Going on those early tours can definitely feel like a risk. Not knowing if you’ll be able to afford gas, not knowing where you’ll be sleeping, not knowing if you’ve saved enough money up to go on the road for 30 days. There are so many uncertainties that you start wondering if it’s even worth it.
First off, even if you end the tour in the red, those early runs teach you things you can’t really learn any other way. Can you live off of fast food for a month? Can you sleep on a floor in a random house? How well do you handle 4+ hours in a van every day?
Second, making a tour work financially is very doable! You just need some clear goals to aim for. In this series we are going to break down some touring costs and what you need to sell to tour effectively.
Pricing
How much do you sell a shirt for? This is a discussion that’s been going on for decades, and I don’t imagine it’s going to stop any time soon. While we can’t give you the exact answer, what we can do is provide a little context. A couple of the main factors are:
- Size of band
- Type of venue
- Complexity of shirt design
- Quality of shirt
The general range that we see is about $20-$50 per shirt depending on those factors. If you’re just getting started playing locally, you’ve printed a one-color print on a cheaper garment, then $20 is an easy sell to someone who enjoyed your set. You may also notice that some arena level bands are selling shirts for $50+ and there are multitude of reasons for that. Merch costs, crew costs, costs for show production, exclusivity of a design (those can actually be higher than average merch costs since they’re often limited runs), etc. There’s a pretty big range there, and there are reasons for each price point.
Once you’re going on the road, though, you need to start thinking about what that money is doing for you. It’s going to be one of the primary ways you’ll pay for gas and lodging, decide if you can do a per-diem for everyone, or even if the band can afford to buy the crew Taco Bell one night.
Band Math
How can you use your shirt profits to pay for traveling expenses? Here’s an example and factors you need to consider:
Let’s say you’re selling a shirt at $25 that costs about $10 to produce.
An average 12-passenger van gets 15-19 miles per gallon on the interstate, and if we’re pulling a trailer, let’s look closer to that 15 mpg range.
As of 8.17.26, the average national cost of gas per gallon is $4.05 according to the US Energy Information Administration.
Let me show the work:
To start off, we’re going to look at the gross profit generated on a shirt sale: $25-$10=$15.
Easy enough.
Gas needed:
An hour of driving at 60 MPH gets us 60 miles (shocking info right here). If we say the van is getting 15 MPG then we do 60 miles/15 mpg = 4 gallons needed to drive for an hour.
4 (gallons) * $4.05 (avg gas price per gallon)=$16.20 (Cost for an hour of driving)
That means every shirt we sell gets us almost an hour down the road.
Let’s break that down for a 4 hour drive to the next show:
$16.20 (Cost for an hour of driving) * 4 (hours) = $64.80
Shirt Sales needed to pay for 4 hours of driving:
$64.80 (4 hour drive cost) / $15 (gross profit of a shirt at $25 with $10 cost) = 4.32 shirts
So instead of looking at a four-hour drive and thinking, “I don’t know how we’re going to afford this,” you can break it down into something tangible: we need to sell five shirts tonight to cover the gas to get to the next show.
Obviously, gas is only one piece of the equation. You still have food, lodging, crew, merch costs, and everything else that comes with being on the road. But once you start breaking those costs down into actual sales goals, the whole thing starts to feel a lot more manageable.
That’s what we’re going to keep doing with Band Math.
To be continued…