What the numbers should look like
Is our merch doing well?
At a show the test is spend per head: atVenu’s average for 2025 was $10.24, with 21% of fans buying. No benchmark is published for comedy, and an online store is judged by different numbers: conversion rate, order value and repeat rate.
Five numbers, and what each one counts
“Doing well” is a comparison. It needs a number of your own and somebody else’s to set it against. Merch has five numbers worth keeping. Some belong to the table at a show, some to an online store, and some to both.
- Spend per head
- A night’s merch sales divided by the number of people who paid to get in. It is the table’s headline figure, because it lets a night in a club be set against a night in an arena.
- Conversion
- The share of people who could have bought and did. At a show it is buyers as a share of the audience. Online it is orders as a share of visits.
- Order value
- What the average buyer spends in one go: sales divided by the number of orders. Stores call it average order value, or AOV.
- Repeat rate
- The share of customers who come back and buy again. Only a seller who can tell customers apart can count it.
- Size curve
- The share of sales that each size takes. It decides how a run of shirts is split before it is printed.
At a show the first three are one sum seen from three sides. Spend per head is the share of the room that buys, multiplied by what each buyer spends. Take a sample night: 800 people pay to get in, 168 of them buy, and the table takes $8,400 before tax. The share buying is 21%, the average order is $50, and the spend per head is $10.50, which is 21% of $50.
Divini’s own dataSample figures, not a real show. · checked
So a low spend per head has two possible causes. Either too few people bought, which points at where the table stands, how long the queue is and whether the audience knew it was there. Or enough people bought and each spent little, which points at the range and its prices. The single figure cannot say which, so keep all three.
The published benchmarks
The table sets out what was found for each of the five, and who published it. Every row was read off its own page on 6 October 2026, and each carries a label that says how far to trust it. Most of the show figures come from one company: atVenu, which makes the point-of-sale and settlement software used at merch tables, and publishes a review of the year’s averages.
| Measure | Benchmark | What it counts | Source | Label | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spend per head, at a show | $10.24 | atVenu’s average spend per head for 2025, in dollars. Its page does not define the figure | atVenu, year in review | Filed or disclosed | 6 Oct 2026 |
| Conversion, at a show | 21% | atVenu’s average share of fans buying merchandise, 2025 | atVenu, year in review | Filed or disclosed | 6 Oct 2026 |
| Order value, at a show | $64 | What atVenu calls the spend of the average fan, before tax, in August 2025. Read here as the spend of a fan who buys | atVenu, fan spending report | Filed or disclosed | 6 Oct 2026 |
| Items in an order, at a show | 2.1 | Items in the average purchase, in August 2025. It was 1.7 in 2024 | atVenu, fan spending report | Filed or disclosed | 6 Oct 2026 |
| Conversion, online | 1.4% | The median store’s share of visits that include an order. 421 Shopify stores, 90 days to 26 September 2026 | Littledata | Third-party estimate | 6 Oct 2026 |
| Order value, online | $110 | The median store’s average order, same stores. $98 for the fashion and clothing stores among them | Littledata | Third-party estimate | 6 Oct 2026 |
| Repeat rate, online | 27% | The chance that a customer who has bought once buys again, on all-time figures | Smile.io | Third-party estimate | 6 Oct 2026 |
| Size curve | L 30%, M 28%, XL 20% | Share of shirt sales by size in the United States, from a wholesaler’s guide. Not measured at concerts | The Adair Group | Third-party estimate | 6 Oct 2026 |
| Any of these, for comedy | None | No figure for comedy shows was found | None found | Not public | 6 Oct 2026 |
The online rows describe online stores of every kind. None is a benchmark for merch stores.
