Former Taylor Swift Manager Rick Barker On My Latest Inner Circle Podcast

This week's guest on my Inner Circle Podcast is Rick Barker, who helped launch the career of Taylor Swift as her first manager. In the interview, Rick provides an overview of how Taylor became such a huge star, and gives us some insights into how the music business has changed since she hit the scene.

Rick is now is the social media mentor on American Idol, and offers a great Social Media For Music video full of tips and tricks on how to use Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to help you promote your music. Rick is cutting edge in this regard, and taught me a few things I didn't know myself.

In the intro I'll take a look at how the record labels are now changing their marketing strategy away from the short product release window to a "continuous loop," and how the fifth Beatle Sir George Martin changed the finances of the music business.

Remember that you can find the podcast at BobbyOInnerCircle.com, or either on iTunes, Stitcher and now on Mixcloud and Google Play.

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The 20 Top Grossing Tours Of 2015

One of the cool things about the music business in 2016 is that it looks like analytics have finally caught up to the business to the point where it doesn't take months to get the big picture. It used to be February or March before we would see yearly sales figures, but now we're seeing them within the first couple of weeks in January.

A good example of this is Pollstar's annual top grossing tours. Here are the 20 tours that made the most money in 2015.

1. $250.4 - Taylor Swift

2. $210.2 - One Direction

3. $180.0 - AC/DC

4. $152.2 - U2

5. $127.0 - Foo Fighters

6. $125.1 - Fleetwood Mac

7. $117.3 - Ed Sheeran

8. $116.4 - Kenny Chesney

9. $114.9 - Garth Brooks

10. $109.7 - The Rolling Stones

11. $88.4 - Madonna

12. $82.2 - Kevin Hart

13. $77.7 - Paul McCartney

14. $77.6 - Elton John

15. $76.8 - Violetta

16. $72.0 - Maroon 5

17. $71.8 Luke Bryan

18. $69.9 - Billy Joel

19. $69.0 - Shania Twain

20. $68.0 - Neil Diamond

A couple of quick notes.

• A bad sign for the business is that over half of the top money-making tours were from legacy artists.
• Comedian Kevin Hart probably personally made more than everyone but Ed Sheeran, as his overhead costs were particularly low.

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As Always, Female Buyers Still Fuel Pop Music Sales

What do Adele, Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran and Sam Smith have in common? Most of the buyers of their albums are female, according to an article by Hannah Karp in the Wall Street Journal based on data from a number of market research firms.

While this info is probably no surprise to music execs who’ve inherently known this for decades, the new-found ability to have a greater understanding of an artist’s fans syncs more with the conventional industry wisdom than previously thought.

Take Adele, for instance. First of all, she’s an artist that goes completely against the grain of what the music business currently considers a pop star. She’s a full-figured women who has a relatively small social media footprint and no bombastic big-production stage show, yet she’s been crushing sales records by doing it the old fashioned way - with great songs and performances.

If you look closely at the demographic profile of her fans though, the sales records begin to make perfect sense.

According to the article, a Nielsen study funded by Sony Music found that 62% of Adele’s fans are female, between the ages of 25 and 44 years old, and have children. In other words, they’re soccer moms. What’s more, a majority of them work in the health care industry, drink light beer and Aquafina water, and are 80% more likely than average to read Parents magazine, for whatever that’s worth. To take it a step further, 28% of her fans are in the 50+ age bracket, according to music consumer research company Music Watch. Read more on Forbes.

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This Is The Revenue From A Single Taylor Swift Concert

If you ever wondered where the money goes when an A-list artist gives a concert, the Tampa Bay Times laid it out pretty well.

Most of the time the income and expenses for a concert are hidden, but in this case the venue (Raymond James Stadium) is publicly owned and operated so most of the data is readily available.

This is financially what happened during a Halloween concert given at the venue by Taylor Swift:

• The show was a sellout at 56,987. Swift received 100% of the ticket sales, which initially amounted to almost $4 million, including a $2.75 million guarantee.

• But there's some intrigue here, as at the last minute Swift's production company became the concert promoter, which means she may see even more money in the end since the final income from tickets was actually more like $5.8 million.

• $843,947 of that was split between the Tampa Bay Sports Authority and Tampa Bay Buccaneers football team.

• Merchandise sales brought in $40,784 (which sounds low to me).

• Food and drink sales amounted to another $244,626.

• Parking is always a big money maker at concerts and this one was no exception at $127,798.

So the concert brought in about $6.2 million and Taylor Swift kept over $4 million of it, which just goes to show how much money is generated by an A-list artist on the road.

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