What It Costs an Independent Band to Tour: One Disclosed Budget, Read Closely

In early press about their disclosure, Los Campesinos! did something almost unheard of in a business that treats settlement sheets as trade secrets: they published the actual numbers. Gross fees, commission, taxes, production, costs, the loss, and the merchandise line that reversed it. One band, one tour, one routing — and, because it is real, worth more analytically than any number of “typical budget” listicles assembled from vendor quotes.

The disclosed case, kept in its own currencies

The band reported $149,037.74 in gross show fees across 11 shows on its 2024 North American tour, reduced to $127,729.53 after booking-agent commission of 10%, withholding taxes and extra production costs. Against that income stood £101,857.95 in tour costs, producing a £2,089.90 loss on the shows themselves. Live Index preserves the split currencies — income disclosed in U.S. dollars, costs in pounds sterling — rather than converting them, because any conversion would embed an exchange-rate assumption the band did not publish and create a false precision the source does not contain.

The line that rescued the tour

Merchandise profit of £40,336.54 converted a £2,089.90 show-level loss into an overall net of £38,246.64. The structural point generalizes even where the numbers do not: for bands at this scale, the merch table can be the tour's entire margin — which is why the venue merchandise cuts documented in the merch-cut evidence page bear directly on whether touring at this tier is viable at all.

One show, fully settled

The disclosure includes one itemized settlement: a $17,000 guarantee against 80% of show profits, on a show that sold out — so the percentage leg exceeded the guarantee and the band was paid $21,743.80. It is the cleanest public demonstration of a versus deal resolving above its guarantee, and it anchors the settlement model in the artist ticket-share analysis.

The hypothetical budget, and why it is separate

Below the disclosed case, this page carries an editable budget scenario for readers who want to explore the arithmetic of a hypothetical tour — shows, guarantees, transport, lodging, wages, merch. Its defaults are illustrative inputs chosen for arithmetic clarity, not an industry average, and the apparatus keeps it visually and textually separate from the Los Campesinos! record so no reader can mistake exploration for evidence. Deeper routing arithmetic is available in the Live Index tour builder.