Filed or disclosedThe four rows from atVenu’s own pages. · Source: atVenu, Artist Merchandise Trends of 2025, atVenu, The 2025 Fan Spending Report · checked
Third-party estimateThe four rows from other companies’ published figures. · Source: Littledata, Average Ecommerce and Shopify Conversion Rate, Littledata, Average Order Value by Industry, Littledata, Average Conversion Rate for Fashion Ecommerce, Smile.io, What is a Repeat Customer, and Why are they Profitable?, The Adair Group, Shirt Order Size Distribution · checked
Not publicNo spend per head, share of fans buying or order value was found for comedy shows. atVenu’s chart of its top sixteen genres has no comedy row. · Source: atVenu, Artist Merchandise Trends of 2025 · checked
One caution covers every show figure. atVenu’s page does not define its spend per head or its share of fans buying: it does not say whether tax is counted, or how attendance is. Its only note on method is for its ranking of cities, which takes shows settled from artists’ accounts and averages the spend per head of every show. Its prices for items are given before tax. So this chapter reads spend per head as sales before tax and before the venue’s share, divided by the people who paid to get in. That is a reading, not atVenu’s definition, and a figure of your own has to be worked the same way before the two are compared.
Spend per head, by year and by genre
atVenu’s average has risen in each year it shows: $8.79 a head for 2023, $9.90 for 2024 and $10.24 for 2025. The same page shows $10.33 for 2026, and does not say whether that is a forecast or the year so far.
Filed or disclosedSource: atVenu, Artist Merchandise Trends of 2025 · checked
atVenu’s pages do not always agree with each other. Another of its posts about 2025 gives $10.29 for the year, and $9.44 for 2024. This chapter takes its yearly figures from the year in review, and names the page beside any figure taken from elsewhere.
Filed or disclosedSource: atVenu, An Updated Look At Artist Merch Trends In 2025, atVenu, Artist Merchandise Trends of 2025 · checked
The average hides more than it shows. The report charts its top sixteen genres, and they run from $34.52 a head for K-pop down to $8.46 for country, a spread of four to one among the sixteen alone.
Thirteen of the sixteen sit above the average for the year. The genres left off the chart are not listed, and neither is the weight each genre carries in the average. Either way, the one average is a poor yardstick for any single act, and the row for its genre is a better one. An act in country at $9 a head is ahead of its genre. An act in K-pop at $20 is well behind.
The city matters as well. atVenu ranks its markets by spend per head, from $16.25 in Los Angeles to $12.59 in Orlando, the fifteenth on its list. It leaves out any city with fewer than 100 shows.
Filed or disclosedSource: atVenu, Artist Merchandise Trends of 2025 · checked
Spend per head, by size of room
atVenu also splits its average by the capacity of the room. In 2025 the highest group was the smallest rooms, under 500, at $11.86 a head. The lowest was rooms of 3,000 to 5,000, at $8.39. The largest rooms, 15,000 and over, came back up to $10.75.
Two things follow. Spend per head does not simply fall as rooms get bigger: it dips in the middle and recovers. And the pattern moves from year to year. In 2024 the largest rooms were the highest group of all, at $11.84. In 2025 they fell by 9%, while every group under 3,000 rose by 10% or more.
A plan needs a figure before any show has been counted. Divini, which writes this Manual, sizes a tour with a model of its own. Its figures are assumptions, not measurements: a base spend per head for each size of room, lower at every step up in size.
Set beside atVenu’s figures, the model’s base figures are lower for every size of room. For a club it has $10.00 where atVenu reports $11.86. For an arena it has $5.50, between a half and two-thirds of the $8.95 to $10.75 that atVenu reports for rooms of 5,000 and over. The model also has spend per head falling at every step up in size, which atVenu’s 2025 figures do not show.
A model that runs low makes for a cautious plan, since stock bought against it is less likely to be left over. It is not evidence of what a night will take. Where the two disagree, the reported figure is the benchmark.
How many buy, and what they spend
About one fan in five buys. atVenu puts the share at 21% for 2025, and at 20 or 21% in each year since 2023, though its page gives 2023 and 2024 both ways round. Spend per head rose by about a sixth over the same years. So most of the rise came from what each buyer spent, not from more of the room buying.
Filed or disclosedSource: atVenu, Artist Merchandise Trends of 2025 · checked
atVenu’s report on fan spending, published in August 2025, gives the other half: $64 before tax, up 7% on 2024, running from $45 at smaller shows to $90 or more at the largest. The report calls this what the average fan spends, and in the next sentence calls it spend per head. It cannot be spend per head as the year in review uses the term, since it is six times that figure. This chapter reads it as the spend of a fan who buys. A separate atVenu report, on more than 50,000 events at venues, gives $67.53 a fan at concerts.
