As Ultra Q transitions into their final song, the pulsing multicolored lights illuminating the rock quartet fade into a deep blue. The group pauses, letting the audience push harder against the barricade below them. The venue’s floors slope downwards, pulling patrons closer to the band members on stage. They launch into a guitar-heavy track, and the young concert goers mosh up and down the tilting ground.
Despite calls for an encore, Ultra Q promptly finishes their set. They’re just the opening act, after all. And although performing drives them as a band, it isn’t how they’re breaking even tonight. Bassist Kevin Judd darts from the stage to the front of the venue to continue selling merch–their prime money-making venture on tour.
Ultra Q is playing the SOMA, a venue for indie and alternative rock groups in San Diego, leading off for garage-rock band Together Pangea. Formerly a movie theater, SOMA is located in a nondescript strip mall surrounded by boutique gyms. If you blink, you’ll miss it while driving past, but it’s a staple in the San Diego independent music landscape, a survivor of early pandemic shutdowns.
A few hours earlier, the members of Ultra Q had unloaded their gear into the back of SOMA themselves. To cut costs, they stopped hiring crew on tour at the behest of Chris Malaspina, who doubles as drummer and tour manager for the band. Malaspina keeps a detailed log of expenses and merch sales from each day of tour and creates a spreadsheet to track profits.
Choosing where to stay is critical on tour, as hotel accommodations make budgeting difficult. On this tour, they’re couch surfing the whole way. After selling as much merch as possible tonight, they’re driving back to Los Angeles to sleep before driving to Phoenix, Arizona the next day.
“Luckily, Kevin's family's Irish Catholic,” Malaspina laughs. “The family is huge…so we’re staying with a lot of them on the road.”
Since pandemic restrictions were lifted, independent musicians face a vastly more difficult touring landscape than three years ago. COVID shutdowns forced many independent venues to permanently close, limiting opportunities for smaller artists to get their start. The remaining venues are flooded with booking requests from musicians trying to make up for years off the road. While touring for independent artists has never proven easy financially, rising prices make touring more economically precarious than before, with gas, hotel and flight costs skyrocketing in the last year. But with royalties from streaming amounting to about a penny a play, touring is how most musicians make a living.
Ultra Q began touring again last spring. The bandmates didn’t see each other for most of the pandemic. They've played together since high school four years ago, and jumped at the chance to perform again. But on their first tour back, lead singer Jakob Armstrong contracted COVID two days before their scheduled appearance at Governors Ball, a popular music festival in New York City. The group canceled two weeks of shows and lost thousands of dollars. Judd said the financial impact of the halted tour continues to affect the band.
“Our debts are further away from being paid. But we're pretty good about saving money..we don't live a luxurious lifestyle on the road,” Judd said.
Even more high profile acts canceled tours in the last year, citing health reasons and financial concerns. Indie rock group Animal Collective canceled international tour dates last fall due to “touring obstacles related to COVID and the economy,” according to a post on their Instagram. Santigold, a multi-genre singer-songwriter who has performed on tracks with Jay-Z, Drake and David Byrne, became one of the first artists to speak about the struggles of the new touring environment in September. In a cancellation announcement for her fall tour, she explained how artists are “unable to make it work” in the increasingly costly touring circuit that escalates the already mentally draining nature of tour.
The members of Ultra Q love the thrill of touring, but it isn’t a particularly lucrative undertaking for the band. The group makes a few hundred dollars per night of tour. Split between the four of them, it doesn't amount to much. Despite having over 47,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and a consistent audience on tours, they don’t make a living as musicians. Every cent from touring, merch and streaming is reinvested into the band to pay label advances, gear rentals and accommodation costs. Judd picks up landscaping and contracting gigs when he can, but his inconsistent touring schedule makes it difficult to keep a full-time job.
Revenue from merch sales, whether it’s t-shirts, vinyl or cassettes, accounts for most of Ultra Q’s slim profits. This is the case for most smaller acts, according to USC Thornton School of Music professor Robert Borg. Borg, a former DIY touring musician, said that merch sales are an integral part of making a living as an artist.
“Merchandising is where most people, like an indie artist, will make any sort of money because with streaming you're not going to make much money, because it's fractions of pennies,” Borg said.
Merch sales are often the deciding factor in a band breaking even, but many venues take 15 to 25 percent of an artist’s merch revenue. Merch cuts aren’t a new phenomenon, but with finances more unstable than ever, artists are protesting the practice. The Union of Musicians and Allied Workers, a nonprofit organization known for its activism on the streaming economy and musicians’ rights, started a campaign in November calling for venues to stop taking merch cuts. Over 100 U.S. venues pledged to end the practice, but it’s still commonplace.
