James Maslow

Well, it isn't, it isn't.

Like somebody just, I just did this interesting, it was a country artist, or he was, sorry, he was a country business manager maybe, and he was talking about like your average pretty successful country artist.

He said, say they make a million dollars a year.

Sounds like a lot of money.

but it goes away so fast.

Your production to get everybody there, salaries, buses, gas, you have to cover everything up front.

It's a huge portion of what you make.

If you take home 30 to 40% of your guarantees, you're doing extremely well, and most artists don't do that.

So already you're down to $300,000 or $400,000 there.

And then you have commissions, manager, 10 to 15%, business manager, 5%, agent who booked it, 10%.

You're giving away about 30% pretty damn fast before you've paid taxes.

then you're paying taxes.

So you can see how that million dollars got down to like one or two on the ground, maybe if you're smart.

Wow.

But of course, the nice thing about then scaling your guarantees and scaling the size of places is your overhead from there to then two, three, four, five, $10 million doesn't necessarily need to change relative to the increase in money you're making.

Point is, once you've paid for it, you've paid for it.

So the longer you tour and the more you can make in merchant guarantees, then you can start making real money.

And you just have to have smart people around you.

You know, especially like in my world, we split it four ways.

We really have to be smart about it because everybody's families need to be taken care of.