So I wrote yesterday about the state of my band, The Princes of Hollywood and I made mention of the difficulties in touring, and the relative stupidity of a career in music. Allow me to illustrate.
Let’s take your average, semi-nationally touring independent musical act, say, The Princes of Hollywood, and see how the touring business actually breaks down. Let’s assume that you’ve already got the point of having a tour booked, no small feat in itself, and have some press and radio arrangements for the tour. If you have an independent publicist working on your behalf, as we do, remember that you’ll have to pay them for their services since they are not working on behalf of you record label—because you don’t have one, remember? For a general press push in radio, print, and web mediums, it is safe to assume that you’ll pay around $100 per show for extensive market saturation. And remember, other than the events calendars, there is no guarantee that anyone will write about your show, or play your record on the radio, or call you for an interview. So far, we’re in the red -$100.
Assuming that you’ve got all that covered—which is half of the work of touring alone—then you’ve got the travel and show related things to consider. If you’re lucky and booked a reasonable tour, you won’t half to travel more than 400 miles between any two shows, but trust me, it happens (in one four day span, The P of H once played Boston, Cleveland, Virginia, and then Dewey Beach, Delaware, and another time Dayton, Duluth, MN, and Omaha, NE. Yikes!). Say you’re trying to play a venue and a town for the first time, and you’ve done what you could getting the venue flyers, getting your tune on local radio, getting a write up in the local papers, and emailing your fan list about the show; consider yourself blessed if you get 15 people to show and see you play. By our last tour we rarely played a headlining show with a ticket price about $10, and that was at the end of two years of full-time touring. So let’s say your show has a $10 ticket price. If the venue lets you keep the full door cover, you’ll make $150 on the show. More than likely, they will at least keep something to cover the technical costs of the sound equipment and paying the sound engineer, so let’s take that number down to $120. Of those fifteen people who showed up, let’s say five of them (33%!) were moved enough by your stellar performance to buy a CD, which you sell for $12. That’s an extra $60, but if you’re anything like most independent artists, you’ve self-financed your own record, and you’re probably in debt for the cost of making an album, which can easily reach and soar into the five figures. So more than likely that $60 is going into the jar to pay off the record costs. But for the sake of argument, let’s say that you’re debt free, so that $60 will go into the band payment fund. You’ve made $180 for your first show in a new town, and the venue owner liked you enough to have you back for a show in the future. Great! But what about this tour?
Well, you made $180 on this show, but you started out in the red because you had to pay your publicist $100, so now you’ve made $80 on the show. But, shit, you had to drive there, didn’t you? Say that you were in a small enough band that you could fit into a relatively compact car, like was the case on the most recent P of H tour (we were a three piece, no drums). Say you get 34 mpg on the highway, which is pretty good for a car crammed full of shit and three dudes or ladies. With gas being almost $4.00 a gallon, it adds up. Say you traveled from Boston to Rochester, NY between gigs, a 392 mile drive (trust me, I’ve done it many times). 392 in a car that gets 34 mpg at $3.50 a gallon means the drive cost you $40 and change. So, that $80 is cut in half just getting to the gig, so you’ve now made $40 on the gig, after all that hard work. But wait, there’s more!
What if you don’t have friends to stay with in the town you’re playing? It looks like the Motel 6 for you, my friend, and good luck finding a Motel 6 for under $40, even if you sneak your bandmates in while the hotel staff isn’t looking (as we did frequently). There goes the rest of the money you made that night, and you still haven’t had anything to eat. A pizza and a six-pack of beer puts you in the red by $20. And there are other costs to consider if you’ve printed up flyers and sent them to the venue ($8 a show, perhaps), and the cost of car insurance, upkeep of instruments and the tour vehicle, a booking agent’s cut (if you have one, say 10-20%) and what about your home life? Do you have rent or a mortgage, not to mention bills and a girlfriend? Wow, so you’ve spent money to play this show, and now you’ve got to call your girlfriend on your cell phone (don’t forget to pay that bill!) to tell her about how things went? Feeling up to it?
So, that’s why touring sucks. But there are plenty of reasons touring doesn’t suck, and how people make a living doing it, but I’m too exhausted to try and tell you about it now. More to come on that soon.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
"Send me again into the sky..."
First, my apologies to all of those who’ve asked me what been happening with the blog, and thanks for the encouragement to keep it going. Life has just been getting in the way as of late, and I mean that in a good way. But I’m still here, and thing are definitely looking up.
Second, I’d like to address what may be on some folks’ minds, including mind: what’s happening with The Princes of Hollywood? Some of you saw us this weekend, for what turned out to be a sort of reunion show, though we’d expected only to be in Athens, Ohio for the support of the Passionworks Project CD release show. As most of you have noticed, we’ve been laying low for most of the last four months, after our tour ended in Rochester, New York on December 18th. First of all, we had a fantastic but tumultuous year in 2007. We toured more extensively and successfully than ever before, but we also found ourselves exhausted, still in debt from our last record, and unsure of our next move. Scotty “The Mullet” Houchens amicably left the band for pursuits academic, and Harlan and I decided it was time to get the hell out of dodge, so to speak, and leave our hometown of Athens, Ohio for the big lights and warmer climes of Nashville, TN. The move took a lot out of us, both financially and emotionally, and we’re only now getting back on our feet. We also got pretty used to performing as a three-piece, and singing in three-part harmony, and we felt very little excitement about re-working our songs for duo performances. Meanwhile, the state of the economy and the price of gasoline have made it the prospect of making money on tour excruciatingly suspect. A career in music (or the arts, for that matter) is not for the faint of heart or the soft of stomach.
