AOA sold ove 200,000 thousand copies since its release and thats not profitable? They only did a small club tour and did have much advertisement around it. what could have cost the money there?
A lot of their live shows were only half full, have you ever seen footage of the Arizona show?
That shouldn't matter though, as far as I understand it. A band gets their quote despite the attendance. Still, they could've lost money.
Just for fun, I'll go through some numbers...who knows how accurate it really is though (though from what I have read in the past, a band of AoA's stature could command roughly $5,000--that's what a band like Eve 6 was charging, say, early 2000s--per show as a flat rate before merch and ticket sales).
Attendance could affect their cut of ticket sales, though some bands and artists have it in their contracts to get their ticket cut as if the show sold out no matter how many tickets were sold.
I counted 37 tour dates on their website forum. Let's say the band did get $5000 per show. That's $185,000. Let's say they got 10% of all tickets sold at an average of 400 people per show. Guessing tickets were $25, they'd get $2.50 per head, so that would mean $1000 per show. Let's say they made $500 in merchandise each show. That's a grand total of approx $240,500 for the tour.
AoA as a band probably got a buck per record sold, so that would give them $200,000 based on the figure above.
That would mean that AoA made $440,500 just for the tour and album sales. Take 10% for a manager off the top. That's $43,600, bringing the total down to $396,900. Tax would've been around 36% for federal, 9% for CA state tax, again off the top, and that would be $198,225.
That brings their take home pay as a band to $198,675 for the tour. Divide that by 4, that's almost $49,700 per band member.
Who knows how accurate the numbers are, and don't forget songwriting royalties. However, they also had to pay for gas, buses and/or hotels...some food, etc., etc.
