The Revenue Per Attendee Model in Rush’s Tour
How much revenue does a Rush concert generate?
A single concert on Rush’s 2026 Fifty Something Tour generates an estimated $6.79M, based on an 18,000-capacity venue like the Kia Forum in Los Angeles. But the sharper metric is Revenue Per Attendee (RPA): ~$377 per fan, of which 60% is generated beyond the base ticket. The model breaks that value into five layers: on this tour four are active and the fifth sits at zero, a finding as significant as the other four.
| Revenue layer | Share of RPA |
|---|---|
| Base ticket | ~40% |
| VIP packages | ~24% |
| Merchandising | ~25% |
| Food & Beverage | ~11% |
| Digital add-ons layer not activated | 0% |
| Total RPA | 100% |
The five layers belong to the framework, not to the case: they describe the purchase decisions an attendee can make at an event of this profile. Rush does not sell an official recording of each night, standard practice on comparable tours, so the digital add-ons layer is set to zero. Its quantification as a hypothetical scenario is developed in the methodology section.
Some business cases work better than the ones you invent. The world tour Canadian prog-rock band Rush has announced for 2026 and 2027 (their first in eleven years, after what seemed to be the band’s definitive dissolution) brings together such a singular set of conditions that pricing it becomes a first-rate academic exercise.
That tour is also unusual in how it is laid out: four-night runs in its deepest markets, single nights across most of Europe, and never two shows in a row. The economics behind that structure are examined in tour routing economics.
Below, I develop one of the central concepts in the case: Revenue Per Attendee, or RPA, a metric that challenges the conventional way of understanding revenue in the live entertainment industry.
The ticket price is only the beginning…
The industry’s traditional logic has treated the ticket price as the main -and often the only- indicator of a concert’s pricing policy. It is an understandable simplification: the ticket is the visible data point, the one displayed on the sales platform, the one that fuels the public conversation about whether an artist is charging too much or too little. But that same visibility also makes it a profoundly incomplete indicator.
A Rush fan attending a show at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles does not make a single purchase decision: they make several, spread across the weeks or months leading up to the event and concentrated within the three or four hours spent inside the venue.
- They buy the ticket, assess whether to add a VIP package,
- stop at the merchandise stands during the roughly twenty-five-minute intermission that Rush builds into every show of the tour,
- consume in the venue’s food and beverage spaces,
- and could, in principle, purchase a high-resolution download of the concert recorded that very night: a fifth purchase decision that many contemporary tours of this profile do offer, and that Rush, as we shall see, has chosen not to put on the table.
Each of those decisions generates revenue for the promoter, the artist, or the venue operators, and none of them appears in the ticket’s nominal price.
“RPA seeks to capture all of that in a single metric: the total value generated by each attendee across the entire consumption cycle linked to the concert.”
RPA is read per attendee, not per buyer. Every layer is an average across the full house: merchandising, food and beverage and the VIP premium are each divided by total attendance, so anyone who buys nothing in a given layer stays in that layer’s denominator and pulls its average down.
In Rush’s case, roughly 60% of total RPA is generated outside the base ticket price, and that counts only the layers this tour has active. The ticket is only the access layer to a much broader value ecosystem.
The model: Live Event RPA Calculator©
The Live Event RPA Calculator© interactive model that follows breaks the RPA framework down into its five constituent layers (direct ticketing, VIP packages, merchandise, food & beverage, and digital add-ons), proposes a functional segmentation of the audience into five differentiated profiles, includes a calculator to adjust event parameters and explore the model’s sensitivity to each variable, and closes with an analysis of the limitations and risks that any estimation model of this kind must explicitly acknowledge.
It is worth stating from the outset that the five layers belong to the framework rather than to the case: they describe the purchase decisions an attendee can make at a large-format live event, not the ones they necessarily make at this one. Applying the model to a specific tour consists precisely of establishing which layers activate, with what weight, and which ones remain dormant.
[Note: the methodological criteria behind each calculation are developed in the section following the model. For the best experience with the interactive calculator, desktop is recommended.]
Interactive Revenue Per Attendee model for the Rush Fifty Something Tour with verified data.
The Rush fan as a consumer behavior case study
Not every concert generates the same RPA potential, and the difference is not just price: it is consumer profile. The Rush fan has characteristics that make them an especially interesting subject from an economic perspective:
- predominantly male, between 50 and 65 years old
- with a history of following the band that in many cases goes back to the 1970s or 1980s
- greater purchasing power than the average rock concert attendee
- a documented tendency to attend multiple dates on the same tour in different cities
- a relationship with merchandise that goes far beyond the souvenir: they buy as an identity marker, as a collector, and as a custodian of memory
To that is added a relevant generational phenomenon: a significant portion of the audience attends accompanied by children or younger relatives whom veteran fans have introduced to the band’s music. In that sense, Rush retains an intergenerational cultural transmission capacity that very few bands of their era still preserve with the same intensity.
All of this creates an exceptionally favorable consumption ecosystem for maximizing RPA, even before considering the factors specific to this particular tour.
The unique conditions of 2026
If the Rush fan profile was already favorable for high RPA under normal circumstances, the circumstances of 2026 are not normal in any sense. Three factors converge simultaneously on the same consumer in a way that has rarely occurred in any other contemporary rock tour.
