You! Me! 10 Million Spotify Streams! How Much?!?!! Why Los Campesinos! Stopped Being Quiet - Part 1

0:00Welcome to the Drowned in Sound podcast. It's Helena here, your new occasional co-host. I'll be joined in a second by your old faithful, the man who keeps everything dissed together, Sean. And I'm so excited to say that in this episode, we interviewed none other than Gareth David, the lyricist and lead singer of the iconic indie band Los Campesinos. Los Campesinos is a band who I have admired not just musically but, for want of a better word, politically as well. They are a band who have walked the walk for 20 years. Whether this is showing unconditional support for trans people, rejecting advert money from an unaligned brand, or putting aside low-income tickets for their fans.

0:47They are also one of the few bands who have been radically honest about money. Last year, around the time of everyone getting their Spotify wrapped, Lost Camp instead put out five slides of cold hard stats about how much money their band makes from streaming royalties. Spoiler alert, it's really quite shockingly bad. They followed this up with an article this month presenting their tour accounts. So a breakdown of every penny spent and earned on their sold out 2024 North American tour. from visas to buses to taxis, hotels, crew costs. There's a lot of numbers to get your head around and we do go into those numbers, but we also talk about what the effect of this is on bands trying to emerge and sustain themselves today.

1:36I also got to live out my dream by making a Best of Los Campesinos companion playlist to go with this interview. So please do make sure you listen to that created in partnership with the more ever cool streaming platform, Cobuzz. It can be found at drownedandsound.org forward slash playlists and you can get a 30-day free trial. Without further ado, I will throw over to myself and Sean and Gareth from Los Campesinos.

2:12us welcome to the drowndon sound podcast today we are joined by the lead singer of a band that drowndon sound have put on at festivals i think last time we had a festival stage at summer sunday they were making a raucous noise i think the law is true that gareth before the band existed you were even a member of our message boards and when you played your first london show lots of people came or was it a different member of the band so yes we are joining tom from that was tom yeah tom can take the credit for that i was the i was the big name on the football manager uh message board at the time so i had football manager covered and tom i tried in sign coverage it's a strategic wow are we part of a strategic marketing is this like yeah that's everybody covered before geese was a psyop there was lost canvas seen us as a psyop okay you were you're big on the message boards um yeah and you've just released your second piece of what some people might call radical transparency of showing the details in the mathematics behind touring there's a lot of conversations about bands are struggling venues are struggling grassroots music's in crisis and then there's stories about Taylor Swift's a billionaire because touring is so lucrative, Live Nation are making record profits and somewhere in between the 99 % and the 1%, there's people that have money and people that don't.

3:36So I thought we'd go through some of the numbers and debunk and make sense of things and help people. There was a few questions from the forums of people, things people were curious about. but I think to kick off I just wanted to know who sort of inspired you to talk about these numbers and share them was it from reading Fugazi's books on how to start a label was it seeing Grizzly Bear chatting about the economics of music was there any anything that sort of triggered it I think one of unfortunately one of the primary motivating factors in Lost Camps in Lost History is spite and that's why we started a band in the first place because we had mates in bands that we'd go to watch and they were rubbish and we were like oh god we could do better than this and we could be getting drunk for free so we did it but i've i kind of got bored of just reading so many pieces which sort of say broadly things are bad it's hard for musicians we're cancelling tours because the sales aren't good enough or one thing or the other but they they never get interesting because they're all too shy and they want to sort of they want to complain and perhaps have some sympathy which is which is justified to a degree but they don't actually want to work towards a solution and i think the reasons for that are partly because a lot of artists don't know the reality of their financial situation because they're sheltered from it by management or by record labels.

