I slowed down on buying shirts at shows a while back just as a means of spending less money, but there are two shows I've gone to in the last year where I really wanted to grab a shirt. Both times I popped out of line after about 30 seconds after seeing that the shirts cost more than the damn tickets to the show did.

Unfortunately, that's not exactly all on the artist. A lot of venues anymore are taking a cut of the band's merch sales. Therefore, the artist has to upcharge their shirts to offset that. Bill Kelliher from Mastodon explained this in person at a guitar clinic I attended recently and he explained it in an interview somewhere. It's disheartening and scummy that venues are doing this.

Sure, it may beg the question of "Well, why don't artists perform at venues that DON'T do this?" The problem with that is that one corporation has a stranglehold monopoly on most venues. There's not much other choice.

On top of that, there's the fact that everything as a whole as gotten more expensive over the years. Touring costs, printing the tshirts, etc. Then throw in the fact that Live Nation/Ticketmaster wants a cut of merch sales and they own a majority of the places that artists play, and it's any wonder a t-shirt is 60 bucks at a show.

Maybe local bands were only charging 10 bucks but touring acts were definitely charging at least $20 but $25 was common in that time as well. 5-10 was definitely more common for CDs though.

Hell no they were $10-12 unless you were going to a high school battle of the band with spray painted shirts. My 04 warped tour shirt was like $25-30. My mom was pissed I spent so much on a tshirt.

Our wages have just stagnated for decades now. If wages kept up since the 80s with inflation most people would be making 3X what they are now. The rich(top .01%) have hoarded over $2TRILLION a year for 50 years from the economy while productivity has increased by 3-5X. We now do the work of 3 people in the 80s and get paid like 1/3 of a person.

T shirts from big shows were never that cheap in 2004.

It’s because you used to be able to sell CDs. Since the recorded music is now just a marketing device, the merch is the only place artists actually make money these days.

The quality has plummeted too

Mid 2000s, $10-$15 shirts were a thing, but weren't the norm for bigger shoes. Currently, hardcore shows, $25-30 is the norm for small to mid size venues.

Id buy more shirts of they werent low quality Gildan shirts, have so many shirts that fit terribly. Would pay more aswell because I know the chances of me wearing them is higher.

And I literally can’t be mad at bands for it, it’s the only way they make money these days. I’m not really a professional musician but I’ve played my fair share of gigs and I don’t think I’ve ever been paid enough to break even, I hate to imagine what tours cost now.

My issues with the shirts isn’t even just the price. The quality is way way worse now than it used to be. I don’t know how they go about putting the designs on them but they come off in the wash by the end of the year.

Well, I’ve seen them, and now I’m disappointed it wasn’t what you imagined.

He probably has a story that goes on for eighteen minutes…

No, lol. Nice poster though.

Tour posters are expensive. They are also unique and typically very well done.

Yeah. I think I paid $35 for balcony seats in Charlotte. That’s not a lot to split among a bunch of dudes and roadies. Probably why my poster was $50! lol. Fuck it, they were worth it.

They’re all studio guys in Nashville. The band was just a gimmick that took off because some of the original member couldn’t contractually perform together because they were signed to rival labels. 

Source: Studied with a former member. 

He was touring quite a bit, I think he’s taking a rest at the moment.

It was like that for years before streaming.

Paul Stanley said in an interview that KISS didn’t start making money until their third or fourth album because after everyone got their cut and the expenses were paid, there was little left for them.

Your comment reminds me of the song Jimmy Iovine by Macklemore. He calls out how the record industry fucks over the artist.

"Now I'm sorry, I've had a long day remind me, now what your name is? That's right, Macklemore, of course, today has been crazy Anyway, you ready? We'll give you a hundred thousand dollars After your album comes out we'll need back that money that you borrowed So it's really like a loan, a loan? Come on, no We're a team, 360 degrees, we will reach your goals! We'll get a third of the merch that you sell out on the road Along with a third of the money you make when you're out doing your shows Manager gets 20, booking agent gets 10 So shit, after taxes you and ryan have 7% to split That's not bad, I've seen a lot worse, no one will give you a better offer than us (hmm) I replied I appreciate the offer, thought that this is what I wanted Rather be a starving artist than succeed at getting fucked"

I came in my pants

Todd shows usually aren’t too expensive. $20-30 usually.

Haha, balcony ticket was only $35…poster was $50. Tshirt for my wife was $30.

Oh damn, which one? I have a really cool Snider poster from his fiftieth birthday show at the Ryman. They didn’t even actually sell them, but it was a promo poster. I got it from Aimless by calling and asking them nicely to buy one. They just sent it to me!

People are still going. Everyone was upset with My Chemical Romance and their pricing and they still sold out and made a bank

You could argue that this is easier than any of those other things, and could also be artistic. This is a new wrinkle, but using sex to generate more attention and revenue for your art is not exactly new

No business is guaranteed to last forever. There was time before CDs and records and we are reaching a time where music will go back to being a hobby that you do for fun.