- The first is prolonged deprivation: eleven years without concerts creates accumulated and repressed demand that acts as a direct amplifier of willingness to pay. The fan has had no opportunity to “satiate” themselves with any live Rush experience since 2015, which maximizes the emotional intensity of the moment and, with it, impulsive spending and receptiveness to upselling across every layer of the model.
- The second is the perception of finality or a closing window: with Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson both now around 72 years old, each concert is experienced by the fan as potentially the last. They are not paying only for tonight: they are paying for what that night represents within a story spanning more than five decades that may now be approaching its final pages. That perception structurally shifts willingness to pay upward, especially in VIP packages and premium collectible items.
- The third is the tribute component: this is Rush’s first tour following the death of Neil Peart in 2020, the drummer who for decades was the band’s intellectual and technical soul, and the first since 1974 in which the band takes the stage without him. Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson are joined by German drummer Anika Nilles and, since February 2026, by keyboardist Loren Gold, making this the first time Rush has toured as a quartet rather than a trio. Far from depressing demand, that reconfiguration has added a dimension of pilgrimage to the event, one that specifically drives spending on collectible objects. The fan is looking for something tangible to preserve a moment they feel is unrepeatable.
“These three factors combined are what make Rush a case study that is difficult to generalize yet academically very valuable.”
They illustrate with precision how contextual conditions can transform the pricing architecture of an event and elevate its potential RPA far beyond any of its own historical benchmarks, pushing the ticket itself toward what economists call a Veblen good. The brief note below explains the concept.
Conceptual note: the Veblen good
A Veblen good is one whose demand increases as its price rises, inverting the conventional logic of the demand curve. Economist Thorstein Veblen described this phenomenon in the late nineteenth century, observing that certain luxury goods were desired precisely because of their high price, which functioned as a signal of status or exclusive access.
In the context of this case study, tickets to Rush concerts (and particularly the VIP packages) exhibit Veblen good characteristics: their high price reinforces the perception of a historic and unrepeatable event, and willingness to pay does not fall as prices rise but, in specific audience segments, actually increases.
Criteria Applied to Build the Model
Revenue Per Attendee is not a figure that any promoter publishes. It is, in fact, one of the live entertainment industry’s most closely guarded assets, alongside merchandising margins and the terms of corporate hospitality agreements.
What this model proposes, therefore, is not a reading of public figures, but a reasoned construction based on heterogeneous sources combined with economic logic applied to Rush’s specific context in 2026.
1. What comes from verifiable sources
Base ticket prices are publicly accessible data on the official ticketing platforms (Ticketmaster, Live Nation and AXS in certain European markets) at the time of the tour announcement and throughout the various phases of sale. The zone structure of the Kia Forum in Los Angeles and its approximate capacity per level are documented in the venue’s official materials and in specialist press coverage. The prices published by Live Nation for the opening date of June 7, 2026 establish a base face value of ~$150, with a range of $120 to $1,200 depending on zone, figures that have been further cross-referenced against rushisaband.com and Rolling Stone.
The VIP package prices, unlike previous cases where they had to be estimated by analogy with comparable bands, are in this instance directly observable in the official sale. The Fifty Something tour offers four named VIP tiers (Stick It Out, Superconductor, Closer to the Heart, Limelight Front Row), sold across several seating variants (Golden Circle, Reserved, Front Row) that differ from venue to venue, and tiered from a preferential seat up to a front-row place with an official meet & greet alongside Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson, a professional photo, one signed item and a behind-the-scenes tour of the production rig.
Alongside those tiers, and as separate offerings rather than a fifth rung on the same ladder, sit the 2112 Private Platform Experience and a set of Travel Packages handled by an external operator. That distinction matters for the model: Travel Packages bundle accommodation and transport, cost lines that do not belong to the event’s revenue architecture and therefore fall outside the RPA calculation.
Across the US dates checked (Tampa, Atlanta and Glendale), the seated packages ran from about $715 for Stick It Out and $865 for Superconductor to roughly $1,305 for Closer to the Heart (rows 2-12), with Limelight Front Row above them and already sold out. Composition is stable from venue to venue, though prices vary with capacity and the pace of sales.
What sits inside those tiers matters as much as the price. A top package is rarely just a better seat: it bundles a meet & greet, a photo and autograph, a behind-the-scenes rig rundown, and the Rush “Xanadu” pre-show lounge with memorabilia, a Rush x Henderson Brewing bar and appetizers. Prices climb steeply tier to tier, and most of that climb is margin, not cost.
They also vary by market: when I priced the European leg, the top meet-and-greet package for the first of the two Manchester dates ran to around £2,300 a head (about $2,900). I had been intending to buy one. I closed the tab.
This is also where the layers blur: a VIP package re-bundles items that also live in merchandise (the exclusive pieces) and F&B (the lounge bar), so in the model it counts once, as the VIP buyer’s total premium spend, not added on top of their merch or food and beverage.
2. What is grounded estimation
Average merchandise spend per attendee (set in the $70–130 range for a Rush fan versus the $20–40 industry average) is a reasoned extrapolation from two indirect sources:
- Live Nation and AEG annual financial reports, which occasionally break down revenue by event category without reaching artist-level detail
- Post-tour analyses published in specialist outlets such as Pollstar, which do capture averages by musical genre
Classic rock and progressive rock consistently show merchandise spending ratios well above the average, and Rush in particular has a fan community that is demonstrably collector-oriented. The multiple of between 2x and 4x relative to the industry average is not arbitrary, but the range observed at concerts by bands with analogous demographics and purchasing behavior.
