Breaking Down the Dead and Co at The Sphere | How Much Money Does It Earn?

These 4 guys for basically a month's worth of work splitting $25 million apiece. It's just absolutely insane. Who wants to be in the NBA? Like, I want to be in Dead and Company. Like, this is like the best thing ever. They're doing covers of Dead songs with original Dead members. The tickets are like $700 and these aren't even very good. These guys are killing it. $20 million for a month. I don't even know why I try. All right. My name is Michael Girdley. I'm a business nerd, and this is a video about something near and dear to my heart, which is perhaps the best business I've ever seen in my whole life. It is a traveling music act. So here's how I stumbled upon this, and I went and dug into it, and I want to show you how it works. So, okay, a little bit of background. My favorite band of all time is Grateful Dead. I listen to more of their music than any other band in history, except for maybe Taylor Swift now, but don't worry about that part. Anyway, the Grateful Dead stopped touring when Jerry Garcia died, and since then there's been different incarnations. And the most recent incarnation is a band called Dead Company, which is several members of the original band plus an artist named John Mayer, who's one of one of the greatest guitarists ever, and they are a traveling arena rock band. I've seen them once or twice in person. I missed the original Grateful Dead tours, I wasn't into them then. And then I've seen a few Dead Company shows, and then last year they announced they weren't gonna tour anymore, and I missed my shot to go see that. Fast forward to 2024 where we are right now, and Dead Company announced that they are going to do a residency at a place called the Sphere in Las Vegas. And if you're not familiar with the Sphere, it is a crazy venue. It's basically a musical amphitheater theater that is a giant, like, sphere with all kinds of lighting and crazy stuff there. U2 and all these guys have been there. I was very curious because I went through an experience where I signed up for the presale for Dead Company, and then I went in, and on the day that it was announced, I looked in and all the tickets were like $900, and they were like, none of them were any good. And I said to myself, there's something going on here. These people are making a lot, a lot of money. And at the Sphere, the Dead Company announced that they were going to do about a dozen shows or so, and then they extended that. And I started to do some math when I looked at these ticket prices for how much the tickets are costing inside the Sphere. And it led me to believe there's some stuff going on and some of the numbers are kind of out of control. Let's see. So you pull up here, Dead Company live at the Sphere on Ticketmaster. What you need to know, you're going to get robbed. That's what you need to know. These are very expensive. Like the tickets are like $700 for these tickets. And these aren't even very good. Like if you go look at these, there's 44 tickets available for May 17th for $700. Oh. And these are, unfortunately, I think these are the ones that are the obscured views and they're listed as official Platinum. So like you can kind of do the rough looking at it here where you're like, man, like 17,000 tickets at $700 apiece. Like that's a lot of frickin money. So, so I went and did some research on— I wanted to ask myself, how much money is this band making in this residency, right? In terms of how many shows they're going to be doing there. And so I went and talked to one of my buddies who is actually in the concert promoter space. and I asked him like, how much of the money that's coming in for a big headlining act like this? Like, think of Dead Company, Metallica, Taylor Swift, J.Lo, like these big name artists who can sell out amphitheaters like crazy. And what he told me kind of shocked me. He said the concert promoters, so like Live Nation and all these folks and the venues and all this stuff, they will go to the artist and they will basically say, we will give you 100% of the face value of the ticket. You'll get all the ticket revenue and we'll make our money on the back end in terms of other stuff like merch sales or venue sales or Beverages or all that kind of stuff. So somebody like Dead Company is potentially taking home all of the ticket revenue, he said. Now look, this only applies to like the toppest of top-tier acts that can draw huge crowds. The rest of the group— I'm receiving a phone call. Hello? All right, phone call over. All right, so, so Dr. MyBody, these top-tier acts, they can demand all the revenue from this thing. And then there's this thing called Platinum Tickets. So Platinum Tickets are basically something every person who is involved in commerce or America America or freedom should totally hate. And here's how it works. Basically, in researching this, Ticketmaster goes through and they pick tickets that they're gonna own. They're gonna buy them before the public does, and then they're gonna scalp them to the public directly and make them look like they're direct tickets. So if you see a Platinum ticket when you go to Dead Company or any Ticketmaster website and you see where it says Platinum, that means Ticketmaster has bought that ticket and they own it. And they are flipping it to you, uh, the sucker, and making all the profit between what the band was paid and what they paid. And so you think about how the band can get 100% of the ticket revenue. It's because Ticketmaster and all these other promoters are doing this game. So here you can do the math. Even if this was a $395 ticket, they have marked it up to $828. So that is all profit for Ticketmaster. All right, so let's just do some basic math of how much revenue they're going to make as Dead Company in these shows. So they will do 17,600 seats per concert at the Sphere, and they're doing 24 shows. And most nights they're doing Thursday, Friday, Saturday