Rick Beato is right to rant about music copyright strikes

Pirate the music and if you want to support the artist to concerts/gigs and buy merch. These labels are inserted themselves between the fans and the artists w/o any benefit but for themselves.

Well clearly the artists are seeing benefit, otherwise they wouldn't sign up for a label.

Unless you’re a big artist most tours break even at best, but more often lose money. That loss is sometimes supported by the label investing some money because tours can be a good way to market music and find new audiences. A lot of venues also take big commissions on merch, squeezing the profitability on that part of the business.

Unfortunately for a lot of smaller artists the economics of touring are not great. 1000 tickets at $25 does not equal $25000 in the artist’s pocket.

The artist will maybe get 70% of those ticket sales (the promoter gets a significant cut) and the artist needs to pay her touring costs out of her share. If you’re an artist going on tour with a four piece band, and tour manager/instrument tech then your daily costs are going to be thousands of dollars.

Everyone needs to be paid from that split and all the travel, accommodation and food costs need to be paid, and sometimes the cost of local support acts is paid from the artist’s share.

The agent who secured the booking gets a percentage, and the manager who looks after the artist’s career gets a percentage. After commissions, $25000 in ticket sales might mean the artist only sees $10000 - before she has paid the costs of the tour. With at least six people to be paid (four musicians and the tour manager plus the artist) and accommodated, fed and moved around, that $10000 really doesn’t go very far.

If it’s a band the economics are no different really - all the band members need to make a living while they are on the road.

And of course if that’s 300 tickets at $20 rather than 1000 at $25 none of these costs scale down, the musicians aren’t going to take less, hotel rooms aren’t going to drop in price.

Pirating the music and going to see the ban play live might actually mean the label says “live brings us no uptick on our recordings, so we are not going to invest in tour support for this artist”.