There is a concrete mechanism behind that multiple. On Rush’s real 2015 R40 tour, the merch stand carried event shirts printed with the tour dates and city, alongside city-specific pressings and numbered lithographs, sold as limited runs that existed only for that leg. Date and city-stamped merchandise turns each night into its own collectible, which is exactly why a collector-minded fan buys again in the next city instead of wearing the same shirt twice. It is also the artist’s cleanest defense against the one predictable leak in the model: a returning fan who already owns the merch.
The full economics of this merchandise layer, from the t-shirt price anchor to the selling windows and the cut the venue takes, are unpacked in a companion piece: The Economics of Concert Merchandising.
From the 2026 tour
The pop-up shop as a merch strategy
In New York and Toronto, Rush has run dedicated pop-up shops, separate from the arena, that turn merchandise into a destination of its own.
It engineers the scarcity and city-specific exclusivity that lifts merch spend per fan well above the industry norm, the real-world version of the mechanism behind the economics of a concert residency.
3. The logic behind the 25-minute intermission
This is not an estimate but a structural element of Rush’s shows, though it is worth being precise about both its length and its origin. The two-set format with a break dates from the “Test for Echo” tour of 1996, the first the band played without an opening act and the first billed as “An Evening With Rush”; earlier tours carried support acts and ran straight through.
The break itself has consistently sat around twenty minutes, the figure reported from the R40 shows of 2015, and on the opening night of the ”Fifty Something” tour at the Kia Forum it ran to roughly twenty-five.
I was at that R40 New York date, Madison Square Garden on 29 June 2015, and I had carried a longer figure in my memory ever since; the R40 reports and this tour’s opening night are what corrected me. Either way, 25 minutes is long enough to reach the merchandise stands without hurrying and nowhere near long enough to feel like an interruption to the evening. What is an analytical inference is the thesis that this interval functions as a revenue optimization mechanism within yield management.
The relevant comparison here is not between a longer intermission and a shorter one, but between an intermission and none at all. A conventional arena rock show offers the attendee two purchasing windows, and both of them are usually “congested”: the queue before doors open and the exodus that follows the encore. The “evening with” format inserts a third window into the middle of the evening, at the precise moment when the audience is already inside the building, already emotionally invested, and no longer competing for the same minutes with everyone trying to reach a seat or a car while leaving the venue.
The logic is as follows: consumer behavior research in entertainment environments (particularly the work of Dan Ariely and George Loewenstein on spending under states of heightened emotional arousal) suggests that impulse purchases of high-priced items are less likely during the excitement of the performance itself and more likely during intervals of relative calm, when the consumer can make more reflective decisions without the pressure of the moment.
A 25-minute intermission, with multiple points of sale well distributed throughout the venue and a product range spanning from $5 to $450, creates exactly those conditions. The inference is analytical, but it is anchored in solid behavioral evidence.
4. Why the fifth layer has to stay
The model’s fifth layer, digital add-ons, is valued at zero in this case, and it is worth explaining why it stays in the architecture rather than being removed.
The RPA framework does not describe one particular tour; it describes the full structure of purchase decisions available at a large-format live event, and the digital layer is broader than a single product. It runs from the official audio of each night, which Pearl Jam, Phish and Dead & Company sell through platforms such as nugs.net, to the paid livestream of the show itself, which Metallica, Coldplay and others have offered on selected dates as pay-per-view on selected dates, a model that has since given way to sponsored streams and subscriptions, and on to a more experimental cluster of digital seat collectibles, token-gated presales and capitalized lifetime passes. What every one of them shares is near-zero marginal cost and no floor space taken up inside the building.
One mechanism matters more than the catalog, because it conceals the layer rather than closing it: digital does not always sell on its own. It is increasingly bundled inside the VIP package, exactly as the exclusive merchandise and the lounge bar already are. Metallica’s Enhanced Experience for its Sphere shows folds a limited item and an MP3 download of the live audio into almost every VIP tier. Read only as a standalone sale, that download looks like zero, but read correctly, it is revenue captured inside layer two. Measuring the digital layer solely at the counter of a separate storefront will systematically undercount it.
That is exactly why the reading for Rush had to go one level deeper. It is not only that no per-show download is sold separately; it is that nothing digital is bundled inside the four VIP tiers or the Travel Packages either. The official contents are physical or on-site from top to bottom: seat, exclusive merch item, laminate and lanyard, the Xanadu lounge, meet & greet, photo, signed item, production tour. There is no download, no stream and no digital collectible anywhere in the architecture. The layer sits at zero both as a standalone product and inside the premium tiers, which is a firmer statement than a single glance at the storefront would support.
Rush does appear in that nugs.net catalogue, but with historical material only: the Clockwork Angels tour live album, Time Machine 2011: Live in Cleveland, Snakes & Arrows Live from Rotterdam in 2007, the R30 date from Frankfurt in 2004. All of them are commercially released live albums rather than recordings sold show by show. The first retails at $19.99, which sets the sector’s reference price point with reasonable precision. From the Fifty Something tour there is, as of today, no official digital product at all.
Removing the layer from the model because this case does not use it would be a methodological error of some consequence, since it would erase from the analysis precisely what the model is able to detect. The gap is easiest to see through what has filled it: the four opening nights at the Kia Forum already circulate as a fan-produced compilation, assembled from the best available recordings of each song until it covered the full repertoire performed across that return. There is demand, there is a community willing to take on the archival work unpaid, and there is no official product capturing either one.