5:08And I think it's partly this, that artists walk this tightrope of, on the one hand, not wanting to sort of disturb their indie credentials by acknowledging that they make any money at all, but on the other, not wanting to impact their reputation with bookers, festivals, marketing elements by being open about how little that money is. So I just got bored of the, you know, we know the general talking points, but let's be specific about our situation. And it is only our situation. We can't pretend to speak for other bands, but I just think if every band, I know this is an unreasonable suggestion, but if every band was transparent, then we would have a clear idea of what the situation actually is and how we could work towards change.

6:04and I think it would be very useful to fans of the specific bands but music fans in general to get an idea of things and also because I think every band's situation is different. We tend to think of that 99 % of bands as some sort of homogenous group of everyone has the same expenses, the same needs, the same requirements but every band is made up of complex individuals with different circumstances And so I wanted to be open about ours and how that impacts specifically how we tour and what it costs us to tour. I think it's also that specificity that engages people and gets people's emotions up, right?

6:49Because I loosely know that streaming doesn't pay artists well, but then seeing it laid out in Los Camposinos' post was genuinely shocking. like that that tugs on my emotions far more than like a wide concept of oh do you know streaming platforms don't really pay artists I think what really got me was the fact that 20 full listens of your latest album all hell would roughly give you guys one pound sure when I heard that when I read that that honestly like shook me to my core because I know how many times I've listened to that album and the idea that you get one pound from that and sure okay yes there's live show and there's merch and there's other things but should you have to rely on that right like it's your music that people should be repaying you for yeah sure i mean i think it's in the case of the streaming stuff i think it's interesting because i think the amount we made from from all hell in that first year was it about 32 grand or something um i genuinely can't remember offhand about 10 million streams yeah yeah but that's a decent chunk of money to anyone like that that's no small amount of money but when you factor in how much it's cost to record the album in the first place i think there's there's a broad understanding of the the income a lot of time but then that can only really be considered alongside the outgoings as well because they're they always come first or you know 90 % of the time that's what comes first um and so yeah if you make 32 grand from a year's worth of streams on a new album that's good but you've you've spent more than that on recording the album in the first place and you know you've got income from from vinyl or from the associated tours around that album but there is the uh the costs you know we covered the we'll talk about the touring costs in a bit um so i think yeah i think it's the specificity that is key for me because that's only when you really fully begin to understand things other than the broad like artists don't earn much from streaming but how much is not much and why is the amount not much because 32 grand is a lot of money but in this context maybe it's not and and i think that's that's important i think also helena if you're spending 120 pounds a year on streaming service i think it's gone up now i think it's more than 10 pounds a month and you pretty much only listen to los campesinos it's like you're not going to have put very much of what you've listened to into the pocket of the bands you like and i think when i first started this podcast one of the questions I was asked a lot was what's the most ethical way of supporting the bands I like and and I thought well I don't actually know the answer I know if you buy from band camp from a lot of artists there's a lot more go straight into the pocket of the artist but the artist has got to buy the stock they could end up making a thousand records and having 700 left onto their bed as some bands will be able to tell you they might slowly sell them but that's a lot of money that they've had to outlay.

