Why touring sucks: a look into the life of the professional musician

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.