Hypothetical scenario
The dormant layer, quantified
The base scenario keeps digital add-ons at zero. Switching that layer on is a straightforward hypothetical:
Arena-scale capacity, near-full margin, and no logistics, inventory, or venue floor used.
→ Move the digital sliders in the interactive calculator to model it live.
That distance between what is captured and what is capturable is the practical value of breaking an event into layers. The exercise does not only measure what is happening; it locates, with some precision, what is not.
Therefore, it allows for identifying monetization opportunities.
5. The weighted average algorithm and its limitations
Calculating global RPA as the weighted sum of segment-level RPAs is methodologically correct but operationally simplifying. In reality, the weight of each segment within total attendance is neither stable nor homogeneous across venues: it varies by geographic market, day of the week, whether it is a standalone date or one of several consecutive nights in the same city, and the sales channel used.
The weights proposed in the model (40% Veteran Purist, 17% Nomadic Fan, etc.) are order-of-magnitude estimates built on the known historical profile of Rush’s audience and on observed presale behavior, where the percentage of fans purchasing multiple tickets in different cities serves as a proxy indicator for Segment B.
The indicative result of a $290–300 segment-weighted global RPA (lower than the $377 base-scenario figure precisely because it averages across all five fan profiles rather than the single reference attendee) should be read exactly as that: an order of magnitude with analytical value, not a financial forecast.
6. The calculator as a sensitivity tool
The widget’s eight adjustable parameters are not calibrated to produce a “correct” figure, but to illustrate the model’s elasticity in relation to its most relevant variables.
The most interesting exercise is not to arrive at the highest possible RPA by pushing every slider to its maximum, but to observe which variables have the greatest marginal impact on the outcome: moving the percentage of fans purchasing a VIP package from 8% to 12% has a more than proportional effect on total RPA compared with doubling average food and beverage spend.
That reflects the economic reality of the business with precision: experience packages are the highest-leverage mechanism within the revenue architecture of a concert of this profile.
7. Face Value and Secondary Market
The model operates exclusively with face value pricing: the official prices published by Live Nation and Ticketmaster at the time of sale. The secondary market, where tickets for the “Fifty Something” tour have reached average resale prices of $483, with peaks of $9,684 for premium VIP seating (SeatPick, April 2026), is deliberately excluded from the model.
The reasoning is conceptual: the RPA measures the revenue architecture that the promoter and artist can actively design and control. Resale operates outside of that control, reflecting market speculation rather than strategic pricing decisions. It is cited, however, as an external indicator of demand intensity, precisely because the gap between face value and resale price is one of the most eloquent data points regarding the willingness to pay of the Rush fan base in 2026.
© 2026 Oriol Guitart. This Case Study, Rush “Fifty Something” Tour: Revenue Per Attendee (RPA), and the Live Event RPA Calculator© model have been developed by its author, Oriol Guitart. All rights reserved, for the duration and extent established by the applicable intellectual property law. Any reproduction, distribution, public communication and/or transformation, in whole or in part, is strictly prohibited without the author’s express written authorization, and the author must in any case be credited as such in any subsequent use.
Excellent review ! Playing four nights in most cities, with a long break for everyone… ideal ! Did they have to twist Peart’s family’s arm ? I don’t think so. Did you mention them starting in the buzz capitol of LA ? They could have started in Canada, if they still profess to be Canadian, but that would not have been glitzy and received nearly as much attention. Getting the American, and international press machine in gear !
Thanks, John, really glad you enjoyed it. You’ve put your finger on the two levers I find most interesting.
The four-nights-per-city format with a long break isn’t just kind to the fans; it’s a revenue decision. The same fan often comes back across nights and cities, so the value captured per person keeps climbing well beyond the ticket. That’s the whole point of the RPA model.
And the LA opening over Canada is a sharp read, though I wouldn’t bet on how deliberate it actually was. What’s hard to miss is the symbolism: they’re reopening at the Kia Forum, the same room where the R40 tour ended with Neil Peart in 2015, picking up eleven years later right where they left off. Intentional or not, opening in a buzz capital with the American and international press machine already running is the kind of thing that amplifies demand and willingness to pay before a single note is played. Either way, the city and the venue end up being part of the pricing architecture, not just logistics.
On Peart, I’m with you: between that and the venue choice, this reads as a genuine tribute, not something anyone had to be talked into.
Thanks again for being the first to start the conversation here.
Fascinating article! Going back to their early days, the band as new husbands and fathers expressly tried to make tours “easier” on their families with extended breaks to be able to get home for more than a day or two; obviously this was much more attainable as a headliner and not an opening act. I would guess that is part of the strategy as well in the calendar. And, not to be forgotten, Alex and Geddy are 72 year old men who do not have to be doing this for financial reasons. So making the tour as less rigorous as possible must be very strategic. Interestingly the two hiccups after the LA shows (Geddy’s illness and border issues coming back into the U.S. from Mexico) were mitigated slightly by the stretched out schedule. Verifying some of your data points, I went to all four LA shows, and will be seeing a show in NYC and Denver. I won’t give me age! The concept of merch branded for specific tour stops and has been going on with much smaller bands years. The advent of being able to print posters and clothing in almost any quantity with quick turnaround makes that all possible. All of the touch points who mention are very true, and well done by the band and organizers. It’s a well oiled machine. Looking over past ticket stubs from almost fifty something years ago, I can say it’s a far cry from $10.75 on the floor at The Forum.
