Mary Spender loses £12,000 on her recent tour

Vintage65

darthed1981

Yes quite an honest summary of what she got wrong there.. it's interesting.

Like a lot of other solo artists, she concludes a band is just too expensive most of the time for the income she's likely to make.

gretschthumper

... and she's promoting a course about how to tour (profitably, I assume) at the end of the video

Got to get that £12k back somehow I guess

GoldenEraGuitars

I haven’t watched this yet although I had watched some other “day in the life” videos of American artists going on tour and found it quite interesting. Their daily schedule and expenses were documented very well. I can only assume that’s why YouTube recommended her to me, I genuinely didn’t know she made music. I thought she did gear demo videos. I’ll check it out this evening at some stage although I can’t imagine it covers anything new the other stuff I’ve watched hasn’t already.

BillDL

Unfortunate surname if you are trying to make money.

axisus

I'm not planning on watching the video, I don't know her, but it's sad to hear that any musician fares so badly financially.

topdog91

Fricking clickbait again. Why would any non-famous musician expect to make money from anything to do with music? Is being a musician associated with anything other than eating baked beans out of a can? What's the big insight, if you book a venue and don't sell enough tickets you'll lose money? I'm sure we'd all love music to be a source of income, but there's a reason that most of us don't. Hopefully the clicks. With 756K subscribers, one would assume that she'll make it up on clicks and 50% OFF MY NEW TOURING COURSE. Her company balance sheet is okay.

I know last time I moaned about the state of the Internet I got flamed because it's not marketing, it's sincere educational content. I'll just leave this here:

Vintage65

topdog91 said:

Fricking clickbait again. Why would any non-famous musician expect to make money from anything to do with music? Is being a musician associated with anything other than eating baked beans out of a can? What's the big insight, if you book a venue and don't sell enough tickets you'll lose money? I'm sure we'd all love music to be a source of income, but there's a reason that most of us don't. Hopefully the clicks. With 756K subscribers, one would assume that she'll make it up on clicks and 50% OFF MY NEW TOURING COURSE. Her company balance sheet is okay.

I know last time I moaned about the state of the Internet I got flamed because it's not marketing, it's sincere educational content. I'll just leave this here:

I haven't watched terrestrial television for over 20 years, but I digress 

topdog91

Vintage65 said:

topdog91 said:

Fricking clickbait again. Why would any non-famous musician expect to make money from anything to do with music? Is being a musician associated with anything other than eating baked beans out of a can? What's the big insight, if you book a venue and don't sell enough tickets you'll lose money? I'm sure we'd all love music to be a source of income, but there's a reason that most of us don't. Hopefully the clicks. With 756K subscribers, one would assume that she'll make it up on clicks and 50% OFF MY NEW TOURING COURSE. Her company balance sheet is okay.

I know last time I moaned about the state of the Internet I got flamed because it's not marketing, it's sincere educational content. I'll just leave this here:

I haven't watched terrestrial television for over 20 years, but I digress 

No, but YouTube and social media are the 2024 equivalent in terms of market share and penetration etc.

monquixote

Adam Neely did some good videos on the economics of touring.

His band are very good if you like widdley jazz fusion.

Vintage65

topdog91 said:

Vintage65 said:

topdog91 said:

Fricking clickbait again. Why would any non-famous musician expect to make money from anything to do with music? Is being a musician associated with anything other than eating baked beans out of a can? What's the big insight, if you book a venue and don't sell enough tickets you'll lose money? I'm sure we'd all love music to be a source of income, but there's a reason that most of us don't. Hopefully the clicks. With 756K subscribers, one would assume that she'll make it up on clicks and 50% OFF MY NEW TOURING COURSE. Her company balance sheet is okay.

I know last time I moaned about the state of the Internet I got flamed because it's not marketing, it's sincere educational content. I'll just leave this here:

I haven't watched terrestrial television for over 20 years, but I digress 

No, but YouTube and social media are the 2024 equivalent in terms of market share and penetration etc.

I chose to watch the video because I know Mary Spender is very popular on here 

AntonHunter

Fair play to her for being so honest about her mistakes, although she doesn't seem to acknowledge all of them (who pays a promoter a fee? Promoters pay the bands...?). Genuinely hilarious that she's now selling a course on how to do it, but it is good to talk about how expensive touring is.

topdog91

https://www.reddit.com/r/guitarcirclejerk/comments/1hmompl/i_wish_i_could_learn_from_the_pros/

digitalscream

As I recall, Voodoo Six called it a day after touring with Iron Maiden, and making less each than they would in a minimum-wage job.

It astonishes me that any of these people are surprised that making music, and everything that goes with it, makes less money than making videos about making music. It's been that way since Rob Chapman uploaded his first video, it's not like they haven't had time to get used to the idea.