10:07Like buying MP3s off an artist, you're just tokenistically buying a file. And like buying it from the artist at their merch desk sometimes is really good. But as Gareth, you touched on in your article, some venues take a percentage of the merch store sales. Yeah, let's talk more on that later because that's a specific bugbear of mine. Maybe not in the way that you would expect. I wrote an essay about it. What are you saying there about, what you're saying about Bandcamp there and Bandcamp is a great one is a really interesting one but I think the way that we talk about often when we say artists what we actually mean is rights holder and so people you know Bandcamp Friday it's great that you are in theory paying all of your money is going to the artist but it's not it's going to the rights holder so if it's the record label that still owns the rights to that the artist might be recouping against what they own the label but it's not as if the next day they're logging into their paypal account and receiving that income so in our case we own our seven studio albums we now own the rights to six of them so six of them great it is coming literally straight to us after paypal fees and after bank amp fees if it's not a bank amp friday but our sixth album six scenes is um still owned by wichita and i love wichita i've got nothing bad to say about wichita um but you know that's one if that's the album you choose to buy we're not seeing any money from it and we're in a great position because you know six out of seven and six scenes may be our least popular album um but for lots of bands that won't be the case it will just be going to to the rights holder but the language that we've adopted when talking about band camp is it goes straight to the artist which it's not even quite as good as that well i guess in some circumstances if you've bought the stock from the label so often it is going to the artist but that's a bit of a red herring if it was stock yeah i still pretty much entirely associate band camp with with buying from mp3s so yeah that's that's my bad on that yeah if the if the if the band had bought the stock and yeah you're right which is crazy like one of the artists so i managed an artist called the anchor s and catherine's does a lot of interesting things are doing stuff but she recoups the first album but every time she's the biggest retailer for her second album because retail was closed because of covid um so most of her albums that she's bought for not just cost price and she's not buying them for the price of the cd she's buying them for the same price no as a record shop would of her own record yeah the dealer price it's such a weird thing to be in this position where you're buying like your own record from your record company to then sell to your fans it's just like anyway that's a convoluted extra little detail but i think it's one of those small details which it makes that question of what's the most ethical way of supporting the music you love harder to answer and I guess Helena the reason I started that question was because I guess as a music fan you thought you were doing the right thing streaming the band listening to them a lot and I'm assuming you thought that more than a few quid had gone into their pocket would that kind of be why this transparency is so powerful yeah exactly that I also think there is nothing that these it's also it's hard not to blame the fans right i don't you know we don't want to put blame on people for using streaming services that's what everybody does but um i do think that there's nothing that these streaming services won't do to try and keep their reputation and keep their corporate greed i saw when you guys posted your transparent streaming um numbers at Spotify for artists.

13:49Yeah. This really like cutesy, like beggy little comment. I'll just read some of it out, but it was like, this kind of transparency is awesome. And then it was like, just to share some info from our side. And then it was going into this like per stream rate. And they say, we all pay out based on something called stream share. That means we take about 70 % of all the money we make and put it into a royalty pool. And if you get 1 % of the streams, you get one percent of the royalty pool so they were trying to say that's the reason that our per stream rate looks lower because we have so many more streams than other platforms um and then again they were like we think this kind of transparency is great though but like what is your what is your response to that it's just words isn't it it's just like it's just it's that they weren't really refuting anything i was saying they were just saying trying to say that the way that they are doing it is is is right and is good which is which is obviously nonsense um i think i guess two things on that the first thing is i will never begrudge people who listen to us on spotify because like everybody's life is hellish enough that not everybody cannot be sort of like hyper vigilant on everything and spotify for better for worse is the you know the brand leader and the market leader in terms of streaming and people are going to use it for many reasons and i i'm not going to be you know when when people tag us and say you are my most listened to artist on spotify i'm not going to reply being thank you so much but equally i'm not i'm not thinking any less of people for using spotify i do think less of artists when they do you know like spotify single sessions or where they um you know thanking spotify for adding them to a playlist like your your pr person has told you to you know your marketing team has told you to do this that does my head in i think that artists recording end of messages for spotify wrapped is like is just dumb um so that's frustrating but what you're saying about like the way that um spotify pays out on a percentage basis you're in a situation where like if you're even an act like us if you were to release an album the same month that taylor swift releases an album you're going to be earning less money that month than you would the next month and as you can see from like the data that we gave out your first month and six weeks of listening is by far the highest like we like you know if we were receiving say six grand in the first month by the second month it's three grand by the third it's down to two grand and going down again so if you release your album the same day as as taylor swift never mind your chances of a of a you know uk official album charts number one it's like it's actually gonna impact the amount of money you're gonna earn from streaming because every taylor swift super fan is going to be streaming that album 24 7 and that will have a direct impact on on your income as a as an independent artist and that to me seems especially fucked up that that is something that i don't i don't think i often see that element of it highlighted either but it really does it's truly putting artists in competition with each other there's also confusing things like if your audience is in say a country like spain i think at one point had a lot more people using the free version than the premium version but they had a lot less advertising so you were getting less money if you were big in like someone explained this to me about 10 years ago so it might be different now but like for instance every time your fan streams your music on spotify they're sending a signal to the algorithm which is then hopefully pushing you out to a newer audience in the same way if someone engages with your instagram post it's going to show it to strangers and i think that there's going back to that like ethical question like in a way you want fans to be able to have the most impact for you and if there's a lot of people out there in the world that would love your band and haven't heard you yet and they're using spotify then in a weird way getting them all to go on Spotify and stream the record or add it to their playlist and all the other things that you can do.

