The Backstreet Boys Have Stumbled Upon The Greatest Financial Gig In Music History With Their Sphere Residency

Way before he became a boy band impresario, Lou Pearlman leased airplanes, blimps, and helicopters. But, as the first cousin of Art Garfunkel, he was always fascinated by the music business.

In the late 1970s, Lou launched a successful helicopter taxi service that transported people to and from New York City. While this business boomed, he launched a publicly traded company that chartered blimps and private planes to businesses and wealthy individuals. The blimps were mainly rented to companies like Met Life and McDonald's to be used as giant floating billboards, not for transportation. The private planes were mostly rented out to wealthy businessmen traveling back and forth to meetings.

Most clients were boring businessmen, but one fateful day in the 1980s, Lou's life was changed forever when the boy band New Kids On The Block chartered one of his most expensive planes for their North American tour. Pearlman was shocked to discover that a boy band was able to afford such a pricey private jet for a tour all over the country. When he did the math, it all added up to one conclusion: Lou Pearlman was going to form a boy band.

He spent $3 million holding nationwide auditions, recruiting professional songwriters, and in 1993 finally hand-picked five young singers:

• AJ McLean
• Howie Dorough
• Nick Carter
• Kevin Richardson
• Brian Littrell

Together, they became the Backstreet Boys.

A few years later, Lou pulled the whole thing off again when he formed N'SYNC. And about a decade after that, he was convicted of conducting a massive Ponzi scheme and, in 2016, died in prison while serving a 25-year sentence. But that's a story for another day. Today I want to talk about the profits and losses artists earn from a major musical tour.

Historically, when a major musical group like the Backstreet Boys or Pearlman's other boy band, N'SYNC, embarks on a world tour, the profits that eventually hit the bank accounts of the actual artists aren't particularly exciting.

A tour might gross hundreds of millions of dollars, but that gross revenue is quickly whittled down by endless high costs. Imagine all the equipment, lighting rigs, LED screens, props, pyrotechnics, speakers, stages, and instruments that need to be transported from city to city. Add in dozens of semi-trucks to haul the gear, full crews to load and unload at every stop, endless hotel bills, backstage catering for hundreds of people, security, insurance, fuel, freight, and storage between shows. To make it all work on tight schedules, the performers themselves often need to travel by private jet, or in some cases, rent an entire converted Boeing 747, just to keep pace with the logistics.

And all of this is assuming the group sells enough tickets to break even in the first place! If we had the actual numbers, I bet we'd be shocked to see how little money artists make from a massive tour. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that some artists actually LOSE money from a major tour.

But let's assume an artist is selling out every stadium. Even in this best-case scenario, the artist may only earn 15-25% of the gross revenue earned from a tour. Let's assume 20%.

With that in mind, take Beyoncé's recently completed "Cowboy Carter" tour, which wrapped last month. After 32 stadium shows, the tour grossed $400 million in revenue, setting the record for the highest-grossing country tour of all time. But once expenses and promoter cuts are taken out, if Beyoncé nets 20%, that equates to around $80 million. Obviously, that's an incredible payday. But it came at the cost of performing nearly nonstop from April to July, zig-zagging across the United States in front of 2.5 million ticket buyers.

Or take Taylor Swift's "Eras" tour. The Eras tour grossed $2.1 billion, which obliterated the record for the highest-grossing tour of all time. The Eras tour was active pretty much nonstop for 20 months between March 2023 and December 2024. Taylor performed for roughly 10 million attendees at 149 events. It was also BY FAR the most expensive tour ever conducted, but let's assume Taylor managed to maintain a 20% margin. That equates to a $400 million pre-tax net windfall for Taylor, aka Beyoncé's entire gross revenue. Also, keep in mind that Taylor and Beyoncé are solo acts, so they don't have to share the profits with a bunch of bandmates.

And while these numbers are jaw-dropping, they also highlight how much time, effort, and expense are required to earn them. Which brings us back to the Backstreet Boys. Instead of dragging a world tour across continents, these five nearly-50-year-old geniuses have found a way to generate stadium-level money all from a single location…

(Photo by Kevin Carter/Getty Images)

Sphere Money Machine

According to well-placed sources who spoke to TMZ, the Backstreet Boys are grossing $4 million a night at Las Vegas's futuristic Sphere. And while that number may not sound impressive at first glance, consider the following:

According to the sources who spoke with TMZ, the group's biggest expense for putting on a Sphere concert was a "one-time fee of about $7 to $8 million for all the graphics they use in their shows," a cost which they recouped after 2-3 shows.

Beyond that, most of the usual headaches of touring don't exist. The Sphere handles security, ticketing, and concessions. There's no caravan of trucks or thousands of crew to fly around the world. The Backstreet Boys just show up and perform.

Nick Carter lives in Las Vegas. He literally could Uber to the shows, but I'm sure he has a car service. Kevin Richardson and AJ McLean likely hop semi-private out of Burbank on JSX for a few hundred bucks. Brian Littrell and Howie Dorough's Florida flights might be the priciest part of the operation.

The result? Each night's $4 million gross is translating into an astonishingly high net payday. My hunch is they're running close to an 80% margin, but let's be conservative and call it 70%. Which raises the ultimate question: How much will each Backstreet Boy actually take home by the time this run is over?

By our calculations (math below), each Backstreet Boy is making $560,000 PER SHOW, and by the time their initial run is over, they will have each netted $18 million. That's $18 million off 35 shows without having to shlep across the world. The Sphere has a capacity of 17,000, so after 35 shows (assuming they all sell out), that's $18 million earned to perform for 595,000 people. And that's $18 million per Backstreet Boy. If they were a solo act, the combined total net is $90 million – $10 million more than Beyoncé made off Cowboy Carter.

Per-Member Earnings (with first 3 shows netting $0)

• Gross per show: $4,000,000
• Assumed net margin: 70%
• Band net per show (after expenses): $2,800,000
• Per member per show (5 members): $560,000

Full 35-show run (with first 3 at $0)

• Netting shows: 32
• Band net total: 32 × $2,800,000 = $89,600,000
• Per member total: 32 × $560,000 = $17,920,000

BSB vs. Beyoncé vs. Taylor

When you line up the numbers side by side, the brilliance of the Backstreet Boys' Sphere strategy comes into focus. Beyoncé's "Cowboy Carter" tour grossed $400 million from 32 shows, but at an estimated 20% margin, her personal take-home was about $80 million, roughly $2.5 million per show, or $32 per fan when spread across 2.5 million ticket buyers.

Taylor Swift's record-shattering "Eras" tour grossed $2.1 billion from 149 shows, netting her around $420 million at a 20% margin. That works out to about $2.8 million per show and $41 per fan across 10 million attendees.

The Backstreet Boys, by contrast, are netting roughly $2.8 million per show at the Sphere—right in line with Taylor's nightly figure—but they're doing it in front of just 17,000 fans per night. On a per-fan basis, that's an incredible $150 net per attendee, nearly five times more efficient than the biggest tours on Earth. In other words, while Taylor and Beyoncé generate bigger totals, the Backstreet Boys are squeezing far more profit out of every seat, every night, without ever leaving Las Vegas.

Then vs. Now: Black & Blue Tour vs. The Sphere

Back in 2001, the Backstreet Boys launched the "Black & Blue World Tour," which spanned 110 shows across the globe. The tour grossed an impressive $315 million, making it one of the biggest concert tours in history at the time. But despite the giant headline number, the band likely didn't take home as much as fans might assume.

Why? Because world tours in the early 2000s carried crushing expenses. Tens of millions were spent on stage design, lighting rigs, freight, pyrotechnics, and the army of staff needed to move the production from city to city. Add in travel costs, venue cuts, promoter splits, Lou Pearlman's ponzi scheming… and the net margin was probably no higher than 10–15%. On $315 million gross, that translates to maybe $30–45 million total net, or roughly $6–9 million per Backstreet Boy for an exhausting year of touring.

And make no mistake, that tour would have been physically brutal. Night after night, they had to leave it all on stage, belting vocals and executing high-energy choreography in a new city every other day. Compare that to today's Sphere setup: the group performs in one place, with graphics doing most of the heavy lifting. Honestly, are their microphones even on? Would any of the 17,000 screaming fans—many of them nostalgic 40-somethings reliving their teen years—care if the guys were mouthing lyrics while doing some light synchronized dance steps? Probably not. The visuals are spectacular, the nostalgia is real, and the checks clear either way.

Bottom line: the Backstreet Boys may have stumbled onto the greatest gig in music history. Uber to the venue, perform for an hour, pocket $560,000 each, rinse and repeat. Do it again in another year or two, whenever you feel like making an easy $18 million.