Touring, merch, publishing, sponsorships. What is a 360 deal, what does the label actually take, and when is signing one genuinely worth it? Plain English.
A band signs their first record deal, grinds for two years, finally sells out a 900-capacity room, shifts four hundred shirts at the merch table, and then finds out the label gets a slice of the shirts too.
Nobody mentions that part at the signing dinner. So let's be blunt about it.
What is a 360 deal, in plain English
A 360 deal is a record contract where the label takes a percentage of almost everything your band earns, not just the records. The name comes from the idea of covering all 360 degrees of an artist's career.
A traditional deal is narrow. The label funds recording, marketing and distribution, owns or licenses the masters, and keeps most of the recorded-music money until the advance is recouped. Your gig income stays yours. Your publishing stays yours, assuming you did not sign that away separately.
A 360 deal widens the net. The streams it usually reaches for:
- •Live income: ticket revenue and guarantees, sometimes calculated on gross
- •Merch, both at shows and online
- •Publishing, meaning your songwriting income
- •Brand work: sponsorships, endorsements, sync placements
- •The long tail: fan clubs, name and likeness, occasionally acting or modelling
Not every 360 deal grabs all of it. The good ones carve chunks out. The bad ones list revenue streams that have not been invented yet and hoover those up in advance.
Why labels started asking for everything
Fair is fair, this was not invented out of pure villainy. When physical sales collapsed and streaming took over, recorded music stopped funding careers on its own. Touring and merch, meanwhile, kept growing.
So labels found themselves paying to build an artist's fame and then watching the money from that fame land somewhere they could not reach. The 360 deal is their answer. If we fund the launch, we share the results, wherever the results turn up.
That logic holds when the label genuinely is the launch. It falls apart when they sign an act that already tours well and then claim a share of a machine somebody else built.
What you actually give up
Exact percentages vary wildly and are usually confidential, but the ranges people in the industry talk about tend to sit somewhere around 10 to 25 percent of touring and merch income, plus a meaningful share of publishing. Recorded-music terms stay roughly as unforgiving as ever.
The percentage is not the scary bit, though. Three other clauses do more damage.
Gross versus net. A cut of gross touring revenue is a completely different animal from a cut of profit. Tours run on thin margins and can lose money outright. A percentage of the top line can be taken out of cash you never actually kept.
Cross-collateralisation. If your tour income is used to repay the recording advance, a great touring year can disappear into an unrecouped album. Keep the buckets separate if you possibly can.
Term length. A deal that keeps taking a share for years after the last record is a very long shadow to walk around in.
When a 360 deal is genuinely worth signing
Sometimes it really is. If you are unknown, unfunded, and the label is putting serious money and actual people behind you, then giving up a slice of income that currently does not exist is not much of a sacrifice. Twenty percent of a career beats a hundred percent of nothing, every time.
Here is the honest test: what specifically are they doing for each stream they want a cut of? If they take merch, there should be someone running merch. If they take touring, there should be a touring department with names in it. Ask what happens on the ground, then ask for it in the contract.
If nobody can answer, that is your answer. Our breakdown of how record deals work covers the underlying mechanics, and the indie versus major label comparison covers who tends to ask for what.
Feeling the trade-off without a lawyer
The reason 360 deals are hard to judge on paper is that you cannot see the counterfactual. You never find out what the same band would have earned without the deal.
That is one of the things a game can do that real life cannot. In Road to Headliner your band's money arrives from several places at once, shows, merch, streams, sponsorships, and you can watch which stream is actually carrying you in a given season. The revenue and economy guide walks through how each one behaves. Once you have felt a tour barely break even while merch quietly pays the rent, the phrase 'a small percentage of touring' stops sounding small.
A 360 deal is not automatically a trap. It is a trade, and like any trade it is only fair if both sides show up.
Want to run the numbers on a band of your own? Start a band in Road to Headliner. It is free, it runs in your browser, and you will be arguing with yourself about merch margins within the hour.
