Yes, surely if there are so many costs involved now with arranging tours - and wouldn't you pay the same for a lot of those roles if you had 100 people in the audience or 100,000 people? - there were equally many, many costs in producing the singles/tapes/CDs?
Back in the day, if you wanted a million people to each have their own copy of your single, that was a million singles/CDs that you had to have manufactured, stored, transported, distributed and delivered - probably many more unsold ones too, as you had no way of knowing exactly where every purchaser would live.
Nowadays, if you want a billion people to each have their own copy of your song, you have to produce ONE copy and then get the word out. Of course, it's a double-edged sword, as you would hopefully get money in return from every one of those people, which you almost certainly won't; but I remember them saying 40 years ago that singles were mainly for artist promotion rather than actually making a huge profit in themselves.
I love Paul Heaton's ethos. I like quite a few of his songs, although I'm far from an enormous fan. He also celebrated his last two milestone birthdays by putting an equivalent amount of thousands of pounds behind bars up and down the country for ordinary people (whether fans or not) - so £1,000 in each of 60 pubs for his 60th.
I think this proves two things: that he's an extremely generous, principled man who cares passionately about people who are less fortunate than he is and hasn't just used their heads as rungs to elevate himself; and also that, although his time at the top of the charts has long passed and he's not really a household name to anybody under about 35, he's still managed to be in a financial position from the music industry where he can afford to do this in the first place.