MUSIC

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Most working musicians won’t get to back an international pop star. But smaller artists routinely boost their touring prospects by traveling as an opener for a better-known act. Singer-songwriter (and Reader contributor) Tasha Viets-VanLear spent almost a month of spring 2022 supporting Nilüfer Yanya on the road. Ganser opened for Bartees Strange for a week of dates in September 2021, then scheduled a few shows with Algiers the following month. Indie rocker Mia Joy toured with Sharon Van Etten in spring 2022.

This sort of arrangement exposes emerging musicians to larger audiences. “I was playing such big rooms on that Nilüfer tour that I sold a shit ton of merch,” Viets-VanLear says. “I ended up making a lot of money, which I wasn’t expecting—I could pay rent for maybe the next two months and not have to worry about my income.”

Merchandise sales—T-shirts, vinyl, cassettes, CDs, tote bags, buttons, patches, et cetera—can make the difference between a failed tour and a profitable one. “It changes peoples’ lives to sell ten records in a night,” Engel says. Predictably, though, venues and festivals have been unable to resist muscling in on that money—they have a history of taking a cut, usually ranging from 15 to 35 percent, according to the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers. In November, the UMAW, the Featured Artists Coalition, and rapper Cadence Weapon launched the #MyMerch campaign to convince North American venues to stop skimming from artists, many of whom are already struggling.

Vinyl records have outsize influence over tour scheduling. According to Billboard, vinyl album sales reached a post-CD-era high of 43.46 million in 2022, totaling 54.4 percent of all physical album sales. Vinyl’s resurgent popularity has made it more valuable to bands but has simultaneously worsened pressing delays—an October 2021 New York Times feature claims that pressing a record now routinely takes up to a year. Indie acts often plot tours to promote a new record, so delayed vinyl can put plans on hold.

According to Facs front man Brian Case, the band’s April release Still Life in Decay will arrive a year to the day after they finished it. That long road added a layer of difficulty to their promotional planning. “It’s just more complicated,” Case says. “It takes more scenarios: ‘Let’s target this, and if this works, we’re good, and if that doesn’t, we can try this and this.’ It makes submitting for tours harder, because those things happen even further out. So you’re like, ‘Well, we’re record out,’ which makes you more attractive to support some larger bands, because you’ve got press coming in as well.”

Facs are already working on another record too. “That kind of puts your head in a di erent place,” Case says. “And it makes revisiting the [album] that’s about to come out a little di erent.”

Merchandise sales are also vulnerable to the same variables that make touring risky—low turnout and canceled shows obviously mean fewer sales. Several artists I interviewed said they’d love to find gigs with guarantees big enough to float a tour on their own, merch or no merch. Cundi says Ganser has been eyeing shows at colleges, since they tend to pay more than clubs.

Indie-soul combo Hollyy stayed in the black on a tour of around two weeks in fall 2022 because they got hired to play a destination wedding in Asheville, North Carolina, that served as an anchor gig. “Starting out with a guaranteed amount of money was such a cushion for us,” says front man Tanner Bednar. “We only had a couple cities where we had guaranteed built-in numbers at the venues, and then everything else was dependent on draw.”

Hollyy have seven members, but nobody in the band owns a vehicle that can hold more than six. They have to rent a van to tour, and that routine expense (like so many others) has increased during the pandemic. According to Wired, Avis-Budget’s revenue dropped 41 percent year-on-year in 2020 as car rental companies took a major hit; Hertz even declared bankruptcy. Most operations sold o idle vehicles to o set losses, and their inventories remain thin—which has driven up the cost of rentals.

This cost forced Izzy Olive to get creative. Half Gringa guitarist Sam Cantor (aka Minor Moon) owns a minivan, and though the band initially assumed it wouldn’t be big enough for a touring vehicle, they practiced packing it with their gear. “‘Can we fit five people and drums and all our stu in here?’ The answer is yes, technically, we can,” Olive says. “We did it. But the thing with that—it was a tight fit. We managed to make it work.”

Lining up a vehicle is only the first hurdle, of course. Meat Wave learned that the hard fruitful, we would splurge on a nice hotel, and everyone got a bed,” she says.

Indie bands have traditionally saved money on the road by sleeping on the couches or floors of friends or other sympathetic people, but COVID-19 has complicated that. In the middle of a 13-date headlining tour in late 2021, Tasha Viets-VanLear and her band found