Touring

Research on touring

• Gross Potential in Concert Ticketing: What the Room Can Gross Before It Sells a Ticket

  Gross potential is the maximum face-value receipts a show can take if every sellable ticket sells at its scaled price. The formula, what it excludes, where it sits.

• What Is a Concert Offer Sheet?

  A concert offer sheet is the purchaser's proposed deal sent to an artist's agent: parties, date, guarantee, deal type, deposit, scale, inventory, expenses, terms.

• What Are Artist Avails? How Concert Dates Move From Availability to Confirmation

  Artist avails are the dates an artist could play a market before anything is reserved. How a date moves from avail to hold to offer to confirmation.

• What Is the House Nut in a Concert Deal?

  The house nut is the venue's cost of opening its doors for a show: rent, labour, production baseline, box office, insurance. Why it is deal-specific and drives break-even.

• Net Box Office vs. Gross Box Office: The Terms Behind Concert Settlement

  Gross box office is face-value receipts; net box office is what remains after the deductions the contract names. Seven settlement terms and one worked hypothetical sheet.

• Concert Break-Even Attendance: A Simple Model, Not an Industry Benchmark

  How many paid tickets a show needs before the promoter stops losing money, from its own face value, deductions, costs and guarantee. A model you can edit, not a benchmark.

• Ticket Sales Velocity: How Fast a Concert Is Selling

  Ticket sales velocity is tickets sold per unit of time: daily counts, a rolling average, a cumulative curve. What it shows and why there is no published normal.

• Ticket Sales Pacing: How Promoters Compare a Show With Its Comp Set

  Ticket sales pacing compares a show's cumulative sales with a comparable at matched days to event. How the gap is computed and why no published pace exists.

• Hard Ticket vs. Soft Ticket Events in Live Music

  A hard ticket event sells tickets for one artist and ties pay to the count; a soft ticket event cannot attribute tickets to one act. What it means for deals.

• How Does a Concert Promoter Estimate Artist Draw?

  Draw is the paid tickets an artist can sell in a market at a price. Promoters weigh hard-ticket history first, adjacent signals next, audience metrics last.

• What Percentage of Ticket Sales Actually Goes to the Artist?

  There is no universal artist percentage. What exists: deal structures (guarantee, versus, backend), one company's scoped claim about its own shows, and one band's disclosed settlement — all examined here.

• Concert Merch Cuts: What Venues Take, and What the Documents Actually Show

  Venue merchandise cuts documented in named reporting range from 10–20% in Australian documents to 20–30% in U.S. artist accounts — with no measured average anywhere. The evidence, plus a worked calculator.

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

  Los Campesinos! published their real 2024 North American tour accounts: $149,037.74 gross, £101,857.95 in costs, a £2,089.90 loss on shows — rescued by merch. The disclosed case, plus a labelled hypothetical budget.

• Ye Stadium Economics 2026: Capacity, Ticket Prices, Attendance and Gross

  A show-by-show census of Ye's 2026 stadium run: the one reported box office figure, the attendance on record, primary price ladders by market, and a transparent model of the remaining route.

• The Biggest Concert Promoters in America: A 2026 Ownership and Market Map

  Who actually promotes American concerts in 2026: the Live Nation and AEG families mapped by recorded relationship, plus the documented independents — with sources and dates.

• Who Represents American Touring Artists? Booking Agency Concentration in 2026

  There is no national market-share figure for booking agencies, and this article does not invent one. It measures representation inside the Live Index verified sample and documents what the agencies say about themselves.

• Touring Middle Dashboard v1 — July 2026

  Payroll employment in performing arts, spectator sports and related industries fell to 583.4 thousand in July 2026, 24.1 thousand below a year earlier.

• How venue growth and a weakening touring middle can both be true

  A short note on why counting rooms and counting employment answer different questions, with NAICS 711 employment at 583.4 thousand in July 2026.

• Are Concert Audiences Shrinking as Prices Rise?

