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Comment by wins32767 | Hacker News Reader

It makes more money for the artist. The promoter generally pays a fixed fee to the artist to play, rents a venue, and bears the risk on ticket sales. The band has to pay the road crew, etc. and pay for food and buses, and what have you. The label gets by far most of the money from album/streams.

The merch table is one person (maybe 2-3 for big bands) selling stuff with margins of hundreds of percent.

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None of this is true. For reference I worked in this business for about 15 years and represented dozens of famous musicians you've heard of. I also was a touring musician myself in a band nobody ever heard of, and have also worked on the talent buyer/promoter side of things.

Did you know that outside of tiny bar level gigs nearly all deals for bands to play live involve a split of the actual ticket sales between artist and promoter? Did you know that above the bar level the venues actually handle, and take a substantial percentage of, the merch sales?

And so on. I don't know what it is about music but for some reason there's like a tradition in online forums of people going on and on about the nuances of the financial deals in the music industry by people who have absolutely no idea what they're talking about.

> Did you know that above the bar level the venues actually handle, and take a substantial percentage of, the merch sales?

You're referring to large amphitheater and arena shows, for big artists. This isn't (necessarily) true of most touring acts.

It's true of basically every concert that has actual tickets, like where you can buy a ticket, rather than a simple bar with a cover charge.

For all it's worth, I've arranged bar level gigs where there's a ticket at the door and it's split between the bands and promoter/band, bar takes a small percentage of merch sells and band takes a small percentage of drink sales (this one is the hardest to negotiate on my experience). So you are even more in the right and the account you are replying to is even more in the wrong, from my experience.

>I don't know what it is about music but for some reason there's like a tradition in online forums of people going on and on about the nuances of the financial deals in the music industry by people who have absolutely no idea what they're talking about.

I suspect this is 2 factors: 1) music is something people care about, therefore they have opinions on it (whether or not these are justified). And 2) Gell-Mann Amnesia: You're familiar with music, so you quickly spot the bullshit that, in reality, suffuses almost all online discussions.

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