So we’ve been laying low, remembering how to have rewarding daily life, and not thinking too much about the future. And it seems now that we find our selves in a better place than ever, and excited again about the prospect of making music that we love.
I can’t say that things will be quite like they were in the past. I’ve begun work on a number of new projects that should keep me busy performing, writing, and producing music with other folks. Our cavalier attitudes toward driving through snowdrifts in Duluth, MN in the February have mellowed a bit, and extensive touring without the support of a label or sponsor seems unlikely, but you never know. However, we are writing new songs that are some of our best yet, and we are becoming a part of a very vibrant and healthy creative community here in Nashville, so who knows what might come of that. More to the point, we’re spending some time getting back to what it is we loved in the first place and seeing where that takes us, and I promise that is a good thing.
In other exciting news, I’ve begun working on some co-writing with other writers here in Nashville, and the results have been excellent. I wrote a song a few weeks ago with Chad Harris, with whom I currently performing, that has been coming together nicely the more that we play it. It’s a big, catch alternative pop-rock song, unlike most of the stuff I write, though it has a few of my touches—a minor/major 6 chord here, a earthy metaphor there—and I’m excited about it. I’m also working on a song with Chris Meyers, of The Bittersweets fame, a fantastic band originally from San Francisco who now live in Nashville. They have a new record coming out in August on Compass Records, and it is excellent. We’ve started work on a song that is very country-noir, tentatively based on the story of a Iraq war veteran whose post-traumatic stress disorder drove him to drown his wife in the bathtub, call the authorities, and then go bowling. What we’ve come up with is a creepy yet somehow sweet tale of husband and dead-wife talking and dancing in the shadows of a sad and beautiful world.
In the next few months I’ll be doing plenty more writing, and I’ll also be performing with Chad Harris, The Princes of Hollywood, The Queen City Zapatistas, and possibly Southpaw and the Sinnisters. More to come on all of that soon!
Second, I’d like to address what may be on some folks’ minds, including mind: what’s happening with The Princes of Hollywood? Some of you saw us this weekend, for what turned out to be a sort of reunion show, though we’d expected only to be in Athens, Ohio for the support of the Passionworks Project CD release show. As most of you have noticed, we’ve been laying low for most of the last four months, after our tour ended in Rochester, New York on December 18th. First of all, we had a fantastic but tumultuous year in 2007. We toured more extensively and successfully than ever before, but we also found ourselves exhausted, still in debt from our last record, and unsure of our next move. Scotty “The Mullet” Houchens amicably left the band for pursuits academic, and Harlan and I decided it was time to get the hell out of dodge, so to speak, and leave our hometown of Athens, Ohio for the big lights and warmer climes of Nashville, TN. The move took a lot out of us, both financially and emotionally, and we’re only now getting back on our feet. We also got pretty used to performing as a three-piece, and singing in three-part harmony, and we felt very little excitement about re-working our songs for duo performances. Meanwhile, the state of the economy and the price of gasoline have made it the prospect of making money on tour excruciatingly suspect. A career in music (or the arts, for that matter) is not for the faint of heart or the soft of stomach.
So we’ve been laying low, remembering how to have rewarding daily life, and not thinking too much about the future. And it seems now that we find our selves in a better place than ever, and excited again about the prospect of making music that we love.
I can’t say that things will be quite like they were in the past. I’ve begun work on a number of new projects that should keep me busy performing, writing, and producing music with other folks. Our cavalier attitudes toward driving through snowdrifts in Duluth, MN in the February have mellowed a bit, and extensive touring without the support of a label or sponsor seems unlikely, but you never know. However, we are writing new songs that are some of our best yet, and we are becoming a part of a very vibrant and healthy creative community here in Nashville, so who knows what might come of that. More to the point, we’re spending some time getting back to what it is we loved in the first place and seeing where that takes us, and I promise that is a good thing.
In other exciting news, I’ve begun working on some co-writing with other writers here in Nashville, and the results have been excellent. I wrote a song a few weeks ago with Chad Harris, with whom I currently performing, that has been coming together nicely the more that we play it. It’s a big, catch alternative pop-rock song, unlike most of the stuff I write, though it has a few of my touches—a minor/major 6 chord here, a earthy metaphor there—and I’m excited about it. I’m also working on a song with Chris Meyers, of The Bittersweets fame, a fantastic band originally from San Francisco who now live in Nashville. They have a new record coming out in August on Compass Records, and it is excellent. We’ve started work on a song that is very country-noir, tentatively based on the story of a Iraq war veteran whose post-traumatic stress disorder drove him to drown his wife in the bathtub, call the authorities, and then go bowling. What we’ve come up with is a creepy yet somehow sweet tale of husband and dead-wife talking and dancing in the shadows of a sad and beautiful world.
In the next few months I’ll be doing plenty more writing, and I’ll also be performing with Chad Harris, The Princes of Hollywood, The Queen City Zapatistas, and possibly Southpaw and the Sinnisters. More to come on all of that soon!
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