#CRUSADERS OF THE LOST IDOLS REDDIT FULL#
#CRUSADERS OF THE LOST IDOLS REDDIT PLUS#

They deserve every penny and more: booking a four week tour is a huge job. Our awesome booking agency, High Road Touring, takes a commission for booking the tour. Manufacturing merchandise, publicity (a radio ad in SF, Facebook ads, venue specific advertising), supplies, shipping.Ĭommissions. Per diems are twenty dollar payments to each bandmate and crew member each day for food while we’re out. In case we break someone’s face while crowdsurfing. Holy shit, parking a 42-foot van is expensive.

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28 nights for the tour, plus a week of rehearsals. Best Western level hotels, nothing fancy. Production expenses: equipment rental, lights, lighting board, van rental, trailer rental, road cases, backline. Where did all those expenses come from? I’m glad you asked: Expenses The tour ended up costing us $147,802 to produce and execute. With six figures of projected expenses, “the best we could” wasn’t super comforting. Neither of us had experience with financial modeling, so we just did the best we could. We built the tour budget ourselves and modeled projected revenue against expenses. One week of salaries for four musicians and two crew members (front of house engineer and tour manager) cost us $8794. We also knew that once we hit the road, we would be paying our band and crew on a weekly basis. And then we planned (or hoped) to make that back in ticket sales. $17,000 on one credit card and $7,000 on the other, to be more specific. We don’t have a label lending us “tour support.” We put those expenses right on our credit cards. And….Īll of that required an upfront investment from Nataly and me. In order to plan and execute our Fall tour, we had to prepare for months, slowly gathering risk and debt before selling a single ticket. Pomplamoose is “making it.” And every day, we bust our asses to continue “making it,” but we most certainly have not “made it.” Being in an indie band is running a never-ending, rewarding, scary, low-margin small business. But the phrase “made it” does not properly describe Pomplamoose.

Having the opportunity to play music as a career is a dream come true.

One question that our fans repeatedly asked us was “what does it feel like to have ‘made it’ as a band?” Though it’s a fair question to ask of a band with a hundred million views on YouTube, the thought of Pomplamoose having “made it” is, to me, ridiculous.īefore I write another sentence, it’s important to note that Nataly and I feel so fortunate to be making music for a living. I’ll remember that night for the rest of my life. We sold 1129 tickets in San Francisco at the Fillmore.

#CRUSADERS OF THE LOST IDOLS REDDIT FULL#

It was awesome: Nataly crowd surfed for the first time ever, we sold just under $100,000 in tickets, and we got to rock out with people we love for a full month. We played 24 shows in 23 cities around the United States. The following is by 1/2 of the band Pomplamoose and Patreon co-founder, Jack Conte.

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