  Revenue records and attendance are different quantities. This tests what the published evidence can and cannot establish about participation, and names the denominator nobody publishes.

• How Many Tickets Does an Artist Need to Sell to Make a Tour Work?

  Break-even on a tour is arithmetic, not a margin rule of thumb. This sets out the algebra, the cost lines it requires, and worked scenarios with every assumption stated.

• What a Sold-Out Show Actually Pays an Artist

  A sold-out room produces a box-office figure and a settlement, and they are not the same number. This traces the deductions between the two without claiming a universal split.

• Touring Cost Inflation: Labor, Fuel, Hotels and Production

  No index measures the cost of taking a band on the road. This maps each major cost line to the best available federal proxy and states exactly what each proxy misses.

• Guarantees, Door Deals and Percentage Deals

  Who carries the risk on a show is decided by the deal structure. This defines each structure, its expense definitions and its settlement mechanics, without asserting typical terms.

• Why Gross Revenue Tells You Almost Nothing About Artist Profit

  Reported tour grosses are transaction totals, not income. This traces every stage between the reported figure and an artist's take-home, and identifies where the record goes dark.

• Who Represents American Live Music?

  Booking agencies decide which offers reach an artist, yet no public register records who represents whom. Why that gap matters, and what the Live Index Representation Index can and cannot show.

• Are Superstar Tours Hollowing Out Live Music?

  The largest tours have never grossed more. Whether that draws spending, calendar capacity and attention away from smaller tiers is a mechanism that can be specified and tested, not a proven finding.

• Live Music Is Booming. So Why Can’t Working Artists Make Touring Pay?

  Record aggregate grosses conceal a different economy below the arena level, where fixed costs, routing risk and capacity ceilings determine whether a tour clears its own expenses.

• The Touring Middle Is Getting Crushed

  Clubs and theaters between 500 and 5,000 capacity carry rising fixed costs against a ticket price ceiling. What public data shows, and the margin dataset that does not exist.

• The Live Music Pulse: 2026 Baseline

  A first recurring baseline of separately published indicators for U.S. live music: admissions prices, performing arts employment, promoter wages, and the gaps.

• America’s Broken Venue Ladder

  Whether an artist can graduate from 300 to 5,000 capacity in a market depends on which rooms exist. There is no national capacity census, and that absence is the story.

• The Independent Promoter Margin Problem

  Guarantees, rent, production, labour, marketing, insurance, card and ticketing costs and settlement timing decide a show's economics. Why no standardized promoter P&L exists.

• Who Controls America’s Live Music Rooms?

  Venue control is six different relationships, not one. What Live Nation's 2025 10-K, AEG, ASM Global, OVG and NIVA disclosures actually establish — and why no national market share can be computed.

• Houston: A Data Portrait of an Undervalued Concert Market

  The first repeatable Live Index city portrait. Houston metro population, wages, cultural economy and touring geography from primary sources — and the concert measures no public dataset supplies.

• The Headliner Inventory Problem

  Riot Fest, Aftershock and Lollapalooza 2026 top lines, with sourced debut years and career ages: is the live business replacing festival headliners fast enough?

• The Live Nation Flywheel: How Consolidation Actually Works

  Promotion, ticketing, venues and sponsorship reinforce each other inside one company. The FY2025 filing shows the mechanism in reported operating scale.

• Metal’s Quiet Bull Market

  Rock streaming volume, deep-catalog share and reported arena and stadium ticket counts for Sleep Token, Ghost, Metallica, System of a Down and BABYMETAL.

• Stop Calling It the Latin Market

  Language, genre and geography are three different variables. Collapsing them into one market category produces bad demand estimates and worse routing decisions.

• Where Streaming Data Fails as a Concert Forecast

  Streaming measures attention at zero marginal cost. Concert attendance measures willingness to spend money and travel on a fixed date. The two diverge systematically.

• Market gravity: why some cities are routinely skipped

  A routing model that estimates the pull each market exerts, and identifies cities systematically underserved relative to their fundamentals.