Thank you Aaron! Between the four LA nights and the trips to New York and Denver, you have seen more of this tour than I will see of any tour in my life, so let me be plain about the division of labour here: I am reasonably good at modelling revenue structures, and I will never be an expert Rush fan. Three shows over twenty years, with Paris and Manchester still to come, does not put me in your company.
Your point about the extended breaks lands on something I only worked out properly after this piece was published. I wrote a follow-up on the routing itself (https://oriolguitart.com/blog/tour-routing-economics/), and the conclusion there is close to yours: the rest day is not a variable. Across 88 shows in 48 cities the band never plays two nights in a row, not once in ten months, and the pattern holds when they change country. Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Munich, one show and one day off each, in four different countries. That comes from the performer, not from the buildings.
Which reframes the whole thing the way you are suggesting. If the day off is going to happen regardless, the only decision left is what to do with it, and staying in the same building turns out to be the cheapest way to spend it. So the four-night runs are less a revenue strategy than a rational response to a constraint that was already there. That the constraint began as young fathers wanting to get home, as you say, and now serves a fifty-year-old body, only makes the continuity more striking.
Fort Worth proves it better than any argument. Two emergency reschedules, a border delay and Geddy’s illness, a broken calendar and every commercial reason to compress the dates. The shows moved to July 11 and 13, two days apart, exactly as before. Nothing was compressed.
On the city-specific merchandise you are right that this is not a Rush invention and that smaller acts have been doing it for years, made possible by short-run printing rather than by anyone’s cleverness. What Rush have is a fan base that responds to it more strongly than most, which is a narrower claim than the one I made and a more defensible one.
The ticket stub is the detail I keep returning to. A floor seat at the Forum for $10.75, and the band opening this tour in the same building. In today’s money that is somewhere around sixty dollars, which means the real increase in the base ticket is far less dramatic than the headline figures suggest. What has changed is everything built around it, which is the argument the piece is trying to make, told better by a stub in a drawer than by anything I wrote.
If you still have it and would not mind, I would love to know the year and whether they were headlining. Enjoy New York and Denver, and thanks for taking the time to write all of this out.
I’m not gonna lie, I really would like to know what they’re paying Anika. Are you able to tell me that? Lol.
Just kidding. Really enjoyed this great article!
Thank you ❤️
Peter B
Ha! Peter, no, and if I did know I suspect the answer would arrive with a lawyer attached. Touring fees for a hired player are one of the few numbers in this business kept even quieter than merchandise margins, which is saying something.
What I can say is that the piece stops exactly where your question begins. Revenue Per Attendee measures what the audience generates over an evening, before any of it is divided between artist, promoter, venue and everyone else on the payroll. Everything downstream of that sits in a different model and behind a confidentiality clause.
What is safe to say is that Anika arrived with a serious reputation of her own rather than as an unknown, and that a run of this length, with the UK and Europe still to come next year, is not the kind of engagement anyone walks away from poorly. Beyond that I would only be guessing.
Thanks for reading, Peter, and glad you enjoyed it
I attended Rush shows #3 and 4 in LA, and the intermissions were about 20 minutes, not 40. I think this is the case at all shows. There’s a countdown timer on screen during the intermission. Also, as far as I know, no digital downloads of the shows in either audio or video format have been offered.
Thank you Jon. You have confirmed both of the things the piece got wrong, and from the best possible vantage point, which is having been in the room.
The article now says roughly 25 five minutes, with the 20 minute figure from the R40 reviews cited alongside it. The forty minute claim was simply incorrect, and worse than that, I had presented it as a documented fact rather than as the estimate it actually was.
The countdown timer is the detail I am most grateful for, because it is the piece of evidence I did not have. A break that is measured and displayed to the audience is not an operational pause that happens to be useful, it is a window the production has decided to run deliberately, and the fan knows exactly how long they have to reach the merchandise stands and get back. That is a much stronger version of the argument than the one I originally made, and it comes from observation rather than from inference.
On the downloads you are right as well, and the article has been rewritten around that absence rather than pretending it does not exist. The model carries five revenue layers and the 5th one now sits at zero for this tour, which turns out to be more interesting than filling it in would have been. Rush appear on nugs.net only with historical live albums, never show by show, while the four opening nights at the Forum already circulate as a compilation put together by fans. There is demand and there is no official product meeting it.
That is also where the calculator in the piece becomes worth playing with. It runs live simulations, and the digital sliders start at zero precisely because Rush do not sell the recordings. Move them and you can see what the layer would be worth: at a 20% take up and $25 a download it adds around 5 dollars per attendee, which is roughly $90,000 a night at Forum capacity, at almost pure margin and with no inventory and no floor space. Given that you were at two of the four LA nights, I suspect your own take up estimate would be better than mine.
If you happen to remember whether the timer counted down from 20 or from 25, I would genuinely like to know. Thanks again for taking the time to set the record straight on both counts.