18:15With Drowning Sounds podcast, it's available on Spotify, but we don't link to it anywhere. So it's not in any of our link trees or anything like that. So if people want to listen to us, as they are right now, possibly on Spotify, talking about what's wrong with Spotify, they can do. But without getting the biggest podcast in the world to boycott Spotify, it seemed kind of churlish for us to kind of think well we're just going to remove our labor from your platform it's like the few hundred people that listen to us on there are just not going to listen to the podcast anymore and in the same way that you know as an artist i recognize that some people would see see some contradictions between disliking spotify and yet still having our music on that platform and making money from it but they've got artists in a in a chokehold because by their own admission they do have i think it's especially for us as the rights holder as well is that i think a lot of some acts i've seen leave spotify and that's undoubtedly a positive thing to do but they're bands on record labels who probably weren't seeing any income from from from streaming anyway um whereas to us that would be a significant um our monthly income from streaming at the moment is about in in worldwide except for North America because our first three albums are still distroed by arts and crafts in North America first four albums sorry so we only get accounted to twice annually from them so it's frustrating I often can't include the information because I don't get it in time but from the stuff that we own in the territories we own it we make about four thousand pounds a month from streaming income which is great but it's that's because it's coming direct to us because it's not coming through a label who's taken a percentage um which is a position that more acts would be in than not but when you do break it down per stream it's it's it's nothing between seven people that's what i was just about to say yeah but in reality it never gets split because there's the next thing to do like you know we're thinking now we want to record another album so So we need the initial outlay to do that in terms of everything associated with recording.

20:34So studio time, you know, Tom produces the album for us. So my bandmate Tom is now produces our record. So not that, but, you know, engineers, accommodation, travel, because we probably could record it in our spare rooms, but that's not the experience that you want when you record an album. So, you know, that money. and then you're manufacturing the vinyl and the cds etc which isn't cheap and this is all before you've had any income from it um you know and even when you're working through a third party store to sell your um do your pre-orders etc which if you're wanting to be chart eligible you need to be you can't do it from your from your spare room like i have a lot in the past but um you you know those third party stores usually don't account to you until like six weeks after the month it was sold in sort of thing so you're in a situation where you always need money up front and you never really feel in a situation where you know even if you've got a healthy amount of money in the bank which we which we always do you never feel like right let's split this seven ways it's always like well we'll just sit on it a bit longer and because we'll need it eventually Yeah, this is the, I would say, I would think any creative would basically say the same thing, that any earnings are just going back into trying to do the creative thing.

22:04Sure.

