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Los Campesinos! lay bare the true cost of their 2024 North America tour
Los Campesinos! published a detailed breakdown showing their 2024 North America run cost over £100,000, exposing how ticket, visa and transport costs eat into earnings.
Los Campesinos! say it cost them more than £100,000 to tour the United States. The Welsh seven-piece published a line-by-line account in a lengthy newsletter after a run of 11 North American dates supporting their self-released seventh album, All Hell.
The ledger
Frontman Gareth David opens the breakdown with practical context: the band is seven people strong, often travelling with children, self-managed, and running their own label. They also have jobs outside music and so can tour using holiday allowance, a reality David acknowledges shapes how they route their career. “We are aware that specific ideological decisions we make impact our ability to maximise the money we earn,” he writes.
From that position of candour, David lays out the arithmetic. The tour, totalling 11 shows in 2024, produced ticket revenues of $127,729.53 (£99,738.05). Tickets had a base price of $27.50, with 5 percent offered at $10 for low-income fans. Ten of the 11 shows sold out.
On the spending side the band itemised discrete costs: more than £5,400 in visa fees, over £9,000 on transatlantic travel, and roughly £46,000 for the tour bus and driver. The merch table brought in £40,336.54. After accounting for those figures, David reports an overall profit of £38,246.64.
But that’s not the same as pay in pockets. According to the newsletter the profit was not distributed to band members; instead it was retained for future projects and tours because many outgoings had to be paid up front. As David frames it, touring requires capital long before ticket sales land. “A band needs to have access to capital long before the tour (or album recording, or anything else) is going to take place in order to be able to afford to embark on it in the first place,” he writes. “And who has access to capital? Major label acts that still choose to rip their fans off with exorbitant ticket pricing, and rich kid bands that can always return home to their parents.”
The piece is less a plea than a diagnostic: a way to show how visible revenue streams are swallowed by invisible costs, how ethical ticket pricing and modest headline fees do not automatically equate to sustainability for working bands.
Los Campesinos! have been forthright about these pressures before. In 2025 they published notes on the “many financial restrictions” of touring, citing a significant loss on a one-off Dublin gig and reflecting on the class dynamics of UK guitar music. “Without the backing/protection of wealthy family (and it’s clear to see that UK guitar/pop music is overrun by the middle class and private school rich kids), or being sold a dream by an albatross of a recording advance/management company, what hope does anyone have?” the band wrote.
Their 2025 updates also included streaming figures for All Hell: £31,940.29 from 9,300,864 streams in the album’s first year. Because Los Campesinos! are self-managed and operate their own company, they point out, that money flowed directly to Los Campesinos! Ltd. “However, we are in a minority, and most bands will only see money if there is any left over after record labels and management have taken their cuts,” the band noted, a reminder that transparency about income is not the same thing as equitable distribution across an industry built on intermediaries.
The newsletter reads less like a sympathy bid and more like an argument for clearer accounting in a scene that too often trades myth for method. For a band that still insists on running its own operations, the figures are both a cautionary tale and a piece of practical public record: touring is possible, but not necessarily profitable in the ways audiences assume.
