The LiveNation Problem
The following writing is a personal piece that I wrote with intention to include it in a large commonplace book that I am writing. I must admit, it is in its draft format and will develop further from here. Please forgive the lack of introduction to the topic, or real conclusion. It is my hope that you will still find it interesting with these aspects lacking.
If we imagine a mid-tier musician is playing at venues controlled by Live Nation and ticketed by Ticketmaster…
- Ticketmaster Fees — 0%
When you buy a ticket, a significant chunk of the total checkout cost (often ranging from 20% to 30%) goes towards processing fees. Artists don’t see a single cent of this.
2. Face Value Split — 60% to 85%
The price of the ticket before any fees are applied is what gets negotiated between the promoter (e.g. Live Nation) and the artist. For a mid-tier musician playing in large clubs or mid-sized theatres, the on paper deal usually looks like either a 70/30 split or 85/15 in favour of the artist. There is a catch though, this percentage only kicks in after the promoter deducts their expenses, so it could work out to be practically less than even the lower 70/30 deal.
3. The “House Nut”
a. Venue rental
b. Operation costs
c. Staffing (security, bar tenders, box office, etc)
d. Production (sound and lighting)
e. Marketing and insurance
Once these fixed costs are paid off, the remaining ticket revenue is split. If a show doesn’t sell well enough to cover the house nut, then the artist just walks away with their pre-negotiated flat fee and gets no backend percentage at all.
With all of this in mind, if a show does well and the musician gets 85% of the net profits, that money doesn’t actually stay in their pockets for long. From their cut, the artist still needs to pay for:
- Management — 15% to 20%
- Booking Agent — 10%
- Touring overhead (travel, gas, crew salaries, hotels, and per diems)
The final math when you add it all up, industry estimates suggest that from the price a fan pays at checkout, the take home profit for the artist is only 8% to 10% of the gross ticket price.
Get Cal May Gates’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Let’s play this out with an example — the average concert ticket price (as of 2026) currently hovers around $120 to $140, however, that number is heavily skewed by artists like Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter’s huge, A-List stadium tours. Using our example of a mid-tier musician, who we will say is independent (i.e. isn’t signed to a record label) and performs at 500–1,500 person capacity clubs/small theatres in a mid-tier city:
- Face Value — $25 to $45 per ticket.
- Checkout Price — $35 to $60 per ticket.
- Total Revenue of All Tickets — $17,500 to $90,000
- Artist Profit — $2 to $4.50 per ticket.
- Total Artist Profit — $1,000 to $6,750
It should be noted that in late 2023, Live Nation started a program called “On the Road Again” for developing acts playing at their smaller club venues that offers a $1,500 travel stipend per show and allows artists to keep 100% of their merchandise revenue. Wait, that brings up a great point, what about merch sales? Surely artists get a better deal on the merch that they’re producing and selling at these events, right?
For a long time, this was a massive point of contention in the music industry. However, for our mid-tier musician, the situation has improved recently with the program we mentioned above. Under this program, Live Nation dropped its merchandise cuts at its 77 club-sized venues across the U.S. and Canada. If an independent musician performs at a participating club, they’ll get 100% of their merchandise revenue. This is about corporate greed though, so let’s look at what Live Nation takes if our musician isn’t performing at one of those venues:
The Standard Industry Cut: 15% to 30% to the house. This varies with:
- Soft Goods (t-shirts, hoodies, tote bags): 20% to 25%
- Hard Goods (vinyl records, CDs, cassettes): 0% to 10%
Venues have historically justified this “hall fee” by arguing that they provide the roof, the physical space for the merch table, the foot traffic, and sometimes the staff — I argue, in theatric retaliation, that the artist is the one that provides the people to the venue. After all, these fans wouldn’t be in the venue if not for the artist and with the artist not seeing 90% of profits from ticket sales, it makes no sense to undercut merch sales — in my humble opinion. Additionally, because streaming pays fractions of a penny (as of 2026, this is $0.003 to $0.005 per Spotify stream specifically), merch is often the only thing keeping independent artists out of the red.
The practice of venues skimming 20% off the top of t-shirt sales led to a massive public backlash from independent musicians over the last few years, which is what forced Live Nation to introduce the “On the Road Again” program, however they have done nothing to support larger artists which leads to an issue with musicians wanting to be successful, but being actively punished for doing so — this is a small example of the “cliff effect” which is most commonly seen where people who aren’t poor enough to access government benefit programs have less disposable income than people on benefit programs.