Really interesting read. Thanks for this. As one who kind of knows how the “system” works, I selectively spend my money. I am a 59-year-old longtime fan that has traveled extensively (Even abroad) to see them since the ’80s. This time around however, I was a little on the fence. There were many reasons but I won’t get into them all. For me first and foremost out of the gate was pricing. It seemed insane to me. Especially for not knowing what kind of quality show was about to happen. So I wasn’t about to hop on an airplane and go to LA to see this one even though I was at the last show when Neil took a bow. Of course I started to get wrapped up in the hoopla and of course when tickets went on sale I was trying but it was Insanity with the packages and all the BS they were throwing in, and after all was said and done and I ended up empty-handed and discouraged. I wasn’t about to sit in nosebleed seats for what I was paying for top shelf on the previous tour. I went back to “I’m going to wait to see what happens”
I thought to myself, the last thing I want to see is my favorite band on stage when they really shouldn’t be…. Because quite frankly by the end of R40 I think the timing was right for them to retire. It was getting pretty clear to me. I remember sitting in the first few rows watching Neil in obvious pain. That wasn’t fun to watch. Obviously he was done, and with the condition of Ged’s voice at the end of that tour it was time. Fast forward to 2026 and here we are seeing them pull off nothing short of a miracle with Annika behind the drum kit killing it AND being so well received by the fan base. Then we see Getty Lee working his tail off to perform above the level he was at in this fans opinion probably 20 some years ago… If not more. Impressive for a 72-year-old when you look around and seeing all the aging rockers struggling to belt the notes out. All that said I still let the cards fall and I sat in the shadows watching some online clips. I won’t deny that I was absolutely getting excited about what I was seeing. I was able to score some third rows for One of the rebooked Texas shows through a friend who couldn’t go before they canceled so I was the one that had to reschedule not her, so of course that cost My wife and I a bit to rebook the flight and go back out there for the rescheduled show. Of course everybody’s thinking will he recover? Well lo and behold he was pretty impressive for having the illnesses he had and then days later The 4 Chicago shows were off the hook. They jammed that place for four nights And I don’t think anybody walked out of their disappointed. They were definitely putting on a pretty darn good show…and we were truly blessed to be able to witness it. I mentioned I kind of knew how the system worked…. well I didn’t buy a single ticket for Three of the four Chicago shows until the days of the shows. The ones I did buy were blue dots that popped up dead center seats front row back of the bowl. I figured it’d be a good opportunity to chill out and take the production in which it really was awesome to see them dead center at the back for this particular show because the screens were amazing. So for shows 2-4 I went for the release seats day of. Granted this takes work, but you and I both know how that goes nowadays, but I did it I sat in 121s first and second row all three of those nights. For anybody that doesn’t know where section 121 is in the United Center it is prime seating Getty side right off the floor. I’ll take these seats any day of the week over the floor for multiple reasons. One, view for sure… especially when your wife is only 5’2″ and she loves to go, and two… the sound! Third row in Texas was all fun but the sound sucks up front.
So as far as the stats, maybe I’m an exception to the rule because I figured out the system a long long time ago on release seats and I’m pretty good at getting my hands on them. So for me to have done what I did on the average Joe’s knowledge I would have spent a hell of a lot more money. It really is pretty crazy when I look at how much money some people do spend on this. All that said since they swept through here and did four nights and we were able to absorb all four setlists, I think this longtime fan and his wife are done. I think the older wiser me realizes yeah, you don’t need to travel all over the place and blow this money. My hat is off to them. It was almost like the perfect storm for them to come back. Them being able to finally pay tribute to their long-time pal was cool to see, and long overdue. And yes I splurged on a city specific foil of the United Center but it was number 75 or 75 so how could I say no? It’s probably going to be the last time they play Chicago so yeah, I’m good with that purchase. It’s a cool piece of artwork! And this fan thinks it was really cool they did City specific swag. Brilliant!
Thanks for the article, it was really interesting to read
Kurt, this is one of the most useful comments anyone has left here, and it complicates the model in a way I want to acknowledge rather than smooth over.
The release seats are the part that stops me. The model works with face value and assumes a fan buys at onsale or through resale, and you have described a third route that sits outside both: waiting, working the drops, and landing first and second row in 121 for three consecutive nights. You say yourself that on the average buyer’s knowledge you would have spent a great deal more, and that is precisely the point. What the model measures is what a fan generates, not what a fan could have generated had they known less. There is a whole segment of sophisticated buyers whose spend is systematically lower than their willingness to pay, and I have no clean way of sizing it.
The onsale experience is the other thing worth flagging. You wanted in, you tried, and the packages sent you away empty-handed and discouraged. My model counts the eight percent who complete a VIP purchase. It has nothing at all to say about the people who queued, looked at what was on offer, could not make sense of it and left. That is not a rounding error, it is invisible revenue, and yours is the first account I have read that describes it from the inside.
Your description of the onsale also sent me to check something I had been avoiding. Similar seats have cost me around 200 euros in Paris and roughly 400 pounds in Manchester, and I have no way of knowing why. Hotels have run this playbook for years, releasing limited inventory to protect RevPAR, but hotel pricing is at least visible: you watch the number move and you decide. In ticketing you cannot see what was released, what is being held back, or what tomorrow looks like, and the window closes. That is where the helplessness comes from, and it is why someone like you, who has learned to read the system, ends up behaving like an operator rather than like a fan. The uncomfortable conclusion is that demand intensity is doing the pricing, city by city, and that whatever romance there is in this tour lives on the stage rather than in the checkout.
Then the foil. A city specific piece, numbered 75 of 75, bought because it was probably the last time they play Chicago. That is the merchandising argument in the article compressed into a single purchase, and told better than I told it. The date and the city on the object are what make the night collectible rather than repeatable, and you did not need the theory to know that.
