Touring and Licensing: How Musicals Keep Earning for Decades After Opening Night

Touring and licensing economics explain why a musical that closes on Broadway after three years can still be paying its authors and investors thirty years later. In this guide the Kurums Startup team follows the money from a first national tour through international replica productions, non-replica licensed stagings, school and amateur rights, cast recordings and film, and shows how the licensing houses, producers and rights holders divide it. It is part of our Arts & Creative Economy hub and continues the analysis in Broadway and West End economics and the cost of staging a play.

How much money do touring productions make?

Touring Broadway productions grossed $1.63 billion from 18.5 million admissions across 1,188 playing weeks in the 2018–19 season, the last full pre-pandemic year reported, according to the Broadway League, and the League’s February 2026 study found that touring Broadway contributed over $5 billion to local economies across North America in 2023–24.

The road has grown faster than New York over the long run. In 2009–10 tours grossed $947 million; by 2017–18 the figure was $1.42 billion and by 2018–19 $1.63 billion, a 72 percent increase in a decade, driven by Hamilton, Wicked, The Lion King, Dear Evan Hansen and Come From Away running simultaneous companies. The Broadway League’s own research notes that a typical second-tier city can sell about one week, roughly eight performances, of a touring title, so a tour’s annual gross is a function of how many such weeks it can string together and how many sit-down engagements of four to twelve weeks it can secure in the largest markets.

The audience is different from Manhattan’s. The League’s last touring-audience study found 17 million attendances in the United States and Canada, 72 percent female, average age 53.7, with 55 percent reporting household incomes above $100,000 against 25 percent of Americans. These are subscription audiences: regional presenters such as Broadway Across America, Nederlander National Markets and the independent performing-arts centres sell season packages of five to eight titles, which means a tour of a known show can arrive in Cincinnati or Denver with half its week already sold before a single local advert runs.

How is a national tour financed and booked?

A first national tour is capitalised separately from the Broadway production, usually at $8–15 million for a large musical, raised from investors through the same limited liability company structure, and booked through presenters who pay a weekly guarantee plus a share of box office above a threshold, according to industry practice described by Loeb & Loeb and reported in Broadway Journal.

The guarantee is the key number. A presenter in a 2,500-seat hall commits to pay, say, $600,000–900,000 for the week regardless of sales, then splits anything above an agreed gross (often 85/15 or 90/10 in the tour’s favour). The presenter takes the risk of an empty hall; the producer takes the risk of an expensive tour. Because the presenter pays the guarantee partly in advance, a tour with a strong booking sheet can be financed on cheaper terms than a Broadway run, and a tour of a proven title, such as the 2024–26 tours of Six or & Juliet, can recoup inside its first year. A tour of a Broadway flop, by contrast, is routinely cancelled when presenters decline to guarantee.

Costs on the road include trucking (the first Phantom tour travelled in 26 semi-trailers and took ten days to load in), a touring crew and cast on per diems ($58–86 a day under Actors’ Equity’s 2023 touring agreement), local crew hired under IATSE’s touring “Pink Contract” and the local hall’s house minimums, and marketing shared with the presenter. The gap between Equity’s production contract ($2,439 a week in 2023) and the lower SETA touring tier ($662–1,255) has been the union’s main battleground since 2023, and producers of non-Equity tours, which bypass the union entirely on some titles, are the pressure valve the industry uses when tour economics do not work.

What makes a global replica production different from a licence?

A replica (or “first-class”) production reproduces the original staging exactly, with the same direction, design and orchestrations, usually under the control of the original producer in partnership with a local company; a licensed non-replica production uses only the script and score and can be staged any way the licensee chooses. The first is how The Lion King reached $11 billion and 124 million spectators; the second is how it will keep earning once the replica runs end.

Disney Theatrical, Cameron Mackintosh and the Really Useful Group built the replica model. The Phantom of the Opera had played 183 cities in 41 countries to 140 million people by 2019, with its Broadway production grossing more than $1 billion over 13,981 performances before closing in April 2023. The Lion King has passed 11,000 Broadway performances and 10,000 in the West End, with the Hamburg production alone exceeding $1 billion by 2014 and Japan’s Shiki Theatre Company selling over 10 million tickets. Wicked, capitalised at $14 million in 2003 and recouped in 15 months, has become Broadway’s second-highest grosser and in late 2024 became the first production to take more than $5 million in a single week, according to its production figures. In each case the original producer owns the staging, licenses it to a local partner (Stage Entertainment in Germany and the Netherlands, Shiki in Japan, Ocesa in Mexico, GWB in Australia, S&Co or EMK in Korea) and takes a royalty plus a profit share, while the local partner capitalises the production and carries the risk.

