Mike's Money Machine

[HeyJude]

You can actually get some pretty hard numbers from the 2017 Pollstar chart.

They show Mike's average ticket price as $60.77. Average number of tickets sold per show is 1,248. Average gross per show therefore is $75,824. Rough calculations show they tracked a little over half of Mike's shows (it looks like around 91 North American shows). By my count, he did about 36 shows outside North American last year, which gets us to about 127 shows.

But even assuming he did 180 shows last year, and assuming the shows not tracked by Pollstar brought in the same average grosses, the top end number we'd have is something like $13.8 million in grosses.

When you factor in the fact that he probably didn't quite do 180 shows (probably something more like 150-170), some of the private/corporate gigs may have been a flat fee gig and less than $75,000, and that Mike may have sprinkled in a few "California Beach Band" gigs (I honestly don't know if he bothers with the side band anymore), and I'd imagine we're back in that $10-$12 million gross.

I'm also guessing some years in the past were lighter, as an average payout of about $1 million per year to BRI would mean something more like grossing in the $6-$8 million range per year.