Factoids from the latest Billboard Boxscore:

• That weird Kenny Chesney-Keith Urban-Sammy Hagar tour grossed $3.2 million from a single show at LP Field in Nashville. It’s not a small place—50,000 capacity—but the total gross shows that ticket prices for country shows (traditionally reasonable) are heading into the stratosphere. Seventy bucks a ticket for a stadium show for a hat act!
• Tom Petty made $5.5 million from five shows in a twelve-day period, and that doesn’t include two sold-out NYC-area dates, which would have increased the total to $8 million or so. The tour comprises some forty shows in all; you do the math.
• Neil Diamond is raking in $1.2 million a show.
• The decline of the dollar is great for stars touring overseas; Dolly Parton made $1.5 million from two shows in Ireland. And Diamond made almost a million from a single show in a smallish 9000-seat hall in Munich.
• A million dollars a night is just about the norm now for all sorts of acts: R.E.M., Jack Johnson, Barry Manilow, Dave Matthews, Pearl Jam and Iron Maiden (!) among them.

This is part of the reason Live Nation, which was Clear Channel’s concert production arm before splitting off, is making those so-called “360 deals” with artists. This is where the money is!

The economics of a big stadium concert are complicated, but remember that the gross is just the beginning, and the vast part of it goes to the artist*.

Ticketmaster fees (and remember that Live Nation is making moves to supplant that company’s hegemony) can total $5 to $10 a ticket.

Parking is another nice money stream, though some of it goes to the venue.

The promoter or venue typically gets a piece of the merchandise, as well; that’s part of why t-shirts cost $40 in an arena. The money stream here varies wildly depending on a show, but might be $10 to $20 per concertgoer.

Which all means that ancillary spending at a typical concert begins, conservatively, at about 25 percent of the gross and goes up from there—totalling hundreds of thousands of dollars, or perhaps even a million, at certain shows.

So remember that the problems in the music business are affecting the labels, not touring acts and concert promoters.

Here’s the top ten tours from the first half of the year, from Billboard:

1. Bon Jovi, $112.4 million.
   Spice Girls, $70 million
   Police, c. $60 million. (Billboard didn’t give the six-month figure, but said that the band will conclude the 2007-2008 tour in August with grosses of about $360 million, the third-highest-grossing tour of all time.)
   Hannah Montana,  $45.3 million
   Trans-Siberian Orchestra, $44.8 million
   Bruce Springsteen, $42 million
   Van Halen, $40.2 million
   Michael Buble, $36.6 million
   Take That, $32.5 million
   Jay-Z/Mary J. Blige, $30.3 million

Again, with the exception of the Police, there are figures from just a six-month period from November to May.

* I’m always surprised by people who say, “Well, the artist doesn’t get all of that!” The artist gets 90 or 95 percent of it. They can do the math: 17,000 seats times an average ticket price of 80 dollars is $1.36 million. Why should they show up for less?