How does a concert settlement work?

A concert settlement is the reconciliation and finalisation of an event's revenue, expenses and artist payment, carried out at or shortly after the performance. Published booking glossaries define it that way, and the definition is the whole shape of the process: the parties agree what came in, agree what the show cost, apply the deal terms in the contract, and pay the resulting figure. The total the artist leaves with — guarantee, percentage and any overages together — is often called the walkout. The document the two sides sign off is the settlement sheet, and although its layout differs between promoters, buildings and ticketing systems, the arithmetic it records runs in the same order everywhere: receipts, deductions, expenses, deal, result.

The settlement sheet, section by section

The worked sheet on this page is a hypothetical: a 4,250-seat sellable house scaled across four price levels, 3,700 paid tickets, a versus deal that flips to the percentage. Every figure is invented and internally consistent, and none is a rate or cost observed anywhere. Its purpose is to show what each section does to the number the artist is eventually paid from. The first section is box office. It restates the scale — quantity and face by level — records gross potential as a reference line, records paid tickets against sellable inventory, and arrives at gross face-value receipts, which the glossary abbreviates GBOR. In the scenario that is $286,275 on 3,700 paid, a realised average ticket price of $77.37 at face.

The second section is deductions: the items the contract removes from gross before anything else is calculated, typically sales or amusement taxes on the ticket price, a facility fee the building retains, and refunds or chargebacks processed before settlement. What sits in this section is contractual, not conventional. Some agreements treat the facility fee as building revenue outside the gross altogether; some treat tax as inside the printed price and others add it at checkout; some carry credit-card costs here and others among expenses. The line the section produces is net box office receipts — NBOR in the glossary's vocabulary — and the gross-versus-net guide sets out why that phrase means nothing until the deduction list has been named. In the scenario, 7.0% tax, a $3.00 facility fee and $1,150 of refunds take $286,275 down to $253,986.

The third section is approved show expenses. These are the promoter's itemised costs of presenting the event that the contract permits to be deducted before a percentage is calculated: rent, stagehands and security, production rental, advertising, catering per the rider, insurance and permits, performing-rights royalties, and ticketing or card fees charged to the promoter. The glossary distinguishes fixed lines from variables — expenses computed as a percentage of tickets sold or of net potential — and notes that a variable can be capped, meaning it cannot exceed a stated figure for settlement purposes. The scenario's royalty line is a capped variable that reached its cap. Whether a cost is an approved expense is a matter of what the offer and contract said; an item the promoter genuinely paid but the contract does not list is the promoter's own cost, not a settlement deduction. Practitioners sometimes describe the fixed cost base the promoter must clear as the house nut, a shorthand rather than an accounting category. In the scenario, $123,800 of approved expenses take net box office to $130,186 — the base the deal operates on.

The fourth section is the deal. A guarantee is paid regardless. A versus deal pays the greater of the guarantee and a stated percentage of the base; a guarantee-plus-backend pays the guarantee and then a percentage of the base above a stated point. The scenario is a straightforward versus: an $85,000 guarantee against 85% of net after expenses. The percentage side computes to $110,658, which exceeds the guarantee, so the artist is paid the percentage and the overage above the guarantee is $25,658. Had paid attendance been lower, the percentage side would have fallen below $85,000 and the guarantee would have controlled; the break-even page works through where that crossover sits and why it makes the promoter's economics nonlinear.

The fifth section is the result: the artist walkout of $110,658 and the promoter's residual after that payment, $19,528 in the scenario. The residual is not profit in any complete sense. It precedes the costs a settlement sheet does not carry — the promoter's salaried staff, office, financing, and the shows in the same season that lost money — which is why gross, walkout and residual answer three different questions about one night.

Why the order matters

Expense and deduction definitions determine the base the deal calculation operates on, so an expense line the two sides had understood differently can change the artist's payment materially without either party having changed the deal. Move one $10,000 item from deductions into approved expenses and nothing changes; move it out of the sheet altogether because the contract does not allow it, and in the scenario the artist's percentage side rises by $8,500. That is why the expense schedule is a common point of scrutiny when a settlement is worked through, and why the offer stage — where the expense list is first written down — matters as much as the night itself.

Why settlements are not public

Settlement sheets are commercial documents between private parties. They are not filed with any agency, and Live Index is aware of no statistical programme that collects them. When one becomes public it is normally through litigation, a leak or an artist choosing to publish their own, and those instances are not a sample of anything. That is the reason this page describes structure rather than typical numbers: the structure is documented, the numbers are not. The worked sheet is a hypothetical chosen so the arithmetic is visible, not a composite of real settlements.

It is also why reported grosses are a poor guide to what a show paid. A gross figure is the first line of a five-section reconciliation. Live Index research on gross revenue and artist profit, and on what a sold-out show actually pays, works through published examples of the gap between the two.

Reading a settlement claim carefully

Four questions separate a substantive claim from an anecdote. Which revenue lines were inside the contractual gross? Which deductions came off before net box office? Which expenses were approved, and were any capped? Which deal calculation applied, and did the percentage clear the guarantee? A statement about a show's economics that cannot answer those four is describing an impression of the night, not its settlement.