I’ve found some numbers that help bring to life the enormous financial impact a single entertainment entity can have.
U2 is currently out on the road, doing its worldwide thing. (Apparently Bono has time to do more than just rock the house and save Africa.)
This tour started in June and contains a huge steel construction (“The Claw”) as the band’s portable stage. The giant sculpture (and paying the huge team needed to put it together) costs roughly $800,000 per show.
U2 manager Paul McGuinness explains, “The tour’s engineering problems are enormous and costly. We had to find a way for it to be aesthetic and figure out a way of doing video. Whether we’re playing or not, the overhead is about $750,000 daily. That’s just to have the crew on payroll, to rent the trucks, all that. There’s about 200 trucks. Each stage is 37 trucks, so you’re up to nearly 120 there. And then the universal production is another 50-odd trucks, and there are merchandise trucks and catering trucks.”
And despite selling out tickets around the world, the group won’t actually start pulling any revenue back in until the North American leg finishes in October 2009.
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