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Comment by jmts | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see that bill!

Most hotel laundry services I've encountered seem to be priced for one or two critical items. Cleaning a week's worth of items would be prohibitively expensive for most people, and I would be surprised if big productions would be interested in burning several hundred, if not thousands of dollars a week per person just for laundry.

On the flip side, it would be rather amusing to see the entire support cast for Madonna or U2 huddled about grumpily in a coin laundry waiting for other people to finish.

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That's what I underestimated. I didn't realize a tour could have 150 full-time employees.

Those are big big big tours. U2 is #1 by revenue in the 2010s - although that is over a two year period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_conce... Ed Sheeran pulled in $432M in concert revenue last year alone. That is supposedly the highest for single year.

I’d love to see the numbers for a “regular” band, or even broken out examples by category of “stardom” - say, The Strokes level, Bon Iver level, newer up-and-coming artists like Phoebe Bridgers, and then finally your local touring bands and last but not least the guy busking at Whole Foods.

As I understand it there is decent money to be made at most of those levels above local bar bands. But it ain’t easy. There’s a lot of people who go for it that frankly don’t have “it”, though. And some of them make it for a while. Hardly anyone makes it a lifetime career, like Willie Nelson or Elton John.

Is that tour money added to the amount often attributed to the size of the music industry? I'm seeing a number of "only" $15 billion on wikipedia.

A quick search shows Spotify alone paid $9.8 billion in royalties to artists in 2017.

I see that $15B number looks like it's coming from some IFPI reports. I don't know what that org includes but it doesn't sound even close to accurate.

I've been part of the production crew for small-time musicians doing once-off concerts (approx. 2000 attendees). Between artists (warm up act, main act, guest singers, dancers) and crew, there were probably about 30+ people with backstage access that didn't work for the venue. I can imagine if it was a tour, where all of these people need to travel, then the cost would quickly add up.

So I can absolutely imagine that medium to big acts would be quite expensive.

From what I've seen, if you book in a group for a longer time in advance, you can negotiate for X amount of free laundry per day. Just as almost nobody pays the listed hotel room price, many people might not pay the listed laundry prices.

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