haha ok
How did you guys end up with 4 grand tour debt?
Well, we funded our own merch so Shirts, CD's, Stickers, Badges etc as well as driving the whole tour (17 dates back to back covering the entire of the UK from Yorkshire to Ilfracombe etc). We drove 1000's of miles across both tours in a van that averaged 20MPG if we were lucky. That's a cost of 30p a mile. If we did 1000 miles that fuel alone cost us £300. So you're looking at at LEAST £1000 for two tours worth just on fuel alone, then you add in £2000 on merch (2000 CD prints T-Shirts etc) and extra bits and bobs (advertising, food, strings etc).
That's just off the top of my head and is very truncated but you can see where the cash goes. 2nd tour we made around £750 which covered fuel, food (for a crew of 7 people) and some bits n bobs on strings, skins, etc. You need to tour for a good couple of weeks to make any money back for a band like ours. Paul (Cradle of Filth, White Empress) told me they had to tour for 6 weeks to break even and then everything after that was profit. It may not have been 6 weeks exactly, my memory is pretty fuzzy on it, but it was definitely a good 3/4 weeks minimum before profit came into it.
And that's an established band... We're talking my band being unknown and taking all the costs on ourselves. We want to get our to Tour Europe so badly, but we're going to need 5-6000 to pull it off... I'm already working 6 / 7 days a week... Pisses me off when people say "just get a job man"... It's far too deep an undertaking for one individual or even 4 to get together £5000 minimum to go tour Europe as an unknown band, by yourselves. You're looking at a loss. After a year or more of saving you'd be looking at a 2 week tour full of financial loss (most likely). So for now, we can only rely on people buying our merch, supporting us financial etc. This is why we REALLY appreciate people saying that they love our stuff. But when someone says that they love your album and don't even pay you £1 for it when you put it up as pay what you want... It just feels like you stand ZERO chance of getting enough cash to get out there.
In short, when our album on bandcamp was up for £10 we made £100's, with hardly any downloads at all. Compare that to pay what you want... We had 100's of downloads and made £30.... I pour my soul into music and give people DI's to the whole album, music videos, press releases etc etc (not saying that's special or deserves credit, I'd expect most people to do the same) but when you're looking at 100's of people taking your music (great!!!) saying they love it and yet leave you nothing for it financially... It puts you in shit creek without a paddle.