The rebooked Texas flights belong in a different column, and it is one the model deliberately leaves out. Travel and hotels are real money the fan spends because of the show, but they are not revenue the artist, promoter or venue captures. Worth naming, though, because it is the part of the total cost that nobody counts.
What stays with me most is the ending. Four nights, four setlists, and then done. The closing window factor is supposed to push spending upward, and in your case it resolved instead. You got the whole thing in your own city and decided that was enough. That is a healthier outcome than most of what this article describes, and I suspect the sentence about the older wiser you is one plenty of readers will recognize.
Thank you for taking the time to write all this out. Having been in the first few rows for Neil’s last bow and now watching them pull this off, you have a vantage point I will never have, and the piece is better for your having shared it.
Thanks for taking the time to reply and sending me an email that you did reply.
So to be clear, in the very beginning when tickets went on sale, it wasn’t necessarily that I didn’t understand the packages… I just didn’t like them. Some of the packages came with great seats but then you had a hotel room included. Why do I need a hotel room in Chicago when I live here? Initially I had a pretty bad taste in my mouth with how they were marketing all this along with the insane pricing. At the end of the day it all worked out for me because I just went back to my old ways and it paid off. But I will admit they did a pretty darn good job marketing this and as a fan you felt like maybe there’s not going to be any of my old ways anymore this is just such a hot ticket. And it was. But, I paid a lot less for my release seats then even face value. Because the seats I picked up were initially $506 a piece (blue dot price) without any type of package blah blah blah, and the day the show we picked them up for $322.25 (blue dot)
That said, I’ve been stung before. I remember a Chicago show here in Tinley Park (where they recorded different stages) where I stood at the box office all day and not a single seat was released because they know so many sports players here etc, so it’s never a guarantee. And that’s why I was really nervous this time around. It can also be extremely nerve-racking for somebody who is looking at a showtime in a couple hours without having seats. But again the older wiser me said whatever… if I just get in the venue I’m sure I’m going to enjoy myself. At least that’s what I was telling myself anyhow 😬
Since the Chicago shows I’ve been watching the Madison square and it seems that the model repeats itself. But it’s not easy that’s for sure… And you literally have to be on top of it all day long so you can’t work…. literally…. Or you will miss them.
I really enjoy the article and the comments here. It’s such an interesting perspective and to something that most of us wonder about. I took a photograph of the crowd at the United Center during “CONCERT HALL” and I just stood there amazed thinking “I can’t believe they packed this place four nights in a row” You know that brings me to a question that comes to mind. I haven’t seen Rush fill a venue four nights in Chicago since the 80s. And when they did that it was a smaller venue than the United Center. I’ve read a lot of comments about people who are really disappointed that the band wasn’t coming through their city where they normally would. That said, the United Center holds roughly 23,500 for a concert. That becomes to a staggering 94,000 plus people that attended those four nights.
Now me for example, I was at all four nights and I’m sure there were many like me that went to at least two or more shows here in ORD, but what I really wonder is how many of those 94,000 came from other cities because they weren’t able to see them in their hometown. And on the flip side, how much revenue did they lose because people couldn’t afford to come to other cities but more than likely would have figured out a way to squeeze out the price of a ticket in their own city???
Kurt, thank you for coming back, and for correcting me on the first point, because I had it wrong.
You understood the packages perfectly well. You just did not like what was in them, which is a different problem and a more damning one. A package that bundles a hotel room and gets sold to someone who lives twenty minutes from the arena is a segmentation failure rather than a pricing issue (I’m far more better in Marketing than as a Rush fan 😉). The article mentions the Travel Packages as a separate line handled by an external operator, and I treated that as a footnote. Your experience says it belongs closer to the center: the same bundle offered to a Chicagoan and to someone flying in from Cleveland is one product doing two completely different jobs, and for one of them it is dead weight attached to a good seat.
The number that interests me is $506 down to $322.25, because it runs against the direction I had assumed. I had face value as the floor and resale as the premium, and you have described the price moving the other way inside the official channel, on the day, for a dead center seat.
It also says something about the size of what you were waiting on. Holdbacks are one of the least visible parts of this business, and the public investigations that have looked at them suggest the share of a house reserved for insiders and closed presales is far larger than most people assume. So probably you were not fishing at the edges of a sold out room (or maybe yes). You were waiting on a compartment that can hold a substantial part of it.
Anyway, the model holds, just as the Rush case built on it. The five layers stand, and so does the finding that around 60 percent of what a fan generates sits outside the base ticket. Holdbacks operate inside layer one, and what they add is dispersion: two people in the same row can have paid very different amounts depending on when they bought and how well they read the system. The model uses a single average ticket price because it is measuring what a venue full of people generates rather than what any individual paid, and your $322.25 and someone else’s $506 both sit inside that average. What I cannot tell you is how wide the spread is, and that is a genuine limitation rather than a broken assumption.
Tinley Park matters just as much, and I would not have thought to ask about it. The strategy works until it does not, nothing is released, and you have stood at a box office all day for nothing. Add what you said about having to watch it all day, literally unable to work, and the real cost of those seats climbs well past $322.25. Call it $322.25 plus a day of your time and a genuine risk of ending up outside. That is a trade most people cannot make, which is precisely why it stays available to the few who can, and why the average holds up even with people like you in the room.
Your closing question is the one I cannot answer, and I think it is the most valuable thing in this entire thread. Four nights at the United Center is somewhere around 90,000 seats, and nobody outside the promoter knows how many of those people drove or flew in from a city that never got a date. The data exists, because ticketing platforms hold the billing zip code on every order, and it would be one of the more revealing datasets in touring. It is also never going to be published.
