Numbers
Merch: the margin that saves the tour
A €25 t-shirt nets more than plenty of box office nights. And the venue takes a cut almost nobody checks before signing.
On most tour accounts, merch turns up at the bottom in small type. That is the wrong order: on a mid-size club tour, merch decides whether you close in the black more often than the box office does.
The margins, plainly
A t-shirt selling at €25 costs €7 to €10 to produce, depending on run size, number of inks and garment quality. That leaves €15 to €18 a unit before commissions: a gross margin of 55 to 70 %.
Compare that to the box office, where the artist ends up with 25 to 40 % of the gross fee after agency, production and withholding. It is not close.
| Product | Price | Cost | Gross margin |
|---|---|---|---|
| T-shirt | €20 – 25 | €7 – 10 | 60 – 65 % |
| Hoodie | €40 – 50 | €18 – 24 | 52 – 58 % |
| Vinyl | €25 – 30 | €9 – 13 | 55 – 62 % |
| Tote bag | €12 – 15 | €3 – 4.50 | 68 – 72 % |
| Signed poster | €10 – 15 | €1 – 2 | 85 – 90 % |
What almost nobody checks before signing: the venue's cut
Here is the line that eats the margin, and it sits in the contract as a single sentence.
The venue takes 10 to 25 % of gross merch sales. And there are two variants that are not remotely the same:
- Only when their staff sell. Reasonable: they provide a person and charge for it.
- Charged regardless of who sells. You are paying for the right to set up the table. It is standard at venues in demand, and on €1,200 of sales that is €300 out of the margin.
Across €15,000 of sales on a tour, 20 % is €3,000 nobody wrote down. It is negotiable — and above all it is askable, because many venues' standard contracts include it by default.
The number that matters: per head
The industry calls it per head: merch sales divided by people through the door. It is the only figure that lets you compare different nights and decide how much stock to carry.
| Audience | Typical per head |
|---|---|
| Rock and metal | €5 – 9 |
| Indie and pop | €3 – 5 |
| Singer-songwriter and folk | €3 – 6 |
| Urban | €1.50 – 3 |
| Electronic | €0.50 – 1.50 |
The difference is not spending power: it is how much the audience identifies with the artist. A t-shirt is a statement, and there are genres where that gets worn and genres where it does not.
At €4 per head across twelve 700-capacity rooms, that is €33,600 gross. More than several of those twelve fees.
The three expensive mistakes
Badly split stock. Mediums sell out on the third date and forty extra-larges come home. Fixed by looking at last tour's sales, not intuition.
Not taking cards. It costs a few cents per transaction and lifts sales 20 to 30 %: nobody carries cash, least of all at eleven at night.
Closing the table during the show. The busiest moment is right at the end, with people leaving. A table packed away at half eleven misses half the night.
And the accounting detail
Merch is not box office, and so normally does not enter the percentage split with the promoter. It is worth having that stated in the contract in those words: if the definition of "show income" is left open, someone will eventually add the t-shirt table to the split.
Is your per head different, or do you work with other commissions? Write to hello@onroad.live — this article gets updated with real data from the industry.
What this article answers
- What margin does merchandising make on tour?
- Between 55 and 70 per cent gross margin on the sale price. A t-shirt selling at €25 costs €7 to €10 to produce, leaving €15 to €18 before commissions. That is far above the box office, where the artist keeps 25 to 40 per cent of the gross fee.
- How much does a venue take from merch sales?
- Between 10 and 25 per cent of gross sales in Spain, depending on the venue and the artist's leverage. Some venues charge only when their own staff sell; others charge regardless of who sells, and that difference is agreed in writing before the show.
- How much merch sells per head at a concert?
- Between €2 and €6 per attendee at a mid-size Spanish venue — what the industry calls per head. It varies hugely by genre and audience age: a rock or metal show clears €6 easily, while electronic shows often stay under €1.
- Is merch worth carrying on a small tour?
- Almost always, because the margin is high and the marginal cost of carrying it is low: there is already a van and there are already people. The constraint is not margin but working capital, since stock is paid for before the first date and recovered across the whole run.
Where these numbers come from
The figures here are ranges used in the Spanish market, not official statistics. They are checked against people working in the industry and corrected when someone tells us they are off.