night. And so they fly in on their private jets, they do the shows, and they leave. And they're doing 3 of them for 8 weeks apiece in terms of the residency. So Deden Company is taking home 100% of the tickets. Let's say they're going to sell them all out. So on average, if you do kind of a rough estimate of how much they're taking home per ticket, that's around $270. So that's the suckiest seats all the way at the top. All the way down up front, you have the very expensive seats themselves, right? So Here's the very expensive seats down front. These are the platinum ones are selling for $900. And then of course you have these ones up here in the nosebleed section where people like me normally sit. But here you can see something very interesting about these. They have all been sold. There's probably 50 to 100 tickets here for this particular date on May 17th that have not been sold for this particular concert. Yeah, people are gonna smoke a lot of weed at this thing. Just tell you, bunch of rich old hippies able to afford $800 a seat. Okay, so on average they're doing $270 per ticket. So basically, if you do the math of 17,600 seats, you multiply them times $270, that means ticket prices— our ticket revenue alone per show is $4.75 million. Now what's important there is you got to realize they're doing 24 shows. So $4.75 million per show, that means for the total of the residency is $114 million. But wait, that's not all. They don't just make money from the tickets, they also make money from the merchandise and concessions. If you go and do research, and we did this, the of the estimated amount that a per each individual guest on average spends on merch is just shy of $8. So $7.70 on merch per person. So there's 17,600 people. We can multiply that by $17.70 per person. That number appears to be wrong. That number seems really low. Anyway, we'll go with it. That means they're doing another $3 million in merch, selling t-shirts and crap like that over this period of time. That number feels low, but we'll go with it. That's what the research said. So merchandise, they sell $3.3 million. All right. So next thing is, that's not all. Because they're headlining very famous band, they could pick wherever they want to go and they will sell out these shows at maximum price. That's what Metallica, that's what U2, that's what Dead Company, that's what J.Lo, that's what Taylor Swift— they can all do that thing. So they get to dictate their prices. They also get a cut of concessions, meaning if the average person is coming in and spending concessions, you basically have $32 in concessions. That's people buying beer, hot dogs, all that kind of stuff. They will get a cut of that, and that would be $13.5 million across the 24 shows. That's a whole lot of freaking hot dogs. Cool. So that means Dead Company, the band, the band itself, before we even talk about some of the other stuff like streaming revenue, any of the advertisements going on, like, this is just a rough number. That means each show, the band's revenue from each particular show— remember, this is like 6 people in this band— is $5.45 million. The average person is spending $309 per show. That means over the course of 24 shows, they are bringing in $131 million in revenue. Now let's think about what their expenses are. There's not much. So first of all, you have the band. This is the band. There's 6 of them, okay? You have John Mayer, who's clearly a tier 1 rock star, key to the band. Bob Weir, who's a guitarist and who's an original Grateful Dead member. Then you have Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart. Those are the guys that are the original ones. Those are the ones that you need those 4 to do the gig because they're the ones that matter. These two other guys, nice guys, Otell and Jeff, good guys. Somebody else shows up and plays their part. Nobody would know. So what you have to realize is these dead guys are pretty smart. They're good business people. They vacation in Hawaii and I do not. And the reason is because they make sure they get paid for what they're supposed to do. And you have to know, out of that $130 million, the majority of it is going to these four guys. They're the ones that are the famous ones that are the original Grateful Dead members, or in John Mayer's case, superlative talent, right? He's amazing. Let's say each of these 3 guys that don't matter too much, let's say they're making $1 million for the whole thing. So you do the math and let's just do some roughness here. They pay their crew, they pay for their private jets, they pay all that kind of stuff. Basically, like, it's tough to imagine that that amount of expertise of what they're paying for the people to come in and do their stuff, like, let's say that that's $25 million over the course of 24 shows. They're paying $1 million a night per show. That still leaves these guys, these 4 guys, for basically a month's worth of work work splitting $25 million a piece. It's just absolutely insane. Even if you take another $5 million off it, they're all making $20 million for basically working for a month. Like, who wants to be in the NBA? Like, I want to be in Dead Company. Like, this, this is like the best thing ever. They're doing covers of Dead songs with original Dead members. And to some extent, like, a lot of the fans, like, I can understand why they're not super happy. Like, it feels like a money grab. How is this accessible to your normal average individual person? But I've seen some good businesses before. But showing up and playing some songs, somewhat improvised, but now. It is what it is to a bunch of rich hippies. Like, it's crazy. I guess the only better business than this is being Taylor Swift. These guys are killing it. $20 million for a month. I don't even know why I try. All right, that's it. Best business I've ever seen. Dead Company. It'll be the best business I've ever seen until we just talk about the Taylor Swift Eras Tour.