Fascinating tidbit from this Forbes profile of hiphop start Travis Scott, on his groundbreaking Fortnite shows earlier this year:
The implications of his Fortnite concert quickly became evident. For Epic, it proved that the company was well on track to becoming more than just a maker of video games. For Scott and, really, the entire music industry, it laid a path to a new revenue stream. Scott grossed roughly $20 million for it including merchandise sales, according to a source, much more than what his concerts typically gross. It showed that a virtual performance, once dismissed as a gimmick, could be as much an act of artistry as an old-fashioned live show.
Emphasis mine, because wow. At first I assumed Epic developer Fortnite paid Scott most of that $20 million, but running some industry standard estimates on the Fortnite content the Travis Scott show was selling, it's likely half or more of that was virtual goods sales. Here's the back-of-envelope math:
- Scott's Fortnite IAP virtual items sold for between $3 to $33.
- Assume just 3-5% of the 28 million fans who caught his Fortnite show bought at least some of that virtual merchandise.
- Assume an ARPPU (average per paying user) between $10-15.
That translates to a range of...
$8.4 million to $16.8 million in Travis Scott Fortnite virtual content sales. (And that's not even counting the physical merch for concert Scott sold on his site.) No doubt that these kind of numbers are rarely reachable by most other artists in subsequent virtual world shows. But even a fraction of that revenue is enough to shift the thinking of entire industries.
Link via game dev Chet Faliszek, citing music industry analyst Dan Runcie, who lays out the real concert comparison:
That's some putting it into perspective numbers... https://t.co/hgAmDCS2YU
— Chet Faliszek (@chetfaliszek) December 2, 2020
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