Ne Obliviscaris Launch Patreon Campaign to Keep on Touring

When nothing but that jewel-encrusted sorcerer-elephant metal will do, Melbourne’s Ne Obliviscaris is the band to put on. But sadly, the band has come out of their recent tour with Cradle of Filth financially worse for wear, and have launched a Patreon campaign to make enough money to stay on tour–roughly $12,211USD a month, which is Australia’s minimum wage.

Here’s a selection of the band’s statement on their Patreon page, as well as the band’s official pitch video.

THE AUSTRALIAN FACTOR
Things are tough for bands all across the world right now, but realistically part of this is because we are from Australia. We start every tour having to pay $10-15,000AUD in flights to some far-off part of the world (they all are pretty far off, to be honest…), plus Visa’s, Bus Deposits, Merchandise (T-Shirts, Hoodies, CD’s, Vinyl etc.) which can still cost many thousands of dollars despite getting them at wholesale price and more. As a result, we may start a tour with over $30,000 in debt, and then hope that we make enough money each day on the tour to start chipping away at this total so that we can afford to do another tour after that one…

TOUR INCOME/EXPENSES BREAKDOWN FOR OUR LAST EUROPEAN TOUR
To be more specific, on our Oct/Nov 2015 European Tour with Cradle of Filth our total gross income from Performance Fees and Merchandise Sales for the 33 shows combined was $46,789AUD.

Once again, that probably sounds like a lot until you realise that when you add up our international flights, bus hire for 6 1/2 weeks, petrol, tolls, UK Work Visa’s, UK wireless permits, Ferries, Merchandise, Booking Agent Fees, Sound Engineer, Backline Hire & more we had more than $67,433AUD in expenses.

So the final result from that tour was a LOSS of $20,644AUD ($14,625USD/13,504 Euro) and honestly that is with us doing quite well compared to many other bands.

REALITY CHECK
A few weeks ago we started our USA tour with $36AUD in the bank and about $25,000 in debt due to the massive up front costs of international touring, plus some unpaid bills from our European tour in Oct/Nov.

If this current tour is a success we can get some of that money back, but we are treading an extremely fine line now between giving ourselves the best opportunity to tour and make new fans, and going broke.

WE WANT TO DO THIS FULL TIME
We love playing in this band, and we’ll be straight with you, we want to do this full time. It is extremely difficult to hold down any sort of normal job with the amount of touring we are doing at the moment and that leaves us with only two options:
1. Find a way that we can start making a profit and get paid for what we do in NeO, so that we can continue to pursue this as a full-time endeavour and tour the world on a regular basis.
OR
2. Cut back on how seriously we are taking the band and instead just do it as a hobby and maybe do one big international tour every 2 years.

The band’s campaign has already brought in almost $3,800 at this point.

Twelve large a month sounds like a lot of fucking money to me, but these guys somehow crowdfunded $86,132 to go on world tour, so maybe I’m underestimating them. Their drummer did quit a $150,000/year job to tour, which speaks to their resolve to keep this train rolling. If they could recreate that miracle, it would allow them to tour for seven months, but that’s asking a lot.

Meanwhile, the band’s shots at the music industry feel a little predictable. There’s a lot of truth to them — young acts just can’t tour like they used to because fans aren’t shelling out sixteen bucks for a CD anymore — but it feels like they’re driving the point home a little hard.

That said, I’d love to check Ne Obliviscaris out live. If this is the future of how we make tours happen, then this is a good band to start with. Help these guys out if you can.

[via The PRP]