The Price of Music: Artists explain how the monumental expenses of touring make it an unfeasible reality
The music industry has changed dramatically over the past few years. Factors such as the Covid-19 pandemic, the dire economic situation, evolving consumer habits, and Brexit have all compounded each other. Although it is claimed that touring remains one of the last avenues for artists of all sizes to make anything resembling a living, this notion is appearing increasingly threadbare. Indicative of this alarming trend, recent times have seen a host of prominent acts cancel tours due to the economic burden, with it fast becoming an unnecessary expense, often running at a loss. Many favourites have been forced to cancel entire runs, prominent acts ranging from Animal Collective to Santigold.
Critically and commercially successful artist Caroline Polachek released her long-awaited fourth studio album, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, on February 14th. However, despite her prominence, she revealed that her recent tour of Europe had proved to be an expensive pursuit. “Full disclosure: I’m taking my European tour at a loss,” she told Vulture. “But it’s worth it for me. I’ve always leaned to the slightly riskier side of reinvestment back into the project than maybe would be wise. But it’s because I believe in it.”
Reflecting the struggle felt across the board, on February 8th, Island Records’ alternative pop group Easy Life announced on Twitter that they had cancelled their North American tour due to the immense costs. What is the significance of their decision? Well, their debut album, 2021’s Life’s a Beach, reached number two on the UK Albums Chart. Extending the point, they are currently towards the end of a UK and Ireland tour of mid-large-sized venues. It includes the 10,000-capacity Nottingham Motorpoint Arena – so they’re hardly small-fry.
“We’re very sorry to say that we’ve had to make the tough decision to cancel our upcoming North American tour,” their statement explained. “We’ve tried hard to make it work, slashing budgets and trying to justify some insane costs, but we’re just not able to get the funds to bring the Easy crew over this spring. Touring and seeing all of you is why we do what we do so this is hitting hard, but the world seems to cost 10x as much as it used to right now.”
A week later, on February 15th, the band took to Twitter again to outline the eye-watering costs behind the decision to cancel the tour. They wrote: “For the North America tour, the ultimate very best scenario was that we would spend only £50k with a bare-bones crew/prod and make a max of possibly £35k back, the US now wants to up our kind of visas 250% to $1.6kpp, so that’s roughly £7.6k more to spend. So we lose £20k”.
In another tweet, the Leicester group then detailed the difficulties of touring Europe in the post-Brexit world – a tremendous obstacle for British groups. They explained: “On the EU tour, we’d also have lost money, Brexit’s causing havoc with moving merch around, and you can’t just show up and make money without visas etc. taking the same show to a 1.6k cap in Berlin, and a 420 cap in Oslo means wasted prod costs. We will refine our plans”.
As part of The Price of Music project, Far Out‘s ongoing investigation into the inflated costs of being a musician, we resolved to look into the issue of the price of touring a little deeper. Here, we seek to shed more light on the enormous amount of funds an artist is forced to raise to be able to tour. The universal plight that bands face is a startling reality to reconcile. They perhaps even point to a shift in the epoch. The artists we spoke to are deemed ‘successful’ by the traditional metrics yet still see touring as a considerable financial weight, with fundraising yet another unwelcome headache.
Ben Woods of UK band The Golden Dregs, who released their latest album, On Grace and Dignity, via 4AD on February 10th, went into great detail about the cost of touring. As well as outlining the tens of thousands of pounds required for their first US tour – which echoes Easy Life’s statement – he acknowledged how hard it can be to fundraise for excursions. Ultimately, this is due to the cost of living crisis, which has hit those not wealthy enough to get by in the UK. This current financial predicament has only exacerbated the music industry’s existing issues.
The environment Woods describes is an alarming one, as the costs incurred for a relatively moderate-sized band’s tour of America are more than what most people in the UK earn in a year. Additionally, even with the backing of a prominent record label, The Golden Dregs would still run a UK and European tour at an estimated loss of £7,500. This admission brings the extent of the problem into complete focus.
Woods said: “The Golden Dregs are touring as a six-piece band, which is no easy feat. But the textures and vocal harmonies in the recordings are an important part of the band’s makeup, so to strip it back to anything less than that would make it something else. But this does make touring expensive. The total cost of our upcoming US tour (which includes headline shows in NYC and LA, plus appearances at SXSW and Treefort Festival) is in the region of £20,000.”
