I have some mates who work in the live music industry.
The artist generally gets about 10% - 15% of the ticket face value.
The rest of it is promoter fee, venue hire, lighting and sound technicians, backing band and singers, advertising, etc etc.
Plus gig tickets are VATable so 20% of it is VAT.
Like a lot of other sectors the live music industry has been absolutely walloped by the last two years. Generalised costs have gone up too, of course — heat, light and power, fuel costs, truck and driver hire, food costs — all rocketed compared to 2019.
The vast majority of people who work in live music aren’t paid fortunes, in fact some of them barely scrape a living. You need people like Adele, who can command high ticket prices at multiple venues, to pay all these other people’s costs. Plus it supports the staff and venues for lesser-known and emerging artists too. It’s a ‘rising tide lifts all ships’ kind of deal.
A mate of mine is a really well-regarded sound engineer for soul and RnB acts — she’s worked with Mary J Blige, Gladys Knight, Maxwell, Prince and Janet Jackson among others — last year she was driving a delivery van for Tesco because it was the only work she could get.
It is a shame that live music has become so expensive to see, especially for big-name acts. But for the most part it’s not greed on the part of the artist. If there’s greed, it’ll more likely be from the promoter or the venue management.