One of the biggest issues facing working musicians over the past few years is the increasing costs, and decreasing profitability, of touring. After illegal downloads and streaming decimated the market for recorded music, artists relied heavily on live shows to make ends meet. It wasn’t necessarily a fair model, but it held up decently for about two decades, until live entertainment ground to a halt during Covid-19 and returned a few years later into a new era of heavy inflation, rising costs, and stagnant wages.
While this tenuous situation has been well-documented, it’s rare for stories include hard numbers. That leaves lingering, but crucial questions: How much does it really cost to go on tour? How much money do artists actually make? How much do they lose? Does turning a profit really all hinge on merch?
Yesterday, Los Campesinos!, the indie rock stalwarts from Cardiff, Wales, offered some answers to those questions with a comprehensive breakdown of the finances for their 2024 North American tour in support of their latest album All Hell. In a post shared on Substack, the band’s frontman Gareth David revealed exactly how much money the band spent to play 11 shows in June 2024, how much money they made from those gigs, and how they eventually walked away with a profit of £38,246.64 (almost $52,000, using 2026 exchange rates).
David’s post is a fascinating, informative deep-dive, though he was quick to note that this breakdown was not meant “to explain the situation for all touring bands.” Rather it was offered up in the “spirit of attempting to be transparent and honest about the music industry, and perhaps to outline to our own fans why we are unable to tour more frequently and widely.”
The frontman also highlighted several elements unique to Los Campesinos! when taking their tour finances into account. The band comprises seven people, and they often tour with a few band members’ kids. So, there are some additional costs off the bat, but on the flip side, Los Campesinos! are self-managed, meaning they don’t have to pay out an additional commission to a manager or management company. (They do, however, have a booking agent and hire a tour manager for their U.S. runs.) Furthermore, each member has a day job, and the band is no one’s primary source of income. Lastly, David noted, “We are aware that specific ideological decisions we make impact our ability to maximize the money we earn.”
Technically, Los Campesinos! did earn a lot of money from this tour. As David explained, artists typically get paid for shows one of two ways: There’s the “guaranteed” minimum, which the promoter shells out, and the artist always gets, regardless of how many tickets are sold. But if ticket income exceeds the guarantee, the artist gets 80 percent of the show’s total profits instead. For instance, Los Campesinos! scored a $17,000 guarantee for one show, but because it sold out, they made $21,743.80.
These fees are based largely on ticket prices, and David acknowledged Los Campesinos! was likely leaving money on the table because of a deliberate choice to keep prices “as low as possible to ensure our shows are accessible to all fans.” The standard ticket price was $27.50, with some options available for low-income fans. Even still, Los Campesinos! sold out every concert except one on their tour, with total fees coming out to $149,037.74.
What’s remarkable is how quickly that sum shrinks. To start, Los Campesinos! really wound up making $127,729.53 (about £99,738.05) from those 11 shows after the standard 10 percent commission for their booking agent, withholding taxes, and extra production costs that came out of their show fees. And then there were all the other outgoing expenses.
David’s post is worth reading in full for these granular details, covering everything from how much Los Campesinos! shelled out for the visas necessary to tour North America (£5,415.82), to how much they paid for their tour bus and driver (£45,850.07, plus additional hotel costs so their driver had a place to recover in between all-night drives). Ultimately, the costs for Los Campesinos!’s 2024 tour piled up to a whopping £101,857.95 — meaning they technically came out of the trek in the red with a loss of £2,089.90.
In the end, the profit Los Campesinos! turned came from, as expected, merch sales. This area also has its own knotty math, which David digs into in great detail. But at the end of the day, Los Campesinos! made £40,336.54 from merch, meaning, after the aforementioned loss on the tour itself, they wound up netting £38,246.64 from the trek in total.
In the world of Los Campesinos!, that profit isn’t split amongst the band members, but rather put towards their next tour or project. That’s because, David explained, bands need capital on-hand to cover a lot of the expenses that pop up before any income is made on a tour or recording project.
“So for LC!, touring is expensive and packed with financial risk, but marginally possible,” David wrote at the end of the post. “Though it’s not the small amount of money the band earns that makes it worthwhile, it’s our love and passion for playing shows and hitting the road together. The same motivation we had when we first started touring twenty years ago.”
