You know which industry fascinated me. The live music industry (in UK at least), most people don’t realise the model so let’s outline...

Unless you’ve sold part of your live revenues to your label the standard model works as follows...

Promoter makes offer, artists accepts, profits are split 80/20 in the artists favour after costs recouped. Recorded music and publishing have the exact opposite ratios for example... but here’s what’s more interesting to me...

As artists we are only mandated to pay our session players, tour managers etc, I think £72.50 per day or something like that by the MU. Yet I doubt there is a single artist that can sell more than 1k tickets that does not pay their people some multiple of that number...

Why things should have evolved that way is an interesting question. At the very top top level artists often have their people on retainer all year round even when they not touring... there is one band whose live engineer is famously on 1m a year! (though they’re American)

In other words, in that part of the entertainment industry most controlled by the people doing the work that’s being paid for, other people get a much fairer share of the profits...

In a total free market (just to look @ a different sector from a different angle) we could just pay our musicians, engineers etc next to nothing as there would be no minimum in any case...

But here’s what ever crazier, many of you do no know that some of your favourite artists don’t actually ANY money on their own tours because they spend it all on production costs cos they want you to have a great time. They try to make their ££ on the summer festivals

There is one artist I know personally who made his tickets artificially cheap, as in well below what people would willingly pay (cos he just wanted the whole hood to be able to come)... oh and one last thing!

When we put people on the guest list (over our contractually agreed GL allocation) we have to pay for them. We don’t tell you this because we can’t be bothered to argue and explain to friends and family as we’re already extremely lucky/spoiled... but just know that’s how it go

Entirely understandably the promoter does not want to give away more tickets when his margins are so thin (for the smaller promoters at least) and he is actually taking most of the risk in this case...