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22:53so that's streaming and I guess some fans might think okay I'm streaming but all right I bought a ticket to your gig but as you also laid out in a very specific and informative article and post your touring costs especially with a band of seven people can also be an incredible drain on on the funds i wonder if you could first of all just start with yeah why you were why you wanted to be so honest about touring numbers as well everything that we put out there is first and foremost aimed at people who are fans of our band because we you know we don't work with pr or marketing teams anymore um and we have a really great channel of communication with our fan base that you know feel very invested and i think genuinely are curious and and interested in in a way that i would say is probably above average for most bands and i think that's because over the past decade in particular we've really made an effort to be open and be approachable and so the the initial motivation other than the the spite that i referenced previously was to sort of explain to people why we're not on tour all the time why when we go to the us we play the same 10 12 cities every single time why we don't go to florida or or play central states in america why don't you respond to all the come to bogota comments that every band gets i for a long time i did for a long time i did and with that the answer is well actually we went to bogota in 2010 why weren't you there and then the answer is usually i was three which is is a reasonable excuse we we got the come to brazil for years and years and years and then we went to brazil and they subsided for about uh for about two two months i would say and then they were back but we'd love to go to brazil that's the thing like all the come to these places come to australia is a big one we'd love to but a there's no guarantee when we get there there's gonna be a crowd and as a result of that promoters aren't gonna book us to come there in the first place that's a big one i think also with festivals it's always like you should play x festival this year it's brilliant we'll be there let them know let them know we'll we'll do main stage nine o 'clock on whatever second top main stage on the friday we'll be there the thing that's nice with those comments when i see them is they never tag the festival because the festival organizers might actually see if you tag them yeah my my response is usually we would love to unfortunately bands don't get to choose what festivals they play they're invited if you would like us to play please send this message to whatever the festival is um and yeah so just trying to get people to if they want to to to understand what our reality is and i'm very aware um that our reality is different to most bands as i said every band is different but our situation being at the time of this 2024 kim and jace have two kids who were six and two we were away for what about 16 days it's not reasonable particularly not to not to judge how anyone would parent but i think most parents probably wouldn't want to leave a two-year-old um with family for over two weeks and i think most family probably wouldn't want to look after a two-year-old for two weeks um so that's a big element of it um and you know we are aware that we make ideological choices which will limit the amount of money that we can earn but we we are comfortable with that so you know you provide all this context and most people are satisfied with that a lot of people don't read closely enough to see the context um but i just find it interesting myself i keep these accounts um i really wanted to use the substack footnote feature which i hadn't used before um so i had a lot of fun with that so yeah i just i just went for it and uh yeah and i was i was happy with i mean i i learned things as i was right even though i'd experienced it i learned things as i was as i was writing it as well so i would hope that a lot of yeah people who like music who haven't experienced touring will have will have learned something as well there was one thing you just touched on there that i just wanted to come back to is how the live music industry doesn't seem set up for parents and in particular that seems to impact mothers like the anchoress is currently recording a series interviewing people in different parts of the industry about motherhood in the music industry because there's lots of musicians that that leave the industry for years.

27:52There's lots of people working in A &R jobs and things like that who can't go out every night until midnight when they've got a small child to bring up. But in touring in particular, there's not really, like some venues won't allow anyone under 18 in them. The dressing rooms are not really set up for anything more than like throwing your stuff down and maybe having a shower if you're lucky and dipping some carrots in some hummus. but they're not really set up there's not like baby changing rooms in a lot of venues below a kind of arena size so i was just curious from like how you made that work because i know that catherine said she'd seen i think possibly a post from the band just talking about how you managed to make it work i know artists like gueno have talked about taking their little ones out on tour and it just seems like a big thing that it's not like it's not like people give up music when they have kids but there's a lot obviously a lot of dads that go on the road and then don't see their kids for months on end um i'm just curious what your experience of that's been like not wanting to speak on behalf of kim because obviously she experiences it in a completely different way but i suppose in advance i am it's me that is ultimately choosing the venues along with our along with our booking agent and it's me that's advancing the shows and you know one of the first caveats that our booking agent is aware of is like we will have two children with us please let us know how that will impact how the day will operate so pretty much you end up in most venues will allow kids in during the day up until say like doors or 6 p.m or whatever and then it's like off to the bus or off to a nearby hotel room whatever it is on that day um but you're absolutely right about you will go into a dressing room and it will still have smashed glass from the night before and things like that we're super lucky in that I think all of my bandmates are value having the children around it's it's changed our experience of touring but it's it's been an absolute positive change I think it's it has changed how we all go about touring but it's also for them you know when the kids are misbehaving it's kim and jason's problem when they're in a good mood it's all of us getting to have fun with them you get to watch on the tour bus i'm guessing yeah yeah um which you know the best thing about it is i think from kim and jason's perspective is that both of their children have are incredibly grown up and good at interacting with adults because it's what they've known um and they less than watching bluey they just want to be doing what we're doing because they think they're in the band they think they're in the band and they they just want to eat as many different pizza places and go to as many like different uh parks as possible um so yeah it's a it's a completely positive experience for us um but as a result we i think because we are self-managed and we are in charge of everything it's a priority for us in a way that for a lot of artists it wouldn't be because management isn't going to care as much as you know even to the extent that kim and jason are my sister and brother-in-law it's like of course i'm gonna make it as comfortable for them as possible um so our experience is is only positive except for the fact you know it does add it adds expense to to the experience but so what this episode of the drowning sound podcast is presented in partnership with kobus the platform that pays artists four times more than the industry standard that has high quality audio that has human curation which as a human curator is something that I truly value over the kind of algo slop that you get on some platforms.

