The future of small band touring

ahem - Robert Polllard played his first solo show last night to a half empty crowd in Athens, GA

Christ, tons of bands are lucky to make $50 to $150 on any given night. And NO ONE likes to sleep in a van.

Hats off to bands that make it all come together.

Incidentally - "Say you're averaging 200 miles a day." If you're averaging 200 miles a day then you DO need to be cutting back to more regional touring. That makes no sense to me unless you live in central Wyoming and you have to go 200 miles to get ANYWHERE. Maybe booking basement party gigs is harder than I imagine, but it seems like you should be able to easily throw together a decent sequence of stops in the 75-100 mile a day range.

Now take into account that as record sales continue to decrease, and/or assuming digital subscriptions are the way and don't pay bands very much per song

I don't know what kind of setup other people have, but my music is on iTunes and other digital services through CDBaby, and I make more money from that than I do from selling physical CDs. CDBaby gives me 91% of all the money made from digital downloads. So if my album has 10 songs and someone downloads the whole thing I see almost $9 from that, which is great considering there's no manufacturing cost to factor in.

Prices are going up a bit for indie shows, I think.

Cities maybe, but surely our "small" "indie" bands are going to play college towns, high school open-mics, and anywhere else they can get gigs, right? It always totally mystifies me for example when a band on tour plays virtually nowhere in the Southeast but Atlanta. They have to jog WAY the hell out of their way to do that one show, and they're meanwhile skipping over places like Athens, Asheville, hell, even Auburn or Knoxville (both rumored, but unproven, to have great house-show scenes at the very least). It doesn't make sense at either end of the spectrum: if you're a REAL tiny, unknown band, the only purpose of going on tour is to have fun, meet people, see bands and play shows - so play as many of them as possible for pete's sake! If you're a bigger indie "name" act - Sleater-Kinney, Built To Spill, your Pitchfork act of the month or whatever - you KNOW you'll be able to fill or even sell out a decent sized venue in any halfway-cool place....so why not do it?

this is my pal nick's friend:

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=1914429&page=1

as gas prices rise, this seems as good a way as any to counteract them!

Dr. Casino gets it right - the solution to this is imagination, and for bands not just to follow the circuit of Emo's, Empty Bottle, Mercury Lounge.

I co-hosted a show last month for two touring bands at an arty collective here in Chicago - we got about 35 people to show up, the bands got about $150 in donations (plus CD sales), and both the bands and the audience had an experience very different from a night out at a bar/club/coffeehouse.

-- Steve Goldberg (io502s...), June 1st, 2006.

We use CDBaby too. It's fine for now, but it's kind of unsexy and you obviously have to make up for any marketing a label would do with your own cash and work. It's hard to imagine we'd ever see big numbers on it without shelling out a lot for publicity and marketing (which, despite what their press releases say, is what the CYHSYs of the world usually do). 90% of 500 is still a lot less than 40% of 10,000.

I have a CD on there and am in the same situation as Steve G. - I've made more from digital sales than actual-CD sales.

Distributors do marketing and promotion.

I think one thing you will see is already happening, bands going together on tour, sharing vans/equipment. We went out last yr w/ a fellow band, shared gear, shared a van (9 dudes)and if the van would have survived we would have come out ahead (and even as it was we didn't do too bad). Bands that are going to tour, even small amounts, have to accept that it will most likely be a break even type situation, at best. I mean its crazy fun, so to me, at least, its worth it.

I think the comment above about rem/black flag/touring-for-months-on-end touches on an interesting point, if you looks back at old flyers for those shows the first thing that you notice is how little the door price has increased in the intervning 20-25 yrs. In Mpls/St Paul shows are still in the $5 to $7 range, which is not a huge leap. Door prices have not risen to match inflation. Part of it is club owners don't want to charge more becuz they want people buy drinks. Part of it is fans are unwilling to pay more (becuz they want to buy drinks).

I think the future of touring is shorter tours, more bands touring together and higher door prices. This might keep certain bands from venturing very far from their hometowns, but there will always who go out longer, etc.

Touring/playing/etc is so much fun, its worth losing money on.

posting this here too because it's a blast imo. the least likeable person interviewed is the biggest deal (albini) but he doesn't take up too much space imo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agUS6GnZr_U

i would like to watch that film ^

i am also very interested in the post-COVID future of small band touring ... in particular if there is some sort of opportunity to create an ecosystem of small, DIY-ish / collectively owned-ish concert spaces that could somehow work together to make touring the U.S. much easier / better / nicer for small bands.

i know these places existed before, but it would be nice to solidify relationships between them and sort of act like Live Nation does with its venues, but in an underground, more cooperative and less evil sort of way.

is this a pipe dream?

Depends on rent

Wow, what ever happened to Steve Goldberg?

Seems like a good thread to revive for this excellent story from Nina Corcoran:

https://pitchfork.com/features/article/artist-merch-cuts-venues/

Just brutal.

Deck is definitely stacked against working artists right now, which has been true for well over a decade, but it somehow keeps getting worse

The “we take a cut of merch to make taxes easier for the band” quote in the article is fucking absurd.

To add context, I’m playing at a venue tonight that takes 20 percent of merch sales and I can assure you that it is not helping with my taxes or any other of the reasons stated in the article

IMP productions / 930 Club in Washington DC pleading they need to do it financially to survive is absurd. They run multiple venues and have had many sold out gigs post pandemic . Plus they have gotten aid from the city and pandemic money that allowed them to open another venue ( Atlantis)

I used to play music in a band, we weren't big or anything but we toured some and released records and basically broke even (basically) & I stopped playing in 2017 in part cuz it was time but also even then it was so apparent that how we previously operated, DIY everything basically, just wasn't going to be feasible financially any longer or was going to require so much more effort that it was just going to be as much work as my day job.

The people who are still out there doing it are fucking heroes in my book, fuck every venue that does this or if it isn't this some other underhanded scam they are always running on bands.