaks down in Nowhere, Oklahoma. Getting the band from point A to point B seems to be a pretty straightforward job, but in fact, the routine of the tour manager is dealing with unexpected and solving a dozen of new problems each day — all while keeping the artists happy and ready to perform. To give you a taste of an international tour route, here's an approximate map of the Lizzo's tour in support of "Cuz I Love You" release, stretching over 64 locations and 74,575 km — and that is just the straight routs, not accounting for the actual roadways.

Tour managers also run the technician crew, and, while the technical support of the tour is often overlooked, the fact is that behind every show there’s a team that turns the performance into an audiovisual experience that the audience has paid to see. It takes hard work and expertise to assemble the stage, set up the lights and the sound system, etc. The live industry relies on the tech crew to make the show actually happen.

Festivals & Venues

Festivals and venues are at the very core of the live business, providing the space and (usually) the base infrastructure for the show. As we've already mentioned, there’s often a great deal of vested interest between local promoters and performance spaces. That means that there’s usually a local promoter “attached” to the venue, and same goes for music festivals.

Outdoor events are a distinct part of the live performance landscape. Operated by promotion groups, prominent festivals can introduce artists to new audiences, both in terms of fans and music industry executives — all while offering a fat pay-check. A major festival performance puts the artist on the map, and the promotional effect of the show itself has to be considered. It can become even more important than the immediate monetary gain — especially for independent, up-and-coming artists. That’s why the tour routing will often be structured around a couple of big music festivals — and then filled up with solo concerts along the way. A good example is Coachella: as the event takes place over two separate weekends, most of the Coachella artists also book “side-gigs” around the area during the in-between week.

Label & Publisher

Although recording and publishing industries are not directly engaged in the live business, we have to remember that the music industry is built on collaboration. By convention, most music tours follow the release of an album, and each artist has to report his set after the show to PROs so that the proper songwriters get paid. The music industry is made up of separate companies and people working on the different parts of the artist career — and, while not completely aligned, they are always interconnected.

Edited to add a small portion of the article to indicate the convoluted nature of touring.

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Andib

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#3036038 13-Feb-2023 15:24

As others have said, the entertainment industry is filled with people who are solely there to clip the ticket.

Generally speaking, It's up to the local promoter to manage most things. The artists gets a fixed fee & a % of sales (ticket sales, merch & often everything else sold at the venue).
The local promoters likely themselves do deals with venues to bring big artists to their venue over another (Eden Park vs Mt Smart or Western Springs).

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wellygary

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#3036048 13-Feb-2023 15:40

Andib:

The local promoters likely themselves do deals with venues to bring big artists to their venue over another (Eden Park vs Mt Smart or Western Springs).

The "locals" are also integrating with big international Ticketing providers :(

Just this week "Frontier touring" which is one of the real big OZ/NZ local promoters signed up AXS ticketing ( part of AEG) as their exclusive provider,

On one hand it add more diversity that the regular T/master - T/Tek - on the other hand its likely to be an exclusive arrangement so there is even less freedom in the system.

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invisibleman18

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#3036058 13-Feb-2023 16:02

DamageInc:

lol yes Metallica should have been.

Thanks for the reply. Be interesting for ticket sales also. Was watching an Ed S concert on YouTube and Ed was on night 3 of 5 at Wembley Stadium.

90k people x 5 concerts. Staggering.

If you haven't already, watch the ED Sheeran Full Circle documentary which is currently on TVNZ+ which gives a behind the scenes account of how the Wembley show (and this whole tour) was set up. There's a lot of people working for him and on the tour that also need to be paid.

gzt

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#3036061 13-Feb-2023 16:10

On one hand it add more diversity that the regular T/master - T/Tek - on the other hand its likely to be an exclusive arrangement so there is even less freedom in the system.

Hopefully it ends the market driven demand ticket pricing that causes empty seats in stadiums in favor of some sophisticated pricing always upwards. Many of the artists hate it because they're about playing for people not seats and ticket sales.

I have spent money on good seats now and then. I don't have a problem with that. The problem is these algorithms and strategies jack up the price for so many seats to "you have to be joking" levels. I'm not paying it purely on that basis, not going, and fans with limited means don't stand a chance.

DamageInc

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#3036068 13-Feb-2023 16:26

@Handsomedan brilliant thank you

Pop! OS

DamageInc

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#3036069 13-Feb-2023 16:27

invisibleman18:
DamageInc:

lol yes Metallica should have been.

Thanks for the reply. Be interesting for ticket sales also. Was watching an Ed S concert on YouTube and Ed was on night 3 of 5 at Wembley Stadium.

90k people x 5 concerts. Staggering.

If you haven't already, watch the ED Sheeran Full Circle documentary which is currently on TVNZ+ which gives a behind the scenes account of how the Wembley show (and this whole tour) was set up. There's a lot of people working for him and on the tour that also need to be paid.

That's what I'm watching tonight, thank you.

Pop! OS

Oblivian

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#3036119 13-Feb-2023 18:44

Someone I know got vip vf presale for pink today

A tiny $555 each...

Anyway. Didn't the conglomerate that now runs Ticketmaster buy half the venue's here or have fingers in all the pies.
get a feeling they manage a heap of the acts internally and pick amd choose the venue and ticketing based on that. Multi layered proft
They're a major shareholder of spark arena...

Live nation>ticketmaster..

Subsidiaries
Roc Nation
Ticketmaster
Live Nation Concerts
Front Line Management Group
Live Nation Network
C3 Presents
AC Entertainment
Live Nation Merchandise

Dratsab

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#3037420 16-Feb-2023 05:36

In a conversation I had with Billy Sheehan a couple of years ago, I asked him if he'd ever be coming down this way. His answer was that he had no choice in the matter. He said that artists are essentially hired guns, if a promoter books a show - that's where they go.

Obviously, it's a lot different at local level where local acts have to book and pay for venues themselves.

networkn

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#3051488 18-Mar-2023 13:26

Traditionally touring was about promotion of albums, they weren't big money makers, in fact many many tours lost money.

Having said that, the numbers seem staggering, but you'd be surprised how many people are required to make a show happen. There are a *huge* number of moving parts, and in many cases artists are relying on local talent for venue setup and moving between sites and what not.

If you are wildly popular, like Ed Sheeran, then you are going to be making 'decent' money on a tour, but mid-tier artists almost certainly make far less than you might think.