You Won’t Believe How Much It Costs To Book Your Favourite Band

When you go and see a band play at a festival or an arena, you’re probably not actually ever thinking about how much the artist is getting paid for the gig, just that you’re paying a hell of a lot for the privilege of seeing them perform. To be fair, most of the time it probably is worth it, but when you get a load of these lists and the amount that your favourite band is earning for playing a two hour set then you’re probably going to feel absolutely sick.

Degy Entertainment – who are a massive booking agent over in the United States – book a lot of your favourite bands and probably some that you really hate too, but they’re all pretty big time and can command huge fees for their performances. For some reason Degy have released this figured onto the internet – even though they’re probably hugely confidential – so now you can see just how much it might cost to try and get someone like the Foo Fighters to play your birthday party. Or the Kings Of Leon to play your anniversary party because everyone knows that all girls love the Kings Of Leon.

Having said all this though, there are a couple of things that need clarifying before you take a look at these lists. Firstly, the prices quoted here represent the asking prices of artists, but it’s likely that these won’t be the actual prices they’re playing each show for as they will be subjected to intense negotiation before the gig is actually booked and will also probably take a whole bunch of expenses (like humongous riders and hotel rooms and staff fees etc) off the actual price too. Despite this, most of their fees are still fucking ridiculous.

Also for some reason there are also some acts on the list that aren’t actually musicians/bands and they have been included as Degy is also responsible for booking them. There are some pretty jokes characters on the list there too – for example you can book MythBusters for $100K, although I’m not entirely sure what you would actually be doing with MythBusters if you did decide to book them? Still, it’s obviously good to know that the option does exist.

It’s also worth noting that those are . It’s also worth nothing how completely depressing some of these statistics are – for instance every time Nickelback plays a show they get between $350-500K, or that Sublime with Rome can get $100K+ for a show even though they’re mostly just playing songs written by a dead guy, or that somehow Creed can still demand $100K+ for a show. It’s also kind of surprising that bands like Fun. and Foster The People can demand so much money when they’ve pretty much only ever had one hit each. Still, I guess when it’s a massive hit like they had then it doesn’t really matter, does it?

It seems clear I gotta get on the lame rock band bandwagon and bust out some terrible music and make some bucks because these figures sure do look real good right about now.

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