What’s left gets reinvested in the band or saved so that we don’t have to rack up $24,000 of credit card debt to book another tour. After all of our expenses (yes, making music videos professionally is expensive), Nataly and I each draw a salary of about $2,500 per month from Pomplamoose. We sell about $5,000 of music per month through iTunes and Loudr. The loss was an investment in future tours.Īt the end of the day, Pomplamoose is just fine: our patrons give us $6,326 per video through our Patreon page. We wanted to be invited back to every venue, and we wanted our fans to bring their friends next time. That would have saved us over $50,000, but it was important at this stage in Pomplamoose’s career to put on a wild and crazy rock show. We could have played a duo show instead of hiring six people to tour with us. We knew it would be an expensive endeavor, and we still chose to make the investment. And we had $147,802 in expenses.īut this isn’t a sob story. If you’re making a living as an indie band, a tour sponsor is a shining beacon of financial light at the end of a dark tunnel of certain bankruptcy.Īdd it up, and that’s $135,983 in total income for our tour. Some people think of brand deals as “selling out.” My guess is that most of those people are hobby musicians, not making a living from their music, or they’re rich and famous musicians who don’t need the income. We thanked them on stage for saving our asses and supporting indie music. Thank goodness for Lenovo! They gave us three laptops (to run our light show) and a nice chunk of cash. Literally, 72% of our tour income came from the tickets you bought. Let’s look at our income from the tour: Income Kia is the man.įortunately, Pomplamoose made some money to offset some of these expenses. Our lawyer, Kia Kamran, declined his commission because he knew how much the tour was costing us. Our business management takes a commission as well to do payroll, keep our finances in order, and produce the awesome report that lead to this analysis. They deserve every penny and more: booking a four week tour is a huge job. Our awesome booking agency, High Road Touring, takes a commission for booking the tour. Manufacturing merchandise, publicity (a radio ad in SF, Facebook ads, venue specific advertising), supplies, shipping.Ĭommissions. Per diems are twenty dollar payments to each bandmate and crew member each day for food while we’re out. In case we break someone’s face while crowdsurfing. Holy shit, parking a 42-foot van is expensive. 28 nights for the tour, plus a week of rehearsals. Best Western level hotels, nothing fancy. Production expenses: equipment rental, lights, lighting board, van rental, trailer rental, road cases, backline. Where did all those expenses come from? I’m glad you asked: Expenses The tour ended up costing us $147,802 to produce and execute. With six figures of projected expenses, “the best we could” wasn’t super comforting. Neither of us had experience with financial modeling, so we just did the best we could. We built the tour budget ourselves and modeled projected revenue against expenses. One week of salaries for four musicians and two crew members (front of house engineer and tour manager) cost us $8794. We also knew that once we hit the road, we would be paying our band and crew on a weekly basis. And then we planned (or hoped) to make that back in ticket sales. $17,000 on one credit card and $7,000 on the other, to be more specific. We don’t have a label lending us “tour support.” We put those expenses right on our credit cards. And….Īll of that required an upfront investment from Nataly and me. In order to plan and execute our Fall tour, we had to prepare for months, slowly gathering risk and debt before selling a single ticket. Pomplamoose is “making it.” And every day, we bust our asses to continue “making it,” but we most certainly have not “made it.” Being in an indie band is running a never-ending, rewarding, scary, low-margin small business. But the phrase “made it” does not properly describe Pomplamoose. Having the opportunity to play music as a career is a dream come true. One question that our fans repeatedly asked us was “what does it feel like to have ‘made it’ as a band?” Though it’s a fair question to ask of a band with a hundred million views on YouTube, the thought of Pomplamoose having “made it” is, to me, ridiculous.īefore I write another sentence, it’s important to note that Nataly and I feel so fortunate to be making music for a living. I’ll remember that night for the rest of my life. We sold 1129 tickets in San Francisco at the Fillmore. It was awesome: Nataly crowd surfed for the first time ever, we sold just under $100,000 in tickets, and we got to rock out with people we love for a full month. We played 24 shows in 23 cities around the United States. The following is by 1/2 of the band Pomplamoose and Patreon co-founder, Jack Conte.
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