The Greatfruits 2014 Tour Profits
(or Lack Thereof)
The Greatfruits just finished a 28-day tour. It was awesome. We played nearly a dozen venues and sold over $100,000 in tickets. My musical and sexual partner Jarryn is resting on a pile of anoraks in our foyer while I type this. She leaves the accounting work to me, and while we both think our whirlwind 6-city tour was a great success, the numbers tell a different story.
What most normals don’t understand is that even though Jarryn and I are extremely famous and our YouTubes of unlicensed twee covers of 80s pop songs have racked up hundreds of millions of views and we’ve been in commercials for over four different colors of Kia Sorentos, we are not rich people. Despite thousands of fans paying to see us live and buying our merchandise, we actually ended our tour tens of thousands of dollars in the red. How is that possible? See the numbers for yourself:
Expenses
$20,019
Production expenses: musical instruments, cases for musical instruments, lights.
$11,392
Hotels. Gotta stay in hotels. No sleeping in open fields or mysterious barns for us.
$68,492
Crabs. Delicious, healthy, rich in iron and algae, fresh saltwater crabs are our food of choice both on the road and in the studio.
$5,492
Transportation: plane tickets, gas, quarters for parking meters. All that good stuff.
$27,192
Melted butter. You just can’t suckle on juicy crab legs without warm drawn butter to dip them in.
$44,192
Salaries. Jarryn and I each drew a modest $2,500 salary for the month. We also had to pay for one roadie, a 9-member backing band, two pieces of “human furniture” rented from St. Vincent, and a stage manager.
$11,512
Publicity. Although we are extremely famous on the internet, we still needed to spend thousands of dollars on Google and MySpace ads to make fans aware of the tour.
$36,919
Truck hauling saltwater tank apparatus. Keeping your saltwater crabs healthy during a long tour requires a custom-outfitted refrigerated tank. We chose to lease one of John Popper’s mobile crab tanks. This expense also includes the cost of high-grade bacteria, which we fed to the crabs to fatten them.
$7,039
Commissions for our booking agent, payroll manager, and band lawyer, in case we got sued or something.
$86,929
Nutcrackers. Can’t get to that delicious crab goo without cracking the carapace.
Now see how these compare to our income:
Income
$102,391
Ticket sales. Big thanks to all of our fans for coming out.
$11,010
Merchandise sales. 5% of our income came from merch.
$97,282
Sales of discarded crab husks to fertilizer plant. The recycling of this nitrogen-rich detritus accounted for nearly half our tour income.
$9,819
Corporate sponsorship from Red Lobster. You guys are the bomb!
Add it all up, and our tour incurred a financial loss of $54,192.
A lot of people reading this must wonder how we could rake in so much money but fail to turn a profit. The answer is that no matter how many corners we cut, the economics of being a web 2.0 indie pop duoette are so daunting that making money is completely impossible.
And believe me, we cut corners. By my estimate we saved $11,592 in water and cooking expenses by consuming the crabs alive. Jarryn thought it was more delicious this way, tearing off their legs and suckling on the warm crabflesh from their still-writhing limbs. I found it soothed my vocal chords, which helped on our grueling three-shows-a-week schedule. We also managed to save some money by robbing strangers.
I’m not writing this to ask for pity. Financially the Greatfruits are doing much better now than when we started out busking in front of Red Lobsters and subsisting on discarded lungmeat and collagen, parts of the crab that are less delectable but nevertheless are edible and nutritious. Even if it loses us money, we love doing tours, scuttling across the country and appearing live for our fans.
But if you do want to help us, please consider donating to our Patreon. We make a mere $60,000 a month to release one ukelele cover of a rap song, which is barely enough to cover our internet, mortgage, marina fees, and ocean cage rentals. The Greatfruits haven’t yet “made it.” Instead we’re “remaking it” by forging a new paradigm where young Creatives with high credit card limits and limitless appetites for the sea’s bounty can claw their way towards success. Won’t you join us on our journey?