That's why, for me, this kind of video is a bit disingenuous. The video about not making any money on tour will likely make more than enough money to make up for it...which was likely the whole strategy in the first place. If that's the case, then the tour was simply the content for the video, no different to vlogging your way around Japan (for example) and getting a free holiday out of it. Add in the "how to make money from touring" advert, and job done.

However, having scanned through the video, there's one glaring omission: her time planning the tour isn't accounted for. She says that she spent a year planning it...factor that in, even at minimum wage (her time will be worth a lot more than that under normal circumstances), and she lost a hell of a lot more than just £12k.

Ultimately, though, I certainly wouldn't be buying a course on how to tour properly without losing money from somebody who hasn't actually managed to break even on tour yet.

Vintage65

AntonHunter said:

Fair play to her for being so honest about her mistakes, although she doesn't seem to acknowledge all of them (who pays a promoter a fee? Promoters pay the bands...?). Genuinely hilarious that she's now selling a course on how to do it, but it is good to talk about how expensive touring is.

Also having a good album to promote will garner interest, and usually gets you onto one of the Glastonbury stages as well, so it pays to have a good product!

GoldenEraGuitars

I watched the first minute, and the last 4-5 mins. 

I had a few paragraphs typed out of my thoughts (more so as the owner of a business) but I’ve deleted it all as I couldn’t find a way to be polite about it.

In short, 1200 ticket sales to take a team on the road for 13 nights? Wow.

rsvmark

Did I hear that right? She ‘hired’ each venue? 

I may have this wrong but don’t ’promoters’ book a band for the venue? The band get a flat fee and the promotors take the risk and reward on sales in each venue?

So following her model, my band books the RAH but we might stand to make a loss? Sorry but if I am right, her DIY business model over reached her ability to sell tickets for the places she booked.

AntonHunter

Vintage65 7said:

AntonHunter said:

Fair play to her for being so honest about her mistakes, although she doesn't seem to acknowledge all of them (who pays a promoter a fee? Promoters pay the bands...?). Genuinely hilarious that she's now selling a course on how to do it, but it is good to talk about how expensive touring is.

Also having a good album to promote will garner interest, and usually gets you onto one of the Glastonbury stages as well, so it pays to have a good product!

Well, quite, but there's a lot of dross out there that manages to break even as well...

Revolutions

It’s a massive shame that an artist isn’t able to take a backing band on a diy tour & make money. I’m not sure they ever could, though. Paying them £200 a day before expenses is going to put a dent into any tour budget. 

I feel blessed that I grew up in the punk scene, where making money was something you did by accident. You did a few weeks in the studio, toured for a few weeks, and worked the rest of the year to pay your rent. Rinse & repeat. Touring & merch generally covered equipment and van upkeep. Once we even got on a tour that gave us 2 hotel rooms a night which was insane luxury to not be seeping on a living room floor with 3 other bands. 

One thing I’ll never miss from those days is vegan chilli. Forever grateful to get fed, but 3 weeks of the promoter making chilli every night through Europe can sometimes get a little bit disheartening. Unlimited beer riders in Germany more than made up for it though.

distressed

I had to google her. Turns out she's some kind of Rick Beato in its infancy, but at least she had the opportunity to learn from his (and others') mistakes.

digitalscream

rsvmark said:

Did I hear that right? She ‘hired’ each venue? 

I may have this wrong but don’t ’promoters’ book a band for the venue? The band get a flat fee and the promotors take the risk and reward on sales in each venue?

So following her model, my band books the RAH but we might stand to make a loss? Sorry but if I am right, her DIY business model over reached her ability to sell tickets for the places she booked.

Well, I can sort of understand it - generally speaking, promoters take the vast majority of the money and bands make fuck-all. Yes, promoters take all the risk, but they have lots of sneaky ways to avoid losing money...Mary Spender didn't do any of those things, because a) it's fucking people over, and b) it would go over very badly as soon as it got out.

The trouble is, without doing that kind of thing - pay-to-play etc - there actually isn't a practical way to make money. That's the dirty little secret nobody wants to admit.

Add to that the whole "overestimating your own reach" thing, and it's not a massive shock. Just look at the numbers - 700k+ subscribers, only 1200 tickets sold. That's the reality of the Internet; online popularity just doesn't translate all that well into the real world.

It works all the way down to the "enthusiastic amateur" level - one of my bands had around 3k followers, but we couldn't even persuade 50 people to show up to a gig in our home town on a good day. We weren't shit, we were exactly the kind of music they all liked...we had more people than that in our town who really, really liked our music. They just couldn't be arsed to show up.

For most people, unless it's something they can stick on Instagram to make people jealous, music is just something that happens in the background while something more interesting is going on.