32:04You can really hear the difference. I know lots of places talk about the audio qualities and as soon as I moved across it sort of felt like I was rediscovering music which is one of the platform's slogans. If you're worried about your playlists you can use Soundiz. It's a really good tool that's part of the sign-up process when you join Cobuzz. It just transfers everything across. If you'd like a free trial of this platform that's independently owned and made for music enthusiasts, head to drownedinsound.org forward slash playlists, where you can hear not only our playlists, but get a free trial.

32:39You can also find these details in the show notes to this episode. And now back to this episode of the Drowned in Sound podcast brought to you in partnership with Koboz.

32:59you mentioned some ideological choices and i guess one of them is deliberately keeping your ticket prices as low as possible now obviously as fans we're grateful for this but i wondered do you ever get tempted to raise the prices just because it would certainly be easier for you it would possibly make you back some of some of that money and i guess why or why not do you get tempted i think when you when you look at the bottom line i always think like if we did up the tickets a bit then maybe we'll put an extra 20 grand on profit but what can we do with 20 grand like without being like that again is a lot of money but is it worth it to price out fans that wouldn't be able to come.

33:48Like a lot of people have a difficulty understanding that, you know, an extra$5 or whatever does make a difference to some people. And it, it doesn't, I think probably about six or seven years ago, you know, you sort of realize as a band that you're not going to be super famous or sell. I've realized that more than six or seven years ago, but, but you're not going to be super famous you're not going to make millions so just do things the right way do things how you want to do them and that's that's what's most important to us now that like you know when we're all old and retired i want to be able to look back and think that like yeah we did it the way that felt right to us and that that's what the the low ticket pricing means i think i'd imagine next time we tour the u.s they will be a bit the average price was like 27.50 on the on this tour um i think they still were on the 2025 tour but you know the price of everything is going up so we will have to have to increase them a little bit but we want to remain you know i kind of look at venues i'm like what is the cheapest ticket in this venue for an for an international act and if they can do it then we can do it and i and i look at what that is is across the tour um you check that they're not solo artists with backing tracks before you do that though well everybody is aren't they everybody is um but uh yeah the and then there's the low income tickets as well whereby um and actually we did we increased them for this this uk tour for a long time it was it was five pounds so five percent of five percent of the capacity of the venue for every gig that we play is available at a low income rate for unemployed and low income fans so have you come across the ticket bank yet?

35:38no I'm not familiar with that so it's part we interviewed them on an episode back in January and it's part of Tickets for Good who basically if there's unsold tickets for big shows Tickets for Good will offer them to NHS staff and different charity workers but the ticket bank is a ticket like a food bank for tickets so if you're on benefits you can apply for up to four tickets to a show so people can take their carer can take whoever they would want they could obviously just apply for two tickets if they want and it started the guy that I interviewed Jack he used to work for Barnardo's went to a big arena show and saw like 500 empty seats and was like there's so many kids around here that would love to have gone to this, might have been their first ever concert I would just say look them up because although what you're doing is brilliant and the anchoress saw what you were doing and did the same thing last time she literally told people to DM her and she put them on the guest list for shows.