I can at least speak to it from the other side. Rush have never played Barcelona, where I live, so seeing them has always meant travelling: once to London, twice to New York. And there is something in that experience the model captures only in part. When you buy a ticket eleven or twelve months before the show, as I did, the price stops feeling like an expense long before you travel. By the night itself it is mentally written off, paid for by a version of you from last year, and everything you spend at the venue seems to come out of a separate budget. The merch stand ends up competing with dinner rather than with the ticket. Whether that makes the traveling fan a better customer or just a worse accountant I am not sure, but the effect is real and it points the same way the model does: the ticket is the smaller half of what a fan generates.
So the two halves of your question do not cancel out. The fan who travels spends more per head, because the trip commits them and the ticket stopped counting months ago. The fan who would have bought at home but cannot justify a flight never appears anywhere at all. I wrote a separate piece on why the calendar looks the way it does, and its blind spot is exactly this: it explains what it costs to move, and nothing about what it costs not to.
That is the second thing you have added to this today. Thank you!
A really interesting read, particularly given the reaction to the ticket price from fans. What would be really interesting is what happens to the $6.8m gross per concert, split presumably in some way between the band, promotor and venue. Added to this the operating costs of this tour given the many nights off in between concerts; the crew and everything associated with the running of the tour has to be paid even when there isn’t a gig. And they aren’t just trundling around the US and Canada but also South America and Europe.
Added to the 4 night run is that they have deliberately developed 4 sets to appeal to the fan who wants to see them multiple nights – another smart move as they clearly know their fanbase. I’m off to 3 nights in Canada, Poland and the UK. It will just my luck that the 4 night set rotation means I see the same set 3 times! But hey, I never expected to see them again so my regret at not seeing R40 is reduced a tiny bit. And from the reports so far these concerts are definitely not in the Bon Jovi category! Not that I expected anything else from Rush – if you can’t do something well (very very well in their case) don’t do it at all.
Thank you Graham! This is exactly the kind of comment that improves a piece.
One clarification worth making, and it is my fault for how the figure was originally labelled: the $6.79M is total attendee spend across the four active layers, not box office gross. It is what the audience parts with over the whole evening, before any of it is divided between artist, promoter and venue, and before a single cost is deducted. The label in the model has since been corrected precisely because it invited the reading you gave it, which was a fair one.
The question of what happens to that money afterwards is a genuinely different exercise, and you have put your finger on the part that makes this tour unusual. A crew stays on payroll whether or not there is a show that night, so a routing with this many dark days carries a cost structure that a conventional run does not. Revenue Per Attendee stops at the top line by design, and the reason is partly pedagogical: I use this framework with clients and also with MBA and Masters students, and its whole value lies in isolating one question, which is how many distinct revenue layers a single attendee actually generates over the course of an evening. The moment guarantees, splits, hall fees and touring overheads enter the picture you are building a profit and loss model instead, and the layers stop being visible. Both exercises are worth doing, and in fact I have a separate model for the second one, but running them together tends to produce numbers that flatter everybody and describe nobody.
Your point about the four rotating sets is sharper than anything in the article, and it belongs in the merchandising section as much as the setlist one. It is the same logic as printing the city and date on a shirt: give the returning fan a reason why the second night is not a repeat of the first. And three nights across Canada, Poland and the UK makes you the Nomadic Fan of the segmentation almost exactly. If the rotation does land you the same set twice, I would still be curious whether your spending on the night changes between the first show and the third.
Enjoy every one of them, and I hope the rotation is kind to you. I will be at Paris and the first Manchester night myself, and I fully expect to answer that spending question the hard way, standing at the merch stand at the interval telling myself it is research.
Rush doesn’t have a 40 minute intermission. In all their ‘an evening with’ shows I’ve ever attended (and I’ve attended many), it’s only every been a 20-25 minute intermission, and based off of the reviews of this current tour, that has been the case.
Jason, you’re right and the article has been corrected. It now says roughly twenty-five minutes, with the twenty-minute figure from the R40 reviews cited alongside it. The forty-minute claim was wrong, and worse, I had presented it as documented fact rather than as the estimate it actually was.
Your point about the “evening with” shows matches my own recollection of R40 at the Garden in 2015: long enough to reach the merch stands without rushing, nowhere near long enough to break the evening. That’s now in the piece too.
The wider argument didn’t depend on the length, as it turns out, and rewriting it made that clearer. What matters for the model is the comparison between having an intermission and having none: a conventional arena show gives the attendee two purchasing windows, both congested, while the two-set format inserts a third one in the middle of the night with the audience already inside and already invested.
Given how many of these you’ve been to, I’d genuinely like your read on something the model can’t settle from the outside: does the merch queue at the break actually move, or do people mostly give up on it? Thanks for taking the time to flag this.
What an incredibly interesting and intelligently written piece! This was something I’ve been thinking about and you have captured it all! Kudos to you!
Thank you San, that’s very kind. Rush is the illustration here rather than the subject: I picked them because I’m a fan, and because this particular tour activates almost every layer of the framework at once, which makes it unusually legible. Plenty of other acts would work just as well as a case, with a very different economic shape.
If you’ve got a sense of where your own spending goes on a Rush night, I’d be curious to hear it. The merchandise figures are the ones I’m least sure about.