Is the concert industry doing okay?
Part of the difficulty of making sense of concert business discourse is that everyone's perspective is skewed--including mine.
Last week, GQ published a piece about the struggles of arena shows specifically, highlighting the recent tour/show cancellations from the Black Keys and Jennifer Lopez.
It also mentions Justin Timberlake as a counterpoint because he’s apparently added dates to his most recent tour, except he was cancelling shows for this tour last fall and as recently as May. He was cancelling shows for his 2019 tour, and then cancelling the make up shows for those.
So is he a success story? Or are we all a bit confused as to what’s going on in this sphere? This is a sincere question, by the way, because I don't have access to attendance numbers, and even if I had the sales numbers it would be hard to know how many of those remained unused on the secondary market.
I started being suspicious of the way concert industry discussion was being framed in 2018. It’s the year I really started digging into industry resources to see what the people behind the curtain were actually saying, it’s also the year Rolling Stone published a piece stoking panic about the “future of the business,” citing concerned managers, agents and promoters all worried about revenue going down and ticket prices not being sky high anymore.
“The concert business is jammed with stars of all ages who can fill clubs, theaters and even arenas, but most who charge top prices of hundreds or even thousands of dollars are in their 60s and 70s.”
So it’s not “concerts” that they were afraid of losing, it was revenue streams. The stars that they dismissed should be the ones inheriting the mantles of the retirees, but that doesn’t seem interesting. It’s easier to leapfrog into those revenues.
This seems to be what cause the Black Keys to falter with their arena tour, the ticket prices being mostly out of range for their audience.
I don’t think it was crazy to think they could do an arena tour—they have before. But they probably didn’t charge as much in the past. In their reporting on tour cancellations, NBC quoted a fan, “There’s only a SMALL amount of people (10%) that will spend $500+ on vip/floor/premium. The rest of us have budgets and won’t spend $100 on nosebleeds.”
In the past, AEG’s Rick Mueller said, “I still haven’t seen a threshold where somebody won’t buy front row seats. So let’s get more out of that front row or best ten percent of the house.”
I can only assume this was the logic behind implementing Platinum tickets seemingly across the board; ensure that the most eager fans are asked the highest prices. But the percentage of willing participants is not consistent throughout fan bases, nor does it say anything about the rest of the audience that needs to fill up the rest of the seats.
This consistent hammering home of “100 true fans” that will be happy to throw money at their fan objects can’t actually make up for an entire arena. The fan bases that thrive off of capitalist accomplishments congregate around the artists that play the game the most ruthlessly.
I suspect this is what happened with the Black Keys, not because I think anyone who has to downscale a tour was being greedy in the first place, but because this turn of events lead to them parting ways with the management they signed with only three years ago: Irving Azoff and Steve Moir.
That Azoff was involved made a lot of things click into place for me. It’s why I suspect they were promised the spend-happy crowd. He’s been in the news recently, accused of collusion with Live Nation by the DOJ, and well, he has a long history that would require more words than anyone has an interest in reading. Relevant to the current topic of ticket prices is that Azoff was credited with raising base ticket prices with The Eagles in 1995, and in 2018 introduced LaneOne, a “premium” ticketing service.
Still, even me talking about the Black Keys and Timberlake is focusing on a segment of the industry that I don’t think needs that type of attention. They are propped up by enough behind the scenes scaffolding that pivoting away from touring—or simply downsizing—is but a blip on the horizon.
As David Martin, of the Featured Artists Coalition told The Guardian, “It feels like the top 1% have become the top 0.5%. The level of artists we’re talking about here that are struggling to make things stack up financially would really surprise people.”
I don’t care about that point five percent because they represent a miniscule part of the industry and it’s not one I have any say over.
“[Focusing on Swifties] both makes light of the topic, in my opinion, and ignores all of the harm that not only Live Nation and Ticketmaster have been doing to the music industry but also leaves out the harm that happens to venues, that happens to staff that happens to artists themselves.” — Greg Saunier, Deerhoof
As Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier said on The Lever podcast, the only reason this topic took off in the mainstream, “is because the commerce of a megastar was momentarily inconvenienced.” Not because the system has been broken for a while and struggling artists make up more of the artists community than anyone might expect.
The risk aversion that is plaguing the big leagues has far more of an impact on the working class musicians. Arena tours cancelled a year out is kind of a shrug in my book. But I asked my friend who makes a living performing in Scotland what things look like over there, and she shared a story about a band whose gig was cancelled a week out because it wasn’t sold out.
A week out means that there was no time to even stage anything else, and didn’t give the band any time to find another venue.
Although Chris Black’s GQ piece is ultimately about the 0.5%, I think it’s conclusion is worth remembering:
“Big streaming numbers look great online but don’t necessarily translate to ticket sales. A touring business has to be built, returning to the same cities every year. A career cannot rely solely on the algorithm.”
The problem seems to be that solid fan bases and decades of experience doesn’t translate to ticket sales either, these days.
It is also alarming because if the acts that rely on touring to build their audiences and careers aren’t able to do so, we’re left with a gaping chasm between the high rollers and the hobbyists. The few success stories I hear of from our parallel pop culture seem more and more to be anomalies, but again, my perspective is limited.
A perpetuation of the hollowed out culture of today seems inevitable if that’s really what the scene looks like.
It is a profound insult that music industry folks refer to bands or artists as "hobbyists"; given that the opportunities to make music as a profession have been made elusive to the point of non-existence. The disdain implied in that term damages the prospects of some extremely fine and distinctive musicians, and is unwarranted.