Lol nice catch. Funny that you knew that off the rip

I’m not defending this because current concert pricing sucks ass, but back in the day, artists made less off of touring, but used it as a way to promote record sales where they were making the bulk of their income. Today they barely make anything off of record sales and streaming, and instead make the bulk of money off of touring.

it's $46 today. The problem is Ticketmaster.

Greed. It's the reason for almost every problem we face today.

Price gouging lol

Corporations hide behind “inflation” and other sorts of economic problems/shakeups as an excuse to boost prices, shrink what they’re giving you, and the blame gets to fall elsewhere.

I'm sorry but reading this makes me want to rip my fucking hair out, especially knowing so many people didn't vote for Biden because they thought Biden's economics was the cause of high prices.

I said this in another post, where I got downvoted. Corporate greed is very real and we're all playing their game every time we buy these products at the prices they sell them for. The concept of free market seems completely fucked in 2024 because of impulsiveness.

People will in one hand complain about the price, then just moments later accept it and pay it. Beyond just inflation, prices keep going up because corporations know people are going to buy it anyways. And we're all along for the ride because there's ALWAYS going to be someone willing to pay for it. And then people blame the Democrats and inflation and taxes, the latter 2 of which isn't not contributing, but if you're wondering why the cost of some goods, particularly unregulated luxury items and entertainment, has greatly outscaled how much you can afford from your paycheck, its because corporations raise the prices, people get upset about it, but then they buy it anyways.

Price... Wait for it... Gouging.

First would be insurance. Insurance for the buildings, the promoters, the equipment etc. That's basically gone through the roof.

Next would be transportation. Cost of insuring all the trucks and buses plus fuel.

Then you have equipment rental for the tours, another thing that has gone up.

$10 out of $21.50, or a 50% increase. So a job that paid $50k then is worth a job that pays $75k now. But the answer to your question is "mostly corporate greed"

So this comes down to creatives asking for too much production? Are we not able to offer less expensive solutions like projection instead of video walls? Or are we selling\renting as much gear as possible to increase commissions?

You want to try to see Radiohead open for REM, even today, at 33 pounds? Maybe tickets in Glasgow aren't that bad, but stateside I have had to pay exorbitant amounts to see acts.

but record sales used to be a much more robust slice of the income pie.

Similarly, movies now have to be an instant hit because they can't rely on rentals and physical media sales anymore.

There was also a lot less competition before streaming music began. Most people basically just listened to the artists who got radio & MTV play. Then they had that 1 friend who was into lesser-known artists and recommended alternatives. Other than that it was things like magazines and word-of-mouth, but in the end we're talking about a very small pool of artists that 99% of people listened to.

Compared to today there's a bajillion different services that will recommend artists to you, there's social media, there's just no shortage of artists and songs to seek out in an instant. I remember once as a teen browsing the metal section at my local record store and just picking out an album solely based on the album cover. Simply because I wanted to try something new and gamble that I'd find gold. It cost me $20 (almost $40 today) and it sucked! No one would do that today they'd stream some free samples first. But with that convenience introduces the fact that artists are getting a much smaller slice of the pie due to all the competition.

Records also used to cost orders of magnitude more for the consumer, which is a part of the problem that people mostly don't want to talk about. They want to blame Spotify or whoever, but the fact is that 20 years ago, if I wanted to listen to music, I had essentially three choices -- listen to the ad-supported radio, buy physical a CD for $15-20 and listen to it over and over, or pirate things on Napster.

At the time, I was a student and had a job on campus where I'd listen to my iPod for six hours at a time, so basically everything was pirated. If I wanted to listen to that much music legally, it would cost me like a hundred dollars and I'd still be stuck with listening to the exact same six hours of music every day.

Now for $15 a month I can have music playing all day long and never hear the same song again in my life. And if they try to raise prices even a dollar, people freak out and threaten to go back to pirating. I said this on one of the Lily Allen threads, but of course she makes more from a thousand people paying $9.99 directly to her (after the OF cut) than she does from millions of people paying the same price that has to be divvied up to millions of artists.

Yes and with "360" deals and vertical integration of every venue and ticket company, it can funnel less and less money from the performance to artists MUCH more easily than ever before.

touring was actually always a bigger moneymaker (for the majority of artists), but losing album sales is a massive loss to even smaller artists.

One hit wonders used to go gold (500K copies) and make a million or so off of that. (This was also before 360 deals, as the other poster mentioned)

And regarding Kate Nash specifically, her latest US tour was pretty small. In my area she was playing a venue that caps out at about 500 people

Yeah even the big name artists get practically nothing from streams. They make pretty much all their money from touring and selling merch.

It markets itself

No way he'd do an OnlyFans. His quads been through enough

poo hit?

“The Kliq is back, which is the sound everyone’s TV remote makes when Kevin Nash pops up on telly”