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I've just been doing the palehorse accounts for the tour and realising how much we're in the red. So this resonates.
http://therunout.com/post/88686417571/slacktivist-fan-entitlement-is-slowly-killing-punk

I've been mulling this over because the debt we're in is basically just for merch and doesn't include practices, gear and travel/fuel.

Our approximate costs per year are as follows:

Practices: £2,200
Storage: £1,440
Equipment: £1,000
Travel to London gigs: £1,650
Travel to out of London gigs: £3,300
Annual Total: £8,652*

Bear in mind it takes us about three years to write and record and album and that recording costs us about £2,000 that means a three year album cycle costs us approximately £27,956. That's just shy of £5,600 each.

We do usually break even on London shows (where we ask for a guarantee of the £110 the van from the studio costs) and often do on out of London shows as well so but we turn down an awful lot of shows on the basis that they won't pay us enough to break even (which is all we ask for).

On the next tour we will be selling all four albums and a shirt for a bundle price of £25 and I'm sweating making back the £1500 we've put in to getting shirts printed and buying CDs from the labels who put them out (two of which are one-man operations who have also lost a ton of money on us in the past)!

So in order to make back the £1500 we have to sell 60 bundles (and we only have about 50 of each of the records anyway). In order to make back the total spent over three years (and taking into account the extra money we'd have to spend to buy the mercy we'd be selling) we'd need to sell 1,119 bundles. At the price we buy the CDs from our labels and the shirts from Awesome Merch we'd have to spend and additional £16,038 just to do that so then you need to find the point where the bundle price matches the total spend. It's a lot more than the number of people who have ever bought one of our records!

That's al to say, buy some CDs, yeah? We don't really consider the costs when we do this because we do it for the love of it but it's nice when people chuck us a little bit back for the sake of appreciation.

*(assuming about 25-30 practices a year, 15 London gigs and 15 out of town gigs).