Los Campesinos! Detail the High Costs and Risks of Their 2024 North American Tour

Los Campesinos! , by their own admission the UK’s first and only emo band, published a detailed breakdown of their 2024 North American Tour on their Substack. It is a insightful read, and Pollstar got permission from the band to publish the breakdown in full.

The band says, it was important to read the footnotes, and emphasizes that this is a breakdown specific to them and the way they tour, rather than a general statement on the costs of touring for any band that’s comparable in size and popularity.

The Substack post , which was also sent to fans subscribing to the Los Campesinos! newsletter, was penned by the band’s frontman Gareth David Paisey, and it starts now:

By now it’s widely accepted that the live industry is fucked for 99% of us. Be it artists struggling to cope with growing costs, or fans with diminishing disposable income being met with ever increasing ticket prices at arena and stadium gigs, from a gouging music industry.

Bands and Music Biz Insiders are often keen to express their plight, but so often what they say falls short of being interesting because it doesn’t include any detail or tell us anything we don’t already broadly know as music fans. In conversations like these, artists and others within the music industry are happy to convey general frustration and worry at the state of the business, but are too shy to be specific. Part of the issue is that a lot of bands of a certain size don’t know the full reality of their finances because they are shielded from these details by management and labels (who are very often making more money from the project than those that are creating it). But another significant factor is that artists often feel they need to walk a performative tightrope. On one side they’re scared of damaging their perceived authenticity by revealing that they’re earning any money at all, and on the other they don’t want to impact their status and opportunities within the industry by revealing how little money that is.

The purpose of this piece is not to explain the situation for all touring bands, though doubtless a lot of the sums involved will be relevant to others. It’s certainly not intended to elicit any sympathy. It’s only to give an honest and accurate outline of the exact situation for Los Campesinos!. We publish this in our continued spirit of attempting to be transparent and honest about the music industry, and perhaps to outline to our own fans why we are unable to tour more frequently and widely. But I do hope that our continued forthrightness on these issues encourages other bands to speak more openly too.

When I write pieces like this they inevitably reach an audience outside of our fanbase (1), so I’m adding some important contextual details that people who are not familiar with LC! might be unaware of.

- We are a 7 piece band from the UK with a fixed lineup, zero “session musicians”.

- We often travel with band members’ children (2).

- We are self managed, and run our own record label.

- We have day jobs, and use our holiday allowance to tour. Being in this band is not our primary income. We choose to tour because it’s fun.

- We are aware that specific ideological decisions we make impact our ability to maximise the money we earn.

In June 2024 we embarked on a North American tour, between the announcement and the release of our 7th studio album, All Hell (3). Below is our itinerary for the trip, alongside a number denoting the amount of people in attendance at the show. All shows were sold out except for Boston.

June 2024

14 – Fly/Arrive in NY 15 – Warsaw, Brooklyn NY (1,000) 16 – Paradise Rock Club, Boston MA (853) 17 – Union Transfer, Philadelphia PA (800) 18 – Black Cat, Washington DC (800) 19 – Day off 20 – The Opera House, Toronto ON (890) 21 – The Roxy, Cleveland OH (700) 22 – Thalia Hall, Chicago IL (914) 23 – Travel Day 24 – The Crocodile, Seattle WA (750) 25 – Aladdin Theater, Portland OR (630) 26 – Travel/Day off 27 – Great American Music Hall, San Francisco CA (650) 28 – The Regent Theater, Los Angeles CA (1,300) 29 – Fly home

Now let’s get into it…

INCOMING

Show fees explained Typically the fee a band is paid for a show is based on a “Guarantee vs 80%” deal. This means there is a “guaranteed” minimum amount a band is paid (even if a show is poorly attended and loses the promoter money). But if the ticket income (after costs (4) exceeds the guaranteed amount then the band is paid 80% of the show’s total profit. In a situation like this, the difference between the Guarantee and the higher fee a band is paid is called “overage”.

How much were our fees? Guarantees varied from a high of $17,100 to a low of $5,500. Both of these shows sold out, instead earning us $21,743.80 and $10,853.68 respectively. Across the 11 gigs all bar one (Boston) sold out, meaning 12,687 of 12,787 available tickets were sold (99.2%) (5).

The primary factor that informs a fee is the ticket price. We deliberately keep our ticket prices as low as possible, in order to ensure our shows are accessible to all fans. The standard ticket price was $27.50. We also make 5% of all tickets available at a reduced price of $10 to enable low income fans to attend our shows (6). If our tickets were more expensive, the guarantees would be higher and we would receive more money (in theory, but we would be pricing out some fans who would then not be able to attend) (7).

The fees we were paid for these shows amounted to $149,037.74. The industry standard 10% commission ($14,903.77) was paid to our booking agent (8). An additional $4,687.65 disappeared in withholding taxes, and then there’s a miscellaneous $1,716.76 that came out of show fees to cover additional un-budgeted production costs that arose (there were occasions where the rental of extra stage risers or monitors was required from external companies).

Subsequently, we received a total of $127,729.539 (approximately £99,738.05) into our bank account for the performance of these 11 shows.