36:34The ticket bank, I just think what they're trying to do, and I feel like the industry should be adopting it because it's especially for unsold tickets, but we've just done a percentage of the tickets for the 100 Club that are going to be on the platform so people can apply for the tickets on there. And how is that subsidized? Where does the money for that come from with the ticket bank? They can either do unsold tickets, so if it's like a week before and you've got 50 tickets left yeah you could put them on there if you don't think you're going to sell them yeah or we've done them out of the guest list allocation so then with the ticket bank if you put them on there would you would the artist receive the lower um price on are they free on the ticket bank sorry they're free yeah right so they just it's an agreement like the promoter agrees as well that they just go on and they're they're free great that that undoubtedly is is is positive my issues with that would just be that it's it's benefiting artists by it's only a gesture from the artist once they realize they're not going to make more money from it yeah that's my issue with it is it becomes basically seat fill it yes and that's that's excellent and that would be um that would absolutely be the way to do it because you know a lot of people you know if tickets become available a week before the show that's not enough notice for a lot of people or a lot of fans i think it's important for it to be available i noticed a very uh band bigger than more successful than us recently i think they were playing somewhere in london but a couple of weeks before the show they made some low income tickets available which made my stomach turn a bit because that was clearly because it wasn't selling out and because they wanted to get some more people in the room and there would have been low-income fans who'd already spent money on tickets and maybe yeah spent money on tickets that they could have done with still being in their pocket um so already we're seeing it being used as a uh a marketing tool which um i think yeah with that the the ticket thing you reference I think yeah it becomes if it's done at late notice it's essentially the same as seat filling that you would get in a in a theater or anything like that or I'm thinking of wrestling events that's where I know the tickets the tickets for good side of it is NHS staff and people getting into festivals and things which is which is I think there's a fee for some of those tickets I think it's I think they're like discounted but the food the ticket bank thing is essentially the same as if you wanted to go donate food to a food bank you can put your tickets in there you can do it from the off which is what anyway i just thought i'd mention it because i'm i i feel like it's i feel like it's um one of those initiatives that not enough people in the industry are aware of i've totally recorded the episode and instantly dm'd it to a bunch of people going you should be doing this because i think it's really important um so to get into some of the numbers as we've been chatting for a while and i feel like this wasn't meant to be a hook and tease to build up talking about the economics of your touring um but your total income was around 150 000 dollars was that about right but is that plus the merch i didn't actually think if i wrote that down see in this piece i kept switching between dollars and yeah which strangely is one thing i did deserve criticism for but i didn't receive any so um yeah what do we say income i did it yeah so 127 by about 100 000 let's do it in pounds from here on 100 grand on ticket on like it show income and then the eventual merch income was like 40 grand.

40:17So of that, there was 45 ,000 or 46 ,000 for the tour bus, which was the biggest cost, which for 15, 16 days feels expensive. But actually knowing what those buses are like, that probably included the driver, I'm guessing as well. Correct, and the fuel, yeah. And the fuel is not cheap. And obviously with what's happening in the world right now, You could probably add another 10 grand to that if you were doing that tour this week. What were some of the other kind of big costs? Like I was stunned to see that your visas came to over five grand. Yes. And I was looking up and there was a campaign a few years ago because visas had jumped and I'm going to get this right.