Korea has become the most important replica market outside the English-speaking world: Korean theatre ticket sales reached 665.5 billion won (about $470 million) in 2024, up 28 percent on 2023 and 45.9 percent of all live-entertainment revenue, according to the Korea Performing Arts Box Office Information System, with Kinky Boots, Frankenstein and Chicago among the top sellers. The traffic now runs both ways: Maybe Happy Ending was developed in Seoul from 2014, staged in Tokyo, Atlanta and Shanghai, then opened on Broadway in November 2024, swept six Tony Awards in 2025 and has a US tour scheduled from late 2026 at Baltimore’s Hippodrome.

How does theatrical licensing work?

Once a show’s first-class productions have run their course (and sometimes alongside them), its “stock and amateur” rights are released to a licensing house, which grants performance licences to regional theatres, schools, community groups and foreign producers in exchange for a royalty, usually 8–14 percent of gross box office or a fixed per-performance fee, plus rental of orchestrations, scripts and vocal scores.

Two companies dominate the English-language market. Music Theatre International, founded in 1952 by Frank Loesser and Don Walker and majority-owned by Cameron Mackintosh since 2015, licenses more than 500 musicals including Les Misérables, Hamilton, Mamma Mia!, Into the Woods and the Disney catalogue; its “Broadway Junior” one-hour school editions are a business line in their own right, and its 2021 “All Together Now!” fundraising revue raised $6.2 million for participating theatres in a single weekend, a measure of how many groups it serves. Concord Theatricals was assembled by Concord, the Nashville-based music company majority-owned by the State of Michigan Retirement System, through the 2017 purchase of Imagem (bringing the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization and Boosey & Hawkes) and the 2018 acquisitions of Samuel French and Tams-Witmark; its catalogue runs from Oklahoma! and Hello, Dolly! to Six, Hadestown and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and theatricals contributed about 17 percent of Concord’s revenue in 2020. In April 2026 Concord agreed to merge with Bertelsmann’s BMG, which would take 67 percent of the combined company. Smaller houses (Theatrical Rights Worldwide, Broadway Licensing, Dramatists Play Service for plays, Josef Weinberger and Nick Hern Books in the UK) fill the gaps.

The licensing fee is set by a formula: seats multiplied by ticket price multiplied by performances gives potential gross, and the royalty is a percentage of that or of actual gross, with minimums per performance. A high-school production of a major musical over a weekend might cost $1,000–3,000 in royalties plus $500–1,500 in materials; a 500-seat regional professional theatre running a title for four weeks could pay $30,000–60,000. Multiply by the tens of thousands of productions licensed each year in North America alone and the stock-and-amateur market is worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually, almost all of it flowing to a few hundred titles.

Who gets the money from subsidiary rights?

Subsidiary rights income is divided by contract between the authors, who own the copyright; the original producer, who earned a participation by mounting the first-class production; and that production’s investors, who are entitled to a share of the producer’s take for a fixed term, according to the Dramatists Guild Approved Production Contract and standard offering documents described by Loeb & Loeb.

Under the Approved Production Contract, if a Broadway musical runs the required minimum number of performances, the producer earns a share of the authors’ subsidiary income from stock and amateur licensing, foreign productions, touring and media for a period that runs for years (the contract sets sliding scales, commonly starting around 40 percent of the authors’ receipts and tapering). The producer’s share is then divided with investors, usually on the same 50/50 split as net profits. The window is long: the 2019 Equity lab settlement, for example, gives developmental actors 1 percent of a show’s profits, including touring, for ten years after it reaches 110 percent recoupment, a reflection of how long producers expect the income to last.

Three further streams sit alongside. Cast recordings, though small in revenue terms, drive licensing demand: Hamilton‘s album and its 2020 Disney+ film built the school and amateur pipeline that MTI opened in 2024. Film and television rights are negotiated separately, and for a hit they are substantial, as the Wicked films (2024 and 2025) and the licensed Phantom-inspired Masquerade demonstrate. And merchandise, usually 10–15 percent of gross at the door for a brand-heavy musical, is retained by the production company and shared with the theatre. For a show like The Lion King, the Broadway production’s $2 billion is less than a fifth of the $11 billion total; the rest came from replica productions, tours and licensing, and most of it was earned after the original investors had been repaid many times over.

What does a show need to become a licensing annuity?

Three things, in the experience of the licensing houses: a title audiences already know, a cast size and musical demand that schools and regional theatres can meet, and a long enough first-class run to have built the brand. Grease, Annie, Into the Woods, Les Misérables and Mamma Mia! are perennials because they satisfy all three; a chamber piece with a difficult score and no name recognition rarely does, however good its reviews.

