How the World Ran Out of Tour Buses

If you’ve ever gone to a major concert, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the monolithic tour buses parked up near the venue. These blacked-out behemoths embody the mystery of life on the road for a rock band, and evoke questions about what their tinted windows might hide.

Buses like this are packed with the creature comforts any self-respecting musician needs for a life on the road, beginning with a fridge full of beer, beds and bathrooms and going on from there to include everything from massive TVs to cigar humidors and even mobile recording studios. Here in America, they’re also usually slathered with chrome accents adding to the cool aesthetic of a rock-star lifestyle.

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Just a few years ago, it was pretty easy for bands to get hold of buses like this to take out on the road. The first way to do this, if you’re a big name, is to buy one for yourself and keep it running on tour after tour. If you’re a megastar like Dolly Parton, you can even rent it out for fans to stay in.

One bus, two bus, red bus, blue bus.

But for musicians that haven’t written something on the level of “Nine to Five,” the best way to track down a tour bus is to rent one.

“Before the pandemic, there seemed to be more buses available,” says Jamie Morral, president of Pennsylvania-based rental firm JGM Coaches. “Bands would be able to book their tours and feel confident that they would find a bus,”

For almost two decades, Morral and his firm loaned out buses to bands like Killswitch Engage, Hot Tuna and Simple Plan for their American tours. But on March 15, 2020, states began implementing lockdown orders as COVID-19 spread across the country.

“The whole industry was paused for two years,” says Scott Bell, tour manager for American rock band The Menzingers. “So now, everybody has come out to make money and everyone has to tour.”

Bands like The Menzingers hit the road soon after Covid-19 restrictions lifted.

Fierce Competition

Now, almost three years later, bands, musicians and artists of all kinds are itching to get back out on the road and make up for lost time with fans. Because of this, competition for everything needed to put on a psychedelic show is fierce. Venues, equipment and tour buses are all in high demand as everyone from Taylor Swift to Def Leppard tries to hit the road now that they’re free to travel the world once again. Rabid competition is leading to sky-high prices, canceled reservations and soaring demand for all manner of equipment, particularly tour buses.

As long as there’s been rock bands, there’s been tour buses.

“You had the likes of Diana Ross on waiting lists with bus companies hoping bands would cancel a tour so they could get a bus,” says Graham Forster, a tour bus driver for Irish company Crosslink.

So, how the heck did we get here?

First up, the music industry changed. With the advent of streaming, album sales and new music releases aren’t enough to make being a recording artist a full-time job for many. Spotify pays out just $0.004 per stream, so revenue for bands and singers has increasingly come from merchandise and ticket sales.

So when the pandemic put large events and concerts on hold, many musicians struggled. Now that restrictions have been lifted, “Everybody is trying to put money in their checking accounts,” says Morral.

Dolly Parton’s tour bus, where you can spend the night.

No More Buses

But the pandemic took more than just money from artists’ purses. With the industry on hold, bus companies struggled as work dried up. While some firms were able to stay solvent by, for instance, loaning out their buses to healthcare providers to act as mobile vaccine hubs in the pandemic, this was either done at a loss or didn’t bring in the kind of revenue they were used to. Some had to make the difficult decision to sell vehicles or even close up shop for good.

“Some of those companies that went bankrupt during the pandemic, not all those buses have been bought up or are being run by other companies yet,” says Morral. This means there’s now a shortage of buses as these vehicles are still waiting to be snapped up by other operators. “If you take 20, 30 or 40 buses out of the entertainer equation then that’s a lot of buses.”

UK buses were taken out of service to become vaccine hubs.

For this reason, the price of tour buses is skyrocketing. Where bands could usually expect to spend 20 to 35 percent of their budget on the bus, according to Morral, that’s no longer the case.

“I’ve had managers and artists write to me since this all started telling me they would pay double if I could give them buses,” says Morral. “I’ve heard stories of people having their buses pulled and given to someone else. It’s bad business.”