He’s charted a course for artists to create two money-making opportunities out of one album: Hosting a handful of exclusive, ticketed listening parties before its release, and touring on it once it comes out. There’s a lot that’s been said, and said well, about the artistic value of Kanye’s listening parties: Letting fans hear his unfinished record offers them an unprecedented, firsthand look into his creative process, and his performances themselves are otherworldly experiences.īut the fiscal value of these listening parties is important, too-not just for Kanye, but for any artist with a loyal, passionate fanbase. But Kanye wouldn’t make the bulk of his money from ticket sales, Schemankewitz said. Ultimately, Schemankewitz estimated that Kanye would spend about half of his net revenue on expenses, and keep the other half for himself-walking away with a total profit, hypothetically, of about $343,000.įor someone worth an estimated $1.8 billion, that might seem like peanuts. He’d pay about 15 percent of his earnings to his manager, another 15 percent to his agent, and about 20 percent to his crew: his production manager, choreographer, stage crew, sound engineers, dancers, and other staff. Instead, he would first have to cover his own costs. But Kanye wouldn’t walk away with the entirety of that sum, either, Schemankewitz said. In the case of his July 22 show, Kanye would keep 70 percent of the $980,000 net, which is $686,000. Typically, that money gets split 70/30, with the larger chunk going to the artist, he said. After Mercedes-Benz subtracted that from gross ticket sales, net revenue from Kanye’s listening party would stand at $980,000.Īt this stage, Kanye and Mercedes-Benz would arrive at what Schemankewitz called the “split point,” which is what it sounds like: the point at which artist and venue split up the money they made. All told, those deductions would likely amount to about 30 percent of Kanye’s gross ticket sales, according to Schemankewitz-or roughly $420,000. That would include covering the cost of security, ushers and other venue staff, lighting operators, sound technicians, stagehands, and taxes, among other things, Schemankewitz said. First, Mercedes-Benz Stadium would subtract all of the expenses involved in putting on Kanye’s show. Of course, not all of that money would go to Kanye.

Knowing that, it becomes fairly simple to estimate Kanye’s gross ticket sales: 40,000 tickets at $35 a pop would add up to $1.4 million gross.

So for simplicity’s sake, let’s put VIP tickets aside and just focus on the general admission tickets Kanye sold, which were offered at two price points: $20 and $50. It’s difficult to speculate on how much Kanye may have made from VIP tickets-which, to put it as simply as possible, gave celebrities and other rich people access to fancy boxes for an undisclosed sum-but we do know how general admission tickets were priced. Kanye sold about 40,000 general admission tickets to his July 22 listening party, and an unknown number of VIP tickets. Ticket sales are the most complicated part of live-event revenue to explain, so let’s start there. How much money could Kanye make from ticket sales? Together, we did some back-of-the-envelope math-based on industry-standard profit splits on ticket sales, merch, and concessions-to estimate how much money Kanye might have earned from his listening parties.

To help us fine-tune that guess, VICE called up Erwin Schemankewitz, the owner of the Colorado-based touring company EverUpward Entertainment, who’s worked as an artist manager and booking agent for more than a decade. (Neither of their representatives responded to requests for comment.) But there’s enough publicly available information about Kanye’s ticket and merch sales to venture an educated guess as to how much cash, hypothetically speaking, he might have raked in. Kanye himself hasn’t said how much he’s earned from these events, and Mercedes-Benz Stadium hasn’t disclosed how much revenue the shows generated. They're a business enterprise in and of themselves-and given the size of these things, it seems like Kanye is probably making a killing off of them. Ticketed listening parties aren’t just a way for Kanye to control the narrative around his delayed album, and they’re not just a novel form of promotion. Kanye also hawked merch at his Atlanta events, including $120 long-sleeve T-shirts and $300 bulletproof vests, and he’ll presumably do so again in Chicago. Kanye has drawn more than 40,000 attendees to each of his listening parties so far, and his upcoming event at Soldier Field, which is operating at a reduced capacity of 38,000, is nearly sold out.

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