Continuing, Woods added: “A huge chunk of this is for visas, and unfortunately, we got stung with these as we put in for them last autumn, just as the mini-budget tanked the UK economy and the pound took a nosedive. They cost us over £6,000. It’s our first trip, so fees are very low. We have received PRS funding, which is amazing, but they only provide funding for up to four-piece bands, so this has made a £4,000 dent in our total. And we have tour support from our record label, which would be enough to cover the trip but would then mean that we’re unable to tour for the rest of the year, as our fees in Europe and the UK still don’t allow us to break even on the road”.
Summing up the eye-watering proposition, Woods explained: “So with fees, funding and tour support, we still have a deficit of £7,500, which we are currently trying to fundraise. The obvious thing for us to do would be a fundraiser gig, but given that we currently have a UK headline tour on sale, our promoters won’t allow us to do this for fear of it affecting sales, so we’ve had to be a little more imaginative. We’ve called in favours from a load of friends (End of the Road, Wide Awake, 4AD) to stack a raffle with prizes which we are currently selling tickets for.”
Woods concluded: “We have also organised a couple of events. The first of these is a ‘Village Fete’ at SET in Peckham on February 23rd, where we will have fete games to try and raise some extra cash. The second is a Lou Reed covers night at Moth Club on March 1st, hosted by us and featuring a whole host of our musical friends. And then we’re also selling a T-shirt and a tote bag designed by Raissa Pardini. It’s a lot of stuff! And it’s super confusing trying to market this to a somewhat limited audience. But we need to sell out the events, sell all of the merch and sell a decent amount of raffle tickets to hit our fundraising targets. To be honest, it’s a lot to comprehend. No one has much disposable income right now, and here I am trying to push all of this fundraising, the release of a new record, and tour dates in Europe, the UK and the US, and it’s all pretty overwhelming. But if it works out, then it should be a good foot in the door, and hopefully will lead to us returning to America later in the year, which will be a lot more manageable as we’ll already have our visas. And if it doesn’t.. well, we haven’t really gotten to that part yet.”
Warmduscher, friends of Far Out, were also on hand to offer some insight into the costs of touring. Echoing Woods’ thoughts, they explained that it is “nearly impossible to do anything” without the help of fans if you’re not at Taylor Swift’s level, funded by wealthy parents or being pushed by the industry as the next big thing. The band said: “The last thing the world wants to hear about when they have no money themselves are musicians asking for their money to head off to a country far away to get on a stage and entertain people, but this is the stage it’s at. Unless you’re Taylor Swift or the Creator, funded by rich parents, or picked as the next industry darling, it’s nearly impossible to do anything without the help of fans. It’s a constant hustle, to say the least, especially at our level, but it’s all we do, really, so we have to swallow our ego in these situations and ask everyone we can for help because you never know when an opportunity to tour outside your hometown will come again.”
During a recent interview with La Luz’s frontwoman Shana Cleveland, who released her latest solo album Manzanita on March 10th, Far Out asked her whether touring is starting to become economically unfeasible. She offered the perspective of an American musician, and unsurprisingly, it mirrors the accounts of UK artists. Outlining the differences between life in her established outfit, La Luz, and as a solo artist, she said: “It’s interesting. I feel like if you had asked me this question a couple of months ago, I would have felt a bit differently about it. I think that since I have been starting to make plans to tour this album, I’ve really realised how difficult it’s gonna be. With La Luz, it’s OK; we’ve been at it for so long, and we make money on tour. We’re also extremely frugal, we stay with friends, and we don’t have expensive tastes, so we’re able to make it work really well. But for this album, I’m just realising, like, ‘Oh man, I’m going to have pay musicians’. You know, because I don’t have the band, it’s a solo album. So, I’ve got to pay everybody, which means I might not get made because the sizes of the rooms I can play with this album are so much different than the size I can play with La Luz”.
Cleveland continued: “It’s tricky. To me – I can always make it work because I’m just like a diehard frugal. I don’t mind living like a bum a little bit to make it work. I think it’s just so important to me to play live music that I’m willing to make a lot of sacrifices. But yeah, I’ve definitely noticed with this album that it’s going to be hard.”
It’s a strange juncture that live music presently finds itself in. While many conclusions can be extrapolated from the accounts recorded, it produces one crucial question: how long can musicians keep touring at a loss before the whole operation becomes totally unviable? With the pennies stretching less with each passing day, there’s a storm brewing. We can only hope that the world economy starts to look up soon. Otherwise, the live music industry is heading for an existential crisis.
