Be afraid, be very afraid, but don’t despair: The world will get scarier — you just need to get the right costume.
t’ll be Halloween in a couple of weeks, so it’s time to toss a little scare out there. During a deep dive into the changing production-rehearsal studio market recently, I learned that the average size of rehearsal rooms is getting bigger.
Bo Holst, who’s been with S.I.R. since 1974 and now runs its New York operations, told me that the size of the average professional rehearsal studio has increased from about 25-by-30 feet 20 years ago to closer to twice that now, as touring artists have pressed not only for more amenities like producer offices and green rooms with refrigerators but for more space, period. That’s because, he said, even the touring acts furthest down the totem pole need to create more sophisticated stage presentations. They’re bringing their own floor-mounted moving-head lighting fixtures, foggers, lasers and other effects devices into the rehearsal studio and onto any and every stage they can get on. That’s because their competitors are doing the same thing.
Let that sink in — I just called a music act a “competitor.” But that’s what they have become. In an industry where the revenue now comes from ticket sales instead of record sales, live shows now compete with each other at all levels of the live-music business in a way records never did. A consumer could buy as many CDs or downloads as they liked and play them whenever they felt like it, but live music means they have to be at a specific place at a specific time in order to consume that show.
Or do they?
Got It Live (Sort Of)… If You Want It
The rise of live streaming is increasingly encompassing the live music sector. Companies like LiveList.com, LivingIndie, iConcerts.com and StageIt.com are tracking the growing use of live streaming by performing artists and festivals. Vevo, a joint venture between the world’s two biggest music companies, Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group, began as a streaming outlet for music videos but is increasingly being used as a platform for streaming live shows, often in conjunction with corporate sponsors, such as a recent American Express Unstaged concert featuring The Killers in New York. Companies like ConcertWindow.com are integrating live music streaming and real-time social-media interaction, which is arguably the one-two punch for capturing this cohort.
At the moment, live streaming has a fairly small footprint. Research from Global Web Index indicates that only about 1.5 percent of consumers globally are engaging with Meerkat and just fewer than two percent are using Periscope. However, the proliferation of bigger broadband pipes and ad-blocking software, which will make the concert experience more seamless, is making all live-streaming productions more attractive. Meanwhile, among the next generation of concertgoers, 40 percent of them say they are watching native forms of video on their smartphone more frequently than they were a year ago. The change in the user base is coming, and it’s coming faster then many might expect. Digital Democracy Survey data shows Millennials now represent nearly one-third of the U.S. population over age 13, and their entertainment consumption is diverging from that of their elders. (Just a couple of years ago, cable companies were laughing off the notion that Millennial cord-cutting would impact their bottom line. Today? Not so much.)
More live music being streamed, and the upcoming consumer generation looking for less-costly entertainment alternatives. That’s where it might get scary. The next round of consumers might simply go out less. A
survey by ULI/Lachman Associates indicates that barely 60 percent of all Millennials spend time at music clubs, and of that group, only 25 percent spend time at clubs more than once a month. And concert environments have been turning them off. A generation that’s already looking down the barrel of low wage growth and burdened by education debt often can’t see the shows it wants to thanks to rampant ticket scalping, which has reached the point where the New York State Attorney General’s office this year finally began addressing the problem.
At the same time, the infrastructure of live music is showing signs of overbuilding, with a surfeit of both bands and places for them to perform. Temple University’s Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab asks, “Are There Too Many Live Music Venues In Philly?” and raises concerns about the impact of giant brands like Live Nation and AEG Live, both of which have been rolling up local venues. Meanwhile, small clubs remain uncountable because clubs will have music one night but keep the televisions tuned to a big game the next. Nashville’s The Tennessean chronicles a similar scenario there, noting that industry watchers are, “worried that Nashville’s concert industry has reached its saturation point.”
There is growth in the concert industry, but an inflection point is not far off: According to Ticketmaster’s 2014 U.S. Live Event Attendee study, 44 percent of Baby Boomers ages 51 to 70 that attend live events said they attend more events now than they did 10 years ago. Ten years from now? Probably not so much. (And by then, Live Nation will be overcharging for beer and oxygen.) The big bump in the concert industry — the classic rock and pop acts that have been padding the tour-revenue rolls since the turn of the century, and the Boomers with the money to see them — are both declining cohorts. Meanwhile, Millennials, the single-biggest generation in American history, may be just as happy seeing music on a device instead of in a venue.
Boo!
The Same, But Different
Live music isn’t going away, but the landscape it lives on will look different. Metrics today point more and more towards experiential entertainment and away from passive attendance at concerts where those on stage take the lead. Connected devices will continue to play a bigger role, as will virtual reality. While both of those platforms could encourage further avoidance of venues outside the house, they can also be leveraged to do just the opposite, as long as what they can point people to is spectacular enough. That will put more of an onus on the infrastructure of live shows — sound, lights, video, effects and platforms that manage interactivity with the audience — to get people off of couches. Which brings us back to small-town duos bringing their own moving lights, foggers and mini-line arrays into the Holiday Inn lounge.
And let’s say that that isn’t enough to compensate for falling show attendance and revenues in the long run. Then the music business will be facing a rerun of what it faced when CD and then download sales began to disappear. But at least this time we’ll have been through it before, and we’ll know that there are solutions, because the fundamental lesson we’ve learned in the last 20 years or so is that people don’t stop wanting music, they just start consuming it in different ways.
Chicken Little does get a bit wiser every time the sky falls. If concerts have to pivot to accommodate growing online audiences, then the FOH professionals who mix them, among others stakeholders, will have to figure out how to do that. And they will, with help from a pro audio industry whose existence depends on a healthy live-music business. So be afraid, be very afraid, but don’t despair. The world will get scarier — you just need to get the right costume.