Filed or disclosedSource: atVenu, The 2025 Fan Spending Report, atVenu, 2025 Mid-Year Venue Merchandise Insights · checked
Buyers are also taking more. The fan spending report counts 2.1 items in the average purchase, up from 1.7 in 2024. Single-item purchases fell to 52%, and the share of fans buying two or three items rose to 33%.
Filed or disclosedSource: atVenu, The 2025 Fan Spending Report · checked
The two reports do not quite meet. Divide $10.24 a head by 21% buying and the answer is about $49 a buyer, not $64. atVenu does not explain the difference, and the two pages may not count the same shows in the same way. So a figure for spend per buyer needs its page named beside it: one worked from spend per head and one taken from the fan spending report start $15 apart.
Divini’s own dataArithmetic on atVenu’s two published figures, done for this chapter. · Source: atVenu, Artist Merchandise Trends of 2025, atVenu, The 2025 Fan Spending Report · checked
What buyers take is narrow. T-shirts were 56% of all items sold in 2025, at an average of $37 before tax, and the three best-selling items brought in 63% of gross merch sales.
Filed or disclosedSource: atVenu, Artist Merchandise Trends of 2025 · checked
An online store is measured differently
An online store has no audience to divide by. Its conversion rate is orders divided by visits, and Shopify, a store platform, counts visits and not people. A fan who looks three times and buys once is three visits and one order.
Filed or disclosedSource: Shopify, Ecommerce Conversion Rate · checked
So the two conversion figures do not measure the same thing: one divides by the people in a room, the other by visits to a site. Littledata, an analytics company, measured 421 Shopify stores over the 90 days to 26 September 2026. In the median store 1.4% of visits included an order, and a store above 2.6% was in the top fifth. The median store’s average order was $110. For the 69 fashion and clothing stores among them the figures were 1.3% and $98.
Littledata gives the median, the store in the middle. Its mean is 1.9%, pulled up by a few stores that convert far better than the rest. A store measured against a mean will look worse than it is. The sample also leaves out the smallest stores: each had at least 1,000 visits and 90 orders in the 90 days.
Third-party estimateA benchmark from the Shopify stores that use Littledata’s software, generated on 2 October 2026. None is identified as a merch store. · Source: Littledata, Average Ecommerce and Shopify Conversion Rate, Littledata, Average Order Value by Industry, Littledata, Average Conversion Rate for Fashion Ecommerce · checked
Benchmarks from different companies do not agree. Dynamic Yield, which sells personalisation software, reports an average of 2.68% across its customers over the past twelve months, against Littledata’s mean of 1.9%. The two count different stores, and they do not count the same way: Dynamic Yield divides buyers by visitors, where Littledata divides visits with an order by all visits. Neither describes merch stores. No conversion or order-value benchmark for artists’ or comedians’ stores was found for this chapter.
Third-party estimateAn average across the customers of Dynamic Yield by Mastercard. · Source: Dynamic Yield, eCommerce conversion rate benchmarks · checked
Repeat rate
Repeat rate is the one number a table cannot produce. A sale across a table has no name on it, so nobody can tell a second purchase from a first. An online store can: Shopify’s reports count a customer as returning from their second order.
Filed or disclosedSource: Shopify help, Customers reports · checked
Published figures are thin. Smile.io, which makes loyalty software, says a customer who has bought once has a 27% chance of buying again, rising to 49% after a second order and 62% after a third. Those are all-time figures from the stores that use its product, not a rate for a year or a quarter. No repeat rate for merch stores was found.
Third-party estimateA loyalty software company’s all-time figures from its own customers’ stores. The article was first published in 2015 and updated in May 2024, and does not date the figures. · Source: Smile.io, What is a Repeat Customer, and Why are they Profitable? · checked
For merch the period matters more than usual. A fan may buy at each tour and at no time between, so a rate counted over 90 days and one counted over all time describe different things. A repeat rate with no period beside it cannot be compared with anything.
