Some Dynamics That Could Radically Alter the Nature of Live Music
This column has happily marinated itself in the fact that, some time ago, live music supplanted recorded music as the industry’s main revenue generator. The numbers spoke for themselves. While recorded-music sales dropped precipitously between 2000 and 2013, from $13.36 billion to barely $3 billion, concert revenues this year are expected to top $10 billion for the first time, up from $4 billion a decade earlier. Yet I still enjoy elaborating on and contextualizing them. We’ve achieved the tour-sound equivalent of hi-fi in terms of sonic quality, and the options for recording those shows are as good as any conventional recording studio can offer. Now that Uber Eats can deliver to the FOH location, even the food is better. It’s a great time to fly a rig.
So what better time to think about what dangers may lurk around the corner. Specifically, that live music may become vulnerable to a phenomenon that’s plaguing the record business at the moment: too damn much music. That is, thanks to streaming, it’s becoming increasingly difficult if not impossible to listen to, find, or even organize music, because it pours out of the broadband pipes so rapidly that’s it’s overwhelming to process. Is that already happening with live music?
Is Concert Fatigue Setting In?
There are indications of just that cropping up on the interwebs. Articles with titles like “10 Things You Know if You Go to Too Many Concerts” (#3: “All our money goes toward tickets”) and the inevitable Buzzfeed listicle “10 Signs You Go to Too Many Concerts” (#5: ”You don’t have any money from spending it all on concert tickets and merch”) suggest concertgoer fatigue accompanied by empty-wallet syndrome may be setting in. That’s not a good thing considering that show tickets keep getting more expensive — as the average ticket price in L.A. is now over $125 for any show and near or over $100 in all top-ten U.S. markets — while wages continue to lag.
The array of live concerts this summer doesn’t begin to approach the mind-numbing numbers pouring from the spigots of Pandora and Spotify, but there are enough to put the tyranny-of-choice dynamic on the table. The list of artists heading out or staying out on the road as this year’s tour season kicks off is lengthy. Taylor Swift, Kesha and Macklemore, Pink, Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran, Britney Spears, Lorde, Harry Styles, Fall Out Boy, Demi Lovato, Imagine Dragons, Elton John — the list of big names is long and nicely varied by vintage, gender and genre. But there are also plenty of up-and-comers hitting the road, including Twin Peaks, Lucy Dacus and Panda Bear all looking for career traction.
There are plenty of music festivals this year, too, including stalwarts like Coachella, Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo. But the outlook is dimmer in that category after declines in attendance and revenues in the last two years. It augurs what Paste magazine in 2016 was already calling “peak music festival,” citing the expanding and exhaustive number of marquee weekend-long music events such as Firefly, Hangout, Boston Calling, Governors Ball, Outside Lands, Treefort, Sasquatch!, Stagecoach, Eaux Claires and tons more smaller regional festivals. It’s become a crowded field, one that’s had its casualties, like the cancellation of British Columbia’s Pemberton Music Festival, due to bankruptcy, and the cancellation of New York’s Mysteryland USA, which disappeared due to appropriately worded “unforeseen circumstances.” And of course there was the disastrous Fyre Festival, the Bernie Madoff of music events, which resulted in guilty pleas to federal wire-fraud by its promoter in the wake of an FBI investigation.
Of course, these are just some of the bigger names and events on tap this year. You may have also noticed that it’s now impossible to swing a cat and not have it land on a stage, of the sort that are being installed on a daily basis in new clubs, restaurants, hotel lobbies, airports (Nashville’s BNA is up to three, Austin’s AUS has five) and anywhere else two or more people might congregate and has room for a tip jar. In fact, it might be this very ubiquity that’s hastening the onset of concert fatigue: A show by a touring “name” act or a festival that fans plan for long in advance is a destination of time and place that can precipitate some pleasant anticipation; being sung to from every corner of a room everywhere, all the time, might in the long run breed some contempt. If nothing else, that same ubiquity contributes to the perceptual devaluation of live music, just as too much recorded music does.
Too Much of a Good Thing?
The sheer amount of live music out there has been a very good thing for those who provide the sound for it. It’s why there have been new SR companies cropping up nationally and regionally in recent years, and it’s why we’ve seen an increase in the number of overseas speaker brands on these shores. But a backlash effect could be in the offing. First, the balance between vendors and customers could shift as more vendors enter a peaking market, precipitating rounds of price-cutting. That’s something we’re already seeing some of as tours seek to cut overhead (and the industry responds with lighter boxes and more precise coverage capabilities that can cut the number of boxes needed). Any number of external factors could also precipitate a sudden pullback in consumer spending, from a terrorist act — concert ticket sales in France were down by as much as 25 percent at the Bataclan attack in 2015 — to the next recession that most economists believe is overdue.
When the paradigm finally does change, when the supply-and-demand balances shift, the smart ones will have already anticipated that. We’ve already seen a growing number of SR providers moving into AV systems installation and integration. Another recession may put a crimp in the corporate event business, which has mushroomed in the last five or six years, but it helped create