41:01They'd gone from about$460 to$1 ,600. I don't know if those are the same ones you guys had, but like even the fact that you had to like courier your passports and all of those like it's crazy that just to go and like and i know that this isn't any different really because of brexit it's because of america but it's just like i don't think a lot of people even consider the thousands and thousands and thousands for artists to go tour america is like required to even before you get started yeah and so these were before the big price hikes as well so who knows what it's going to be next time if we we will go to america again i'm sure however it doesn't obviously it doesn't feel very tempting at the moment but um yeah the visas the embassy appointments and and the visa postage you know 220 quid on postage because your options are either to collect in person from the embassy or to get it posted out so if you all live in london fair enough you could probably get up again at 5 a.m the embassy appointments are always like 7 a.m as well yeah when you call the passport office isn't it in cardiff that's your passport but your visas come from the embassy yeah yeah so like like when if you thankfully by now they don't make us go to the embassy because we're on like visas seven or eight or whatever so but your embassy appointments are all if we did have to go for appointments that would have been traveling accommodation as well because the appointments are always like 7am and none of us live in london the amount of bands you see posting they're exhausted at the embassy posted they used to do that on like stories and stuff like years ago but yeah that it's a yeah it's the good thing was always you'd be in the queue trying to see what other bands were there that was always that was the fun part but yeah and then like your your transport your flights to america are expensive of course they are but then i think often people don't consider the expense and even get into the airport in the first place because again none of us live in london so with the cost of trains etc um but also getting your gear to there you can't take it would be i would say impossible at the very least incredibly antisocial to try to take all of our instruments on the train for example and on the tube so you know you're hiring somebody with a van to get your gear there travel and gear insurance as well um because you might have travel insurance as an individual but this is a business thing all of a sudden so you need the business travel insurance um and that's before yeah so i think by the time we even got into the states we're talking 15 grand on just legally getting us there um i think we did this tour without a carne as well so if we'd done a carne that would have been another four or five hundred quid on top could you quickly explain what a carne is for people that don't know um a carne is essentially a list of items that you are importing and then exporting out of the the country you're going to so if you'd manufactured your merch here you'd have to list them all before taking them into america and then yes but even your instruments so that's what the we would always manufacture merch um in the country that we're traveling to but um we have backline that being amps and drum kit and stuff that we store in the us but your guitars and your pedals are you know what you play every gig with i'm sure most bands are the same as that um so So yeah, you need, or you don't need, depending on which customs officer you come up against.

44:47It's 50-50 whether you get a customs officer that's like, right, we're going to go through every line of this, or somebody who's like, why did you get a carne? You don't need a carne, and just pushes you through, but you can't take that chance. But I guess it's that thing if you're carrying a three grand synth into a country, you could flog that for three grand whilst you're there and leave the country without it. Exactly that, yeah, and that's why you get it checked on departing the UK, on arriving in the US, on departing the US and arriving in the UK. And when you do that, it's the arrival ones that's the pain in the ass because you've just landed, you think, right, we can get home or we can get in the pub.

45:22And it's like, no, you've got to wait for three hours whilst we dust down all your, check all your guitars for cocaine.

45:35Right. This is a little outro because we are going to split this episode in half because we natted for a long time. And as you might have noticed, the aforementioned conversation about tickets and touring and the price of how you do that is not something we've got to yet. So before we switch over to a part two, which you can tune into next week, so make sure you're subscribed if you just clicked play on this and you're not listening. Just search for Drowning Sound wherever you get your podcasts. and if you know other Lost Camper fans, make sure you send it to them so they can be locked in in time for part two next week, where we will go into quite a lot of the details, but nowhere near as detailed and nerdy as we could have done with the 30 or so other questions had we both, or all three of us really, not been such yappers.

46:31This is the Drowning Sound podcast brought to you in partnership with Cobuzz and as Helena mentioned in the intro, you can hear a very special playlist that she's put together with all of her favourite Lost Camp tunes. Just head over to dranninsound.org forward slash playlists and you can hear that on Cobuzz and use our 30-day free trial to get hold of the music in a slightly better audio quality than most platforms, but also more importantly and possibly more relevantly to this episode, pays a bit more than the other streaming platforms. I've been Sean Adams my co-host today has been Helena Wadia and you have been you we'll see you next time bye