The size curve
No size curve measured at concerts was found. atVenu’s report gives its top items and its top t-shirt colours, and no sizes.
Filed or disclosedSource: atVenu, Artist Merchandise Trends of 2025 · checked
What is published comes from companies that sell shirts for groups in the United States, and two of them give almost the same shape. In both, large is the most common size at 30%. Medium, large and extra large together are 78% in one guide and 75% in the other, and the smallest and largest sizes are one to three shirts in a hundred.
| Size | The Adair Group | Manatee Shirt |
|---|---|---|
| XS | 1% | 2% |
| S | 7% | 10% |
| M | 28% | 25% |
| L | 30% | 30% |
| XL | 20% | 20% |
| 2XL | 12% | 10% |
| 3XL | 2% | 3% |
The Adair Group gives its figures as shares of shirt sales in the United States, and names no source for them. Manatee Shirt gives approximate averages for a mixed group of adults ordering unisex shirts.
Third-party estimateTwo suppliers’ guides, one last updated in June 2020 and one in April 2026. Neither is measured at concerts. · Source: The Adair Group, Shirt Order Size Distribution, Manatee Shirt, Average T-Shirt Size Distribution · checked
The Adair Group does not advise ordering to its own percentages. It suggests one small, two medium, three large, three extra large and one 2XL, leaning towards the larger sizes because a shirt that is too big can still be worn.
Third-party estimateSource: The Adair Group, Shirt Order Size Distribution · checked
These are guides to ordering for a group, not counts of an audience. An audience has its own curve, and sales are the quickest way to learn it: the nightly count at a table records every size sold, and so does every online order. Chapter 05 sets out how the count works.
Comedy has no published benchmark
No benchmark is published for comedy. atVenu’s report charts its top sixteen genres. Fifteen are kinds of music, the sixteenth is Creator/Podcast, and comedy is not among them. Yet atVenu sells to comedians: its page for touring acts says the software is built for “artists, bands, comedians, and crews”. The report does not say how the sixteen were chosen, or whether comedy shows are counted under another heading, in a genre left off the chart, or not at all.
Filed or disclosedSource: atVenu, Artist Merchandise Trends of 2025, atVenu, Touring artists · checked
Nor was a figure found anywhere else. atVenu’s is the only yearly benchmark of merch spend this chapter found, and a search for a spend per head, a share of the audience buying or an average order for comedy shows turned up nothing from any other source.
Not publicNo comedy figure is on atVenu’s pages, and none was found from any other source. · checked
The nearest row on the chart is Creator/Podcast, at $11.25 a head in 2025, 3% down on the year before. The report does not say what is counted in it, so it is not a comedy figure either.
Filed or disclosedSource: atVenu, Artist Merchandise Trends of 2025 · checked
Until a benchmark exists, any comedy figure is an inference. Divini’s model makes the plainest one: it gives a comedy show the base figure for its size of room, with no adjustment up or down. On that basis a comedy tour whose middle-sized room is a theatre is planned at $9.00 a head. That is an inference, made because nothing is published. It is not a measurement.
Divini’s own dataDivini’s own model, and its own inference. No comedy show was measured to produce it. · checked
It makes a comedian’s own counts worth more than a band’s. A band may find its genre on the chart. A comedian has only the tour’s own run of shows to go on, and after a handful of them that run is a better benchmark than anything in print.
Setting your own numbers beside them
- Count the same thing
- Spend per head here is sales before tax and before the venue’s share, divided by the people who paid to get in. A figure worked after the venue’s share will look worse than it is.
- Compare like with like
- Use the row for the genre and the row for the size of room, not the one average. Among the sixteen genres on the chart the spread is four to one.
- Keep all three
- Record the share who bought and the average order beside the spend per head. They fall for different reasons.
- Give the period
- A conversion rate or a repeat rate says nothing without the dates it covers.
- Put your own run first
- A single show says little. A run of shows in rooms of a similar size is a benchmark no report can match.
Filed or disclosedSource: atVenu, Artist Merchandise Trends of 2025 · checked