The cost of touring: how much could it cost a small band to tour the UK amidst more tour cancellations?

Have you stopped and noticed over the last year that the amount of tour cancellations have seemed to increase - be it due to burnout or, in some cases, the cost of touring. 

While the likes of The Last Dinner Party soldiered on with some of their dates while also determining their next steps after cancelling some of their European shows (having cancelled some on their UK show too), others have just plain admitted it is now a costly venture.

The operative word here though is “now.”

Having spoken to singer-songwriter Elles Bailey to find out more about the differences between touring currently than when she first started out a couple of moons ago, one of the more interesting points she brought up was how smaller artists could tour Europe easier - and with it, help with touring closer to home.

As Bailey recalls, she would go and tour across Europe in order to make money to then look at touring the United Kingdom. Fiscally, she discussed, there was more money to be made crossing the channel, allowing for that money to be reinvested into the local gig economy.

But with Brexit having occurred and with it a lot more paperwork undertaken, that’s led to smaller bands who perhaps had a better chance at drawing an audience overseas not being afforded the same opportunities as perhaps they were pre-Brexit.

So how much would it cost a three piece band to undertake a small tour? Let’s grab our accountancy visors and calculators for a hypothetical exercise that is still steeped in reality. 

Let’s book a tour!

How much would it cost to tour the United Kingdom in 2024?

Let’s lay out some methodology before we go any further: let’s say I am managing a three piece band with a guitarist, keyboard player and drummer (sorry bassists.) The band are not huge and we’re just looking at shows around the Yorkshire area because, well, they’re not big enough for such an extensive tour. 

Let’s also consider that the band are young(ish) and all the members are holding down jobs that pay the national living wage, currently £11.44-per-hour, which works out after tax and National Insurance as a net of £1,445 per month. They all live together, they all have bills and the rent in the area (LS12) consists of £995 per calendar month.

So for arguments sake, the average outgoings per band member will be around £450 per month, leaving each band member with £995 to last them after household bills and expenses. That, bear in mind, has to last each band member 31 days.

Venue Hire

Luckily, we have some friends who are putting on a show at one venue in Sheffield so the cost of hiring that won’t come into play, but with that comes the idea that someone else needs to recuperate their costs first. The band doesn't do “pay to play,” so we’re not having to sell tickets.

But for our three other shows we have planned in Leeds, Bradford and York, and based on previous experiences pre-lockdown, we’re looking at smallish sized venues like Wharf Chambers or Oporto, for those in Leeds familiar with their layouts.

A cursory look over some subreddits dedicated to touring, for a venue of that size including a sound engineer, these can range between £60 to £100 - and being a glass half empty guy, I’m leaning towards the more expensive rather than the least expensive.

That would already cost the band £300 to hire three venues to perform in.

Current total: £300

Travel Costs

To use public transport, or to not use public transport. That is the question.

You might think that jumping on public transport would be easy, and drummers will know the routine when touring without a backline: just the snare and breakables. All of which is easy enough, while a guitar case and pedal board might now start to occupy some realty on the public transport form of choice.

Add a keyboard into the mix, and some aggravation about sharing seats with random strangers, and we’ve decided upon the train service to get to our shows. Trainline has the following prices for the tour for all three members:

• Leeds to Sheffield: £20.59
• Sheffield to York: £28.79
• York to Bradford: £31.29
• Bradford to Leeds: £9.89

The total for the round trip comes to £90.56 if taking the train, while taking a coach would be cheaper, but slightly more uncomfortable for our three band members. One of them has a car which, as an estimate, could cost around £19.22 for fuel consumption - but with that comes the additional expense of car parking and someone being the sober driver. 

So on the train it is in this case.

Current Total: £390.56

Marketing and Promotion

Gone are the days you could just put your show on Facebook or social media and people could come to see you perform. These days even if you were to use something from the Metaverse, chances are to “boost” your post, that’s going to cost you money.

Boosted posts typically cost as low as £5 per day but can go much higher depending on the reach and engagement desired. For example, a common budget might range from £50 to £500 for a short campaign (a few days to a couple of weeks). 

It’s much the same pricing scale for Instagram, while Twitter’/X has two options too: promoted tweets that can range from £0.50 to £4.00 per engagement, with a daily budget often set between £50 and £500, and trend promotion, with some campaigns ranging from £1,000 to over £20,000, depending on how prominently the trend is placed.

I asked my assistant, Cath GPT (ChatGPT, full disclosure) to arrange a marketing and promotion budget based on the locations the band are going to, and it advised me on the following plan:

• Facebook: £150
• Instagram: £150
• X/Twitter: £250 (including trend promotion)

Forgoing X/Twitter because we’ve had to make a hard choice, the marketing and promotional total for a good, solid promotion across the locations for the tour comes to a suggested £300. 

You could go cheaper printing materials off and handing them over to venues and record stores. But that also comes with a caveat - some stores that sell tickets will only offer real estate for posters if you’re selling tickets with them. 

Don’t attempt to fly poster these days, the risk is not worth the reward currently.

Current total: £690.56

Hidden Costs: food, accommodation and “spare strings”

This is the part I hated the most organising shows - that dreaded last minute hitch. 

Turns out the Leeds venue doesn't have a backline and none of the acts are willing to share their drum kit as it’s our band’s show, so out of the kindness of our hearts (and necessity), we’ve hired a backline including drum kit and bass amp. 

Looking at current prices through Leeds Live Sound, we can get what we need, with a drum kit and bass amp set to cost us £60 for the kit (without snare drum) and £45 for a bass cabinet and head.

We also found out that the York show for some reason doesn’t have a PA, which becomes another expense we should have found out before booking the shows; Presh Audio have come to help and along with a decent sound engineer comes to £120. 

Then there is accommodation; we could slum it out on the floors at places but you know how professional musicians can be sometimes. Our friends in Sheffield and York have put us up for the nights we’re playing there but in Bradford, we’re biting the bullet and getting a Travelodge. 

We employ the cheeky band practice also of one member booking the room (which amounts to £34.99), then three members turning up and piling into the accommodation while people aren’t looking. It’s unscrupulous, sure, but it’s once again based on personal experiences. 

Then there’s all the other little things that add up; spare strings for the guitar, drumsticks for the drummer, a daisy-chain for the keyboardist to plug in. All up, we’ve set aside £50 for these sundries, while in terms of food well - they’re old enough to fend for themselves. We’re not at the point of distributing per diems yet. 

• Current total: £1000.55
• Total per band member: £333.51

Wrapping up the tour

We’ve tried to keep it simple and not include the costs of merchandise and as always with shows, we can only assume how many people would turn up after all our hard work and promotion. 

There is the case of how much could be made back from the shows, but owing to how many bands have cancelled because of overheads, our three piece haven’t even considered what to do if no one shows up. 

So for smaller acts, it is a costly risk at times to hit the road in the current climate of musical venues closing and overheads getting higher. It doesn’t help that those smaller, grassroots venues are closing across the country too; what happens then to bands and artists as the avenues to perform get smaller and smaller?

Do other venues offer a leg up once more or are their overheads leading to “bigger” acts being booked for the sake of covering costs? It’s not a popular decision promoters have to make, but it is as Elles Bailey states, it is the “music business.”

With it, comes some hard business decisions to boot.

Are you a smaller musician who has felt the effect of the costs of touring going up? Are you a promoter who has found themselves in a similar situation to our hypothetical tour? Let us know your thoughts by leaving a comment down below.