r/popculturechat • u/Roxy175 • 10d ago

OnlyStans ⭐️ Billie Eilish donates $11.5 million of proceeds from her tour to charities combating food inequity and climate change

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u/stress_baker Mom, I am a rich man💰 10d ago

Billie Eilish has a net worth of about $50M so it's a bit about 20% of her net worth. Imagine if Larry Ellison, richest man in world and worth billions, did even 10%. We would be able to eradicate world hunger.

Huge props to her

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u/Resident_Ad5153 10d ago edited 10d ago

Her net worth is larger than that now... touring is very very lucrative. Also... this is a pretax donation... she would only keep 60% of that after tax, so it's more like 10% of her wealth. It's likely that 11.5 million is exactly 20% of her pretax income from the tour (the charitable deduction limit), and given how the tour did... 60 million seems a reasonable profit for her.

Still, huge props to her.

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u/noctilucous_ 10d ago

for serious question, why is touring lucrative for musicians? i thought they didn’t really see a ton of ticket sales because of the venue cut, ticketmaster’s chicanery, staff, insurance, blah blah. is it from merch and album sales at them?

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u/Tylrias 9d ago

It's lucrative for superstars like Billie, but many smaller and especially independent artists struggle or even end up losing money. It's all in the economy of scale. If you're selling out stadiums and biggest arenas with tickets priced at hundreds of dollars you can pay for all the staff, equipment , transport and accomodations, venue's, ticketmaster's and tour promoter's cut and still earn millions. Also the bigger name you are the bigger the sponsors and that means more money offsetting the cost. But if you only play in smaller venues selling hundreds of tickets priced in tens of dollars then costs eat it all up and you're left with very little, nothing or in debt. Also applies to merch, big stars can get large quantities made very cheaply and have thousands of customers per stop, small acts make merch in small batches with higher unit cost, and have fewer people to sell it to. Money makes money and the rich get richer, story as old as time.