Musicians say touring is increasingly difficult as costs rise and payouts remain low
When Texas King, a London Ont.,-based rock band, was driving from Edmonton to Calgary on their 2019 tour, it began snowing heavily. Traffic was at a crawl to account for the decreased visibility. Suddenly, the three-hour drive had become longer, colder and more dangerous.
Even at a safe speed, Texas King was no match for a patch of ice. Their trailer slid off road and dragged them into a ditch. They waited hours for a tow truck to pull them back on the road. The band made it to the venue 30 minutes before they were supposed to perform, forgoing set-up and praying to whatever deity would make them sound alright.
The tow truck cost ate into their tour budget, which affected their ability to reinvest back into the band. According to Phil Spina, Texas King’s bassist, that money should go “toward being able to pay ourselves or crew members-, to putting gas in our tank, to paying for a hotel.”
On paper, the high costs and low payouts from touring seem designed to harm artists. Spina says Texas King will create spreadsheets of their costs for each destination to calculate how much they are projected to make, compared with how much they will need to spend on merch production, gas, food and shelter.
But even carefully devised sheets can still surprise you with papercuts-, in the form of merch splits, low turnouts and unexpected fees like tow trucks or van rentals. They cause you to slowly bleed away, leaving you unable to tour; pushing live entertainment closer towards extinction.
This has been the eternal struggle of the musician for decades. “[My career] certainly wasn’t all touring, It couldn’t be,” says Ian Tamblyn, A Canadian folk singer-songwriter and playwright, who has been performing since the late sixties. Through this struggle, musicians have always persevered. But modern costs and conditions have made touring near unprofitable and therefore unreasonable for some to continue.
“[For] everything, prices have gone up so it’s just harder for bands to tour [because] they’re not making money. They just get into more debt,” says Michael Kondakow, a Toronto-based producer.
These factors are draining the variety from the live music industry because less people have the capability or desire to tour. “Some artists I work with now don’t even tour. They just put songs out on Spotify. They haven’t even played a show ever,” says Kondakow. “But then what? Once you put a song [on Spotify] the actual hard work of promoting the song, touring the song, getting fans and working your butt off to get noticed [begins].”
Kondakow says when his old band, Poor Young Things, toured in the early 2010’s they were always broke but still made enough money to continue.
He says merch sales like clothes and physical music get you from city to city, but once you reach a certain level, more venues take merch cuts. Then as the 2010’s continued, interest in CD’s declined. Vinyl made a return, but is too expensive to produce for small bands. The lower revenue from merch made touring more of a gamble, especially when you have to put so much in to get anything out.
In Ontario, the lengthy distances between large cities creates lower profit margins due to the amount spent on gas and hotels relative to how many shows you play. “Toronto to Thunder Bay is a 16-hour drive. You’re gonna play Sault Saint Marie, maybe Sudbury in between,” says Kondakow. “Those places are small, and the next one is Winnipeg, which is eight hours from Thunder Bay.”
In the early days of Texas King around 2014, it was them against this behemoth of the Canadian tour circuit. After a show they would split the money made at the door with other bands, pack up their gear and be back on the road immediately. If they had the time to spare they had options for rest. If they knew someone in town or met someone at the show, they would sleep on their floor.
Alternatively, on warmer summer nights the band would camp out in Walmart parking lots to save money on hotels. No loud music or screaming fans, just a handful of dudes crammed in a van with piles of amps and instruments-, their individual musks mingling while the creaking of crickets put them to sleep under the overhead lighting of the parking lot lamps.
Even at a small size, Texas King was able to pull that off because of smaller venues that help new bands grow. Spina says the biggest change since then has been the widespread closure of venues following COVID-19.
“Touring now, for bands our size, there’s a lot less venues to play. Those mid level clubs were hit the hardest and we lost a good handful.”
According to Now Magazine, twenty-two Toronto music venues closed by the end of 2020. Spina says these venues were important because they allow “bands [to] develop and cut their teeth.”
“Every band needs a place to play when they’re only drawing 50 people. It’s not very practical if the only venue in town is a 500 cap room,” says Spina.
Spina adds that when Texas King began touring in the mid 2010’s for small crowds, they played for small guarantees; flat fees given to bands for playing a show, or door money. At the end of these 50 person shows they would take what they got and often it would just cover gas while other expenses were covered by the band themselves.
“[If] we needed to get our van fixed so [we] could go on this tour, and the band didn’t have 1,200 bucks, we’d all chip in or one member would front the cash personally…as an investment,” says Spina.
This was in the mid 2010’s and is still common for bands, but it is more detrimental these days because the investing artists get less back.
Medieval Found Footage (MFF) is a Port Stanley, Ont.-based noise rock band. Kadin Fehr, one of MFF’s guitarists and vocalist, says travelling is essential for performance because London, Ont., the closest major city, saw most of its venues close after COVID-19.
Fehr says the only places to play in London are restaurants but they want cover artists to play background music for ambiance rather than big shows so they have to go elsewhere for real experience.
“The problem is that playing in Toronto comes with knowledge that you’re not going to make any money…because it costs $80 both ways to travel up. That’s $160 and you’re simply not going to make $160 per person from the cut of a show,” says Fehr.
Despite the financial investment and risks, touring is what makes the music industry possible.
“Touring is still really important. I feel like a standard of being an artist is having a really good live show and managers are still looking for that,” said Kondakow.
Once these managers find acts, they need a venue. Following the many closures during the pandemic, some venues like Sneaky Dee’s and the Hard Luck Bar who were on the brink of shutting down according to Now Magazine, have since reopened to provide a space for burgeoning artists. At the same time higher capacity venues such as the TD Music Hall opened last year while Toronto is expanding with a repurposed tennis stadium venue and a new 5,000 capacity arena in a megacasino.
On Mar 23, 2024, the Canadian Live Music Association announced that the government of Canada will provide $32 million to “strengthen the competitiveness and stability of the Canadian music sector.” This money will be distributed through the Canadian Music Fund who provide it to individual artists and industry leaders.
This will allow independent artists to promote their music and develop their talent while industry leaders create new places for these emerging artists to play.
Last September, Live Nation, a global leader in event promotion, announced their venues would cease merch cuts entirely and provide stipends of $1,500 to artists. This means The Danforth Music Hall, History, The Opera House and The Velvet Underground in Toronto no longer take merch cuts, putting that money back in the artist’s pocket.
Foolishly or not, artists are optimistic about the future.
“This scene seems to be relatively strong. Coming out of COVID posed a lot of challenges for both bands and venues but we’ve seen touring pickup and show attendances seem to be coming back,” said Spina.