The licensing houses have engineered the second condition. MTI’s Broadway Junior and Concord’s “School Edition” versions cut running time to 60–90 minutes, adjust keys and content, and come with rehearsal tracks, so a title can be performed by a 40-child cast with no pit. Disney Theatrical has licensed The Lion King, Frozen and Aladdin in junior editions while the first-class productions still run, a deliberate choice to build the next generation of audience. Rights holders have also learned to stagger windows: Hamilton was withheld from amateur licensing for almost a decade while tours and sit-downs ran, then released to schools in 2024 with the touring companies still on the road.

Investor returns follow the same logic. A Broadway producer who delivers a flop sees no subsidiary income because the Approved Production Contract thresholds (a minimum number of performances in the first-class run) are never met. A producer who delivers a modest hit that runs 18 months may recoup slowly on Broadway and then earn more from the tour and the licence than from Manhattan. Broadway Journal’s reporting on Mrs. Doubtfire is a case in point: the Broadway run did not recoup, but the UK tour did. The lesson for investors is to read the subsidiary-rights clause before the recoupment schedule.

How does touring work outside North America?

The UK has the second-largest touring circuit, run on the same guarantee model through regional receiving houses (ATG’s venues, the Ambassador and HQ Theatres chains, and independent civic theatres) and supported by the 45 percent touring rate of theatre tax relief, which from April 2025 refunds nearly half of a touring production’s qualifying core costs, according to the House of Lords Library. That relief is the reason the UK road is crowded with musicals that would never tour on Broadway economics.

Continental Europe is a replica-production market more than a touring one: Stage Entertainment runs sit-down productions in Hamburg, Stuttgart, Amsterdam, Madrid and Paris, each capitalised locally and often running years, and Germany’s subsidised Stadttheater system (136 publicly funded houses drawing 25.3 million visits in 2023–24, according to the Deutscher Bühnenverein) licenses musicals for its own ensembles in non-replica stagings, a steady stream of income for Concord and MTI’s German agents. Asia is the growth story: beyond Korea’s 665.5 billion won market, Japan’s Shiki Theatre Company and Toho run long replica engagements, mainland China has built a chain of state-backed grand theatres that host English-language and Mandarin-language tours, and India’s NMACC in Mumbai drew 55,000 people across 32 performances of The Phantom of the Opera in 2024, the first such engagement there.

Türkiye sits at the edge of this circuit. Istanbul receives short engagements of international musicals and dance at Zorlu PSM and, since its 2021 reopening, the Atatürk Cultural Centre, and İKSV’s Istanbul Theatre Festival (thirtieth edition in 2026) imports international productions with corporate sponsorship from the Eczacıbaşı and Koç groups. Turkish producers license Western musicals for local-language stagings, and Devlet Tiyatroları’s 50-plus stages in 20 cities function as a national touring network for its own repertoire of about 120 productions a season, which reach around 1.5 million spectators. Lira volatility makes week-long guarantees in dollars or euros hard to underwrite, which is why full first-class tours rarely include Istanbul. See our Türkiye creative economy playbook for the wider context.

What is changing in touring and licensing?

Three shifts stand out in 2025–26. First, cost inflation has pushed producers towards “reduced” tours: smaller casts, projected scenery and fewer trucks, which is how Phantom‘s revised 2021 London staging and several current US tours have kept weekly costs under presenter guarantees. Second, the union question is moving to the road: Actors’ Equity’s 2023 strike authorisation over touring pay and per diems, and the October 2025 Broadway settlement, set up a touring negotiation in 2026 that will raise the cost base of Equity tours and widen the gap with non-Equity ones. Third, the licensing houses are consolidating and financialising: Concord’s $2 billion-plus acquisition spree, its 2022 bond offering secured on over a million copyrights and the planned 2026 merger with BMG show that theatrical catalogues are now treated as yield assets alongside music publishing.

Streaming has been less disruptive than feared. Filmed stage productions (Hamilton on Disney+, the Royal Ballet and Opera’s cinema relays to 1,500 cinemas in 51 countries, the National Theatre’s NT Live) have tended to increase demand for live tickets and licences rather than replace them, and rights holders now sell the “pro-shot” as a separate window. The next question is whether the replica model survives the cost of travelling a $25 million Broadway design: for most new musicals, producers are already licensing non-replica international stagings earlier, accepting a lower royalty in exchange for a local partner carrying the capital. For the rest of this pillar, start with our overview of how Broadway and the West End capitalise and recoup a show.

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