Why The Rolling Stones Keep Touring Despite Being Ancient Zillionaires
The Rolling Stones play the last stop of their current tour — and
possibly their career — next week in London's Hyde Park.
Their last few shows have drawn rave reviews, and the returns on
their earlier shows have been strong.
But others have called it "the night of the living dead" tour, for
reasons that are perhaps evident.
And the Rolling Stones are already one of the wealthiest bands in
the world. Their last tour grossed more than half a billion
dollars. Mick Jagger is said to be worth more than $300 million,
Keith Richards just a bit less.
So why do these guys keep going on tour?
There are three reasons.
First, digitized music is now virtually worthless. Prof. Peter
Tschmuck, a professor at the University of Music and Performing
Arts in Vienna who runs a blog about the economics of the music
business, told me the return on investment from selling a digital
copy of a song is 12% compared with about 36% for CDs — and that's
before that revenue is carved up to various title holders.
Professor Jeff Dorenfeld, Professor of Music Business/Management
at the Berklee College of Music, told us songs have been losing
value for more than a decade.
There's very little money made from recorded music anymore. Apple
— iTunes is mostly a singles market, Spotify, that kind of service
doesn't pay high royalties, radio is not as big as it used to be.
So all those revenues are not where they were, and haven't been
for the last 15 years.
Second — and luckily in response to item 1 — touring now generates
lots of money. And it's especially lucrative to be the Rolling
Stones. Their last three tours combined will likely have grossed
about $1 billion (the mid-2000s "Licks" tour did +$300 million,
and the current one could do more than $100 million for a much
more limited set of dates). The average ticket price is $370.
Bruce Springsteen is only $93.29.
When asked recently by the Guardian's Casper Llewellyn Smith about
whether he regrets bassist's Bill Wyman leaving the band in 1993,
Charlie Watts cracked,"I think he missed out on a very lucrative
period in our existence."
rolling stones
REUTERS/Mike Blake
The band in Anaheim.
Money is money, Dorenfeld says, noting that bands as big as the
Stones command supremely high margins on splits with concert
promoters and bookers because of the guaranteed interest they
draw.
They're getting more than 60% is my guess (of a show's gross
revenues). If the show made $3 million, that's $1.8 million, not
counting merch — you walk away with that also. They're unique —
all the ones like them are unique — the deals are much tighter
because the revenue from everything else is much greater.
An additional consideration — perhaps not for the band, but for
anyone who would think the Stones are wasting everyone's time and
perhaps risking ridicule — is that while the band is just the four
current members, "Rolling Stones, Inc." likely employs more than a
dozen people full time and hundreds while on the road.
rolling stones texas
Youtube
The band in its salad days.
Setting up stages, even for arena tours like the current one, are
massive operations that Dorenfeld says can cost hundreds of
thousands of dollars a night. "They're a major corporation on the
road — they're a company," he says. "They do pay well, many have
benefits and healthcare."
This final point was probably first ever articulated in 1995 by
Larry Mullen Jr. of U2, the band that basically invented blow-out
multi-sensory rock n' roll tours, in Bill Flanagan's "At The End
Of The World":
The biggest responsibility out of all this is the fact that you
employ a lot of people and you are responsible for them,
responsible for making sure they're taken care of. People's
livelihoods are depending on you. I don't like that responsibility
too much, but that comes with the territory.
Of course, one does not go on tour merely to keep your entourage
happy. But it's part of the equation.
Asking why the Stones "need" to go on tour leaves out the
question of "wanting" to go on tour. They're still ostensibly
artists, after all. Here's what Jagger said in an interview with
Chicago Tribune rock critic Greg Kot in April:
Everyone had a really good time in the five shows before Christmas
(in London, New Jersey and New York). We wanted to see how the
band was playing, how people were reacting. We didn’t get too much
moaning or complaining.
Given all of the above, that seems to be a fairly low hurdle to
surmount.
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