A really substantial amount of money, but let’s take a look at how that needs to be spent to enable the tour, and what we’re left with…

OUTGOING

Getting to America In order to play shows in the United States, we need working visas. We’ve always travelled on year-long P-1 visas which allow “internationally recognised entertainment groups” to temporarily visit the U.S. to perform. We need 8 visas total, one for each band member, and an 8th for our Front of House engineer Paul. The cost of these visas totalled -£3,768.87. In addition to this we needed to pay for embassy appointments10 (-£1,426.80) and the postage required for our passports and visas to each individually be returned to us by courier (-£220.15). That means a total of -£5,415.82 on visa costs.

Of course we need to fly to the United States! So, flights for 7 band members and our FOH engineer Paul. BUT…Kim and Jason have two children (at this point aged 6 and 2) who apparently can’t be left home alone for the ~16 days that we’ll be away. So, flights for two kids as well. And wait a minute…who’s going to look after the children while Kim and Jason are sound-checking and performing two-hour long shows each night? So the kids’ Auntie comes along on (unpaid) childcare duties. 11 return flights come to a total of -£7,237.30. That includes additional baggage costs for the musical equipment that we travel with (guitars, keyboards, pedal boards etc).

A further -£900 is spent on transport to and from the airport, pre and post-tour. A mix of National Express coaches, trains and a van hire/driver to transport our instruments from our storage in Cardiff. Plus -£182 on Heathrow hotels for those band members who live too far away from the airport to travel there on the morning of the flight.

Insurance! Travel Insurance for our touring party and the gear we’re flying with comes to a total of -£753.60.

So, before we set foot on US soil to begin the tour, that’s a -£14,488.72 outlay to get us there.

The distances covered during this tour between shows (not to mention the fact that we are a total party of 12 adults and 2 children) mean our only option for travel is a sleeper bus (ie. A large bus that drives from show to show overnight, while we sleep on board in cabin bunk beds). The total cost for the bus (including fuel, driver wages etc) is -£45,850.07. This covers the 14 day duration of the 11 shows, plus “deadhead” days pre and post tour when the empty bus is driving between its Nashville base and the first and last tour stops.

This is obviously a huge outlay, but it is the only option for a band of our number. Touring in a van is not possible, due to a few factors (11), but even if it was, this would then incur different costs (like paying for hotels for 12 people every night and likely needing an extra person on tour to drive). I have budgeted this in the past and the van option ends up costing about the same as a bus anyway, even if it were possible.

Unfortunately the bus isn’t the only transport cost on the tour. As you can see from the itinerary, we play Chicago on a Friday night and then Seattle 2 days later on the Monday. It’s not possible to cover that 2,000 miles by road, in the approximate 40 hours between shows (12). So what happens is, after we load in to our Chicago venue on the Friday afternoon, the bus starts its drive without us. Meaning we all fly between Chicago and Seattle at a cost of -£3,937.40, plus -£344.52 in excess baggage.

Additional transport costs come in the form of large shuttle vehicles (transferring us and our gear from airports to hotels/venues and vice versa, when we do not have the bus) at -£667.34, and miscellaneous taxi costs (-£586.25).

Hotels Even though for the most part we’ll be sleeping on the bus, we’ll need to stay in a hotel occasionally. Our bus driver needs a room every day in which to sleep and recuperate ahead of their all night drives. Sometimes a venue won’t have showers for us to use, so we’ll book a hotel as a “day room” for this purpose.

Additionally, we need accommodation for (a) the night we arrive in the U.S., and (b) the last night of tour because the bus will depart for its depot immediately following hotel drop-off after the show in LA. What’s more, we need to stay in a hotel after the Chicago gig, and the night before the Seattle show because as mentioned, the bus will be driving cross-country without us at that point!

All these hotel costs combined come to a total of -£6,312.59.

Equipment Though we travel with our instruments, we have a full backline (13) that we store in the US. Our gear is stored in Michigan, and needs to start the tour with us 750 miles from there in Brooklyn. It costs -£905.64 (UHaul hire, fuel, hotel) to get this gear to the first tour stop. We end the tour in Los Angeles and it costs -£2,184.41 to get the gear the 2,000 road miles back to Michigan.

And of course, we were briefly separated from our backline in Chicago, because the bus needed to leave before that show was played! So we had to hire backline here, at a cost of -£889.07. Thankfully the bus made the cross-country journey slightly quicker than anticipated, and arrived in time for us to make a saving by cancelling the same hire for the Seattle show.

Prior to, and during, the tour we needed to replace or renew a number of items of equipment. We had a couple of broken guitar cases, and an amp needed replacing. These costs came to around £3,750, but I’m not going to include them in the final maths as they’re not necessarily specific to this tour.. We’ll just add in a conservative -£400 for tour specific items like guitar strings, cables, tape, drumsticks etc

Crew Wages and Costs Including our Front of House Paul, (but not including childcare), we travel with 4 crew members.

Tour Manager – In the UK and Europe we tour manage ourselves, but with additional logistics relating to touring in the US we really benefit from having that extra expertise. Joe advances the shows with the venues a

_Originally reported by [Pollstar](https://news.pollstar.com/2026/05/12/expensive-packed-with-risk-but-marginally-possible-uk-band-los-campesinos-break-down-their-u-s-touring-costs-guest-post/)._