Brad Kearsley, guitarist for indie rock band Carpool Tunnel, said corporatized venues owned by groups like Live Nation Entertainment often impose merch cuts along with burdensome fees for cleaning and operation costs.
“They're just squeezing the profits out of touring bands as much as possible,” Kearsley said. “There's literally nothing you can do to stop any of that.”
Kearsley said the band has also struggled to book shows in an overcrowded touring market. Being one of the smaller bands on their touring agency’s booking roster, they aren’t playing as many shows, and haven’t toured since last February. Kearsley has only received payments twice from Carpool Tunnel tours, and makes most of his money freelance audio engineering. While touring is physically and mentally draining, Kearsley couldn’t imagine giving it up.
“At the end of the day, you’re going on a road trip with your best friends and playing shows every night. And then on the other hand, you're eating gas station food, and you don't sleep,” Kearsely said. “You are in this alternate, overstimulating universe for two weeks, and then you have to come back and readjust.”
Joy Collingbourne, a tour booker at The MOB agency, which boasts a roster of bands including No Doubt and Siouxsie and the Banshees, said she’s struggled to book smaller acts in recent years. Echoing Kearsley, Collingbourne maintains that venues are looking for acts with more established fan bases.
“They want to really ensure that money is going to come into the venue because a lot of venues unfortunately closed during the pandemic…it's just becoming increasingly harder to develop new people. Nobody wants to lose money right now,” Collingbourne said.
Collingbourne has also seen more artists booking consecutive shows with fewer rest days and touring without a full backing band to save money. Venues are also more likely to push 21+ shows to make more on alcohol sales and save money on security. She doesn’t see touring ever going away, but it’s no longer a sure way to generate income.
With touring more challenging to swing financially, Borg has noticed an increasing number of younger artists he works with uninterested in it completely. Known as “bedroom artists,” younger DIY acts produce music from their homes and release it online, hoping it will go viral on platforms like Tiktok. While some popular bedroom artists like Clairo and Gus Dapperton signed to labels and entered the touring circuit, not everyone craves performing to extend their internet popularity. Some lack experience.
Felicity Ward, an artist manager at Roar Management, said she’s seen artists find success on Tiktok without the live performance chops to back it up.
“During the pandemic, when you have artists who have never stepped on stage, blowing up on Tik Tok, a label signing them, and then putting them in front of people… they have no idea how to command a room,” Ward said.
Borg said he looks back on his touring days fondly and as an important part of developing skills as a young artist.
“I remember sleeping in the bathtub with a pillow…that stuff is just like a rite of passage,” Borg said. “It doesn't really have to always be from a business strategic side. We're talking about life. We're talking about learning, we're talking about experience.”
According to Ward, the standard income per night for support acts such as Ultra Q has hovered around $250 for years, despite rising costs and risks from COVID. She said with prices high and revenue streams low, planning tours has to be more intentional than ever. She’s worked with artists who turn down prominent festivals because travel costs outweigh the offered earnings.
“Gone are the days when you could just get in a van, and drive and play all over wherever you want…that's just not the reality anymore,” Ward said. “It has to be more strategic.”
Ward represents Elliott Douglas, who goes by the stage name M.A.G.S. Douglas canceled a tour last summer for financial reasons when a digital distribution company backed out from funding him.
“Sometimes, you have to kind of prioritize certain things, I’d rather have a place to live than go out on tour, and play some good shows, but ultimately come back and have massive debt,” Douglas said. “It's a matter of choosing your battles.”
Douglas joined the indie rock trio The Happy Fits on tour in 2021, and ended up filling in on drums for five shows when a member of the band contracted COVID. They couldn’t afford to cancel multiple tour dates, so he played both his opening set and the headlining act. Douglas also caught COVID during a tour last November and lost money overall. He powered through his last sets after testing negative, but struggled to keep up physically with the demands of tour. Touring during a pandemic means artists often juggle recovering from disease while trying to break even.
“Everything falls on my shoulders for the financial responsibility…it was a tough time coming off tour, and still having a bunch of things that need to be taken care of and not actually having the money from the tour to take care of them,” Douglas said.
Many artists put on virtual performances during pandemic lockdowns to make up for the absence of live shows. But even with venues open, virtual concerts are an expanding niche in the music industry. Major acts like Megan Thee Stallion and Travis Scott hosted virtual reality shows in the last few years, and it’s projected to become a multibillion dollar technological pursuit. While VR concerts would help address the financial and mental strain of touring, Douglas said nothing replaces the intimacy of a live show.
“I’m a very physical performer and when I'm playing my energy is coming directly from the audience and their energy is coming directly from me,” Douglas said. “There's a disconnect with a virtual stream and everyone can appreciate a live experience.”