Narrative
The gross is the easy number. What is left after the venue and HMRC is the one clients miss.
Take a touring artist selling £25 t-shirts at the merch table, printed in runs of 200, 400 people through the door. The back-of-envelope sum is simple: "Sell 50 shirts a night and that's £1,250 in the van by midnight."
The gross is right. The take-home is nothing like it.
When you model merch income for a client, the headline price is the least useful number. What matters is the stack of sitting between retail price and what actually clears.