The crowds were already huge when Olivia Rodrigo left the stage for the last time on July 1, 2025, at Manchester’s Co-op Live. 1.2 million people saw 122 shows. It made more than $209 million. For someone who used to play in theaters, it was the kind of tour that changes the course of a career. There was, however, a quieter, less happy story going on somewhere behind all the confetti cannons and sold-out arenas. Most of the fans celebrating in the crowd had no idea about it.
North American and European venues have long had a policy of taking a cut of the sales of touring artists’ merchandise. This doesn’t make the news very often, but it hurts the artists’ finances a lot. These fees, which are usually between 20% and 35% of gross merchandise sales, are just for being able to sell t-shirts, hoodies, and posters inside the building. It’s likely that Rodrigo’s Guts tour, where demand was high and merchandise lines went deep into venue concourses, cost a lot of money. These dollars were probably not going to the artist or the crew, but to the buildings.
Take a moment to think about that. A fan buys a tour hoodie for $55 because they think it will help the artist they love. In real life, a big chunk of it goes to the arena.
The business side of touring is already very tough, and most people don’t understand how it works. For more than a year, Rodrigo and her team had to move a huge production across continents for the Guts World Tour. The production included floating platforms, full digital backdrops, butterfly-shaped catwalks, a band, dancers, and dozens of crew members. During the tour, a live music consultant said that the crew was taking down the stage while people were still leaving, loading it onto trucks all night, and putting it back together before the next night’s show. All of those people should be paid. With the cost of hotel rooms, meals, flights, and gear, the difference between how much money an artist makes on tour and how much they actually get paid is bigger than most people think.
Merch has been one way for artists and their teams to get some of those costs back in the past. It’s direct-to-fan revenue with pretty good margins, or it was before venue fees became common in the business. One gets the sense that artists, especially younger ones on their first big tours, don’t always have much negotiating power. The dates take place in the arenas. And the dates can’t be changed.
Rodrigo’s situation stood out because of how bad it was. After getting experience in theaters on the Sour Tour, her first full arena run was the Guts World Tour. Over 15,000 people showed up every night on average. Multi-night engagements drew huge crowds of people willing to spend a lot of money in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and London. When that desire for merchandise was multiplied by dozens of stops, it meant that venue percentage demands were costing more and more with each city.
To Rodrigo’s credit, her team made decisions during the tour that showed they understood how to make money off of fans. The Silver Star Tickets program, which sold a limited number of $20 seats for each show in pairs, was a genuine and somewhat unusual act in a time when prices change all the time. Tickets to the show in Manila cost an average of $25, and the money raised went to charity. It wasn’t just marketing tricks dressed up as kindness. They looked like real choices.
But the problem with merch cuts is bigger than the kindness of one artist. It’s a problem with the way the live music business is set up, and it slowly destroys the profits that make ambitious touring possible. Rodrigo’s Guts World Tour was a real cultural event that was influenced by rock music, creatively staged, and meaningful to people of all ages. That’s how it should be remembered. It may have also helped focus a conversation that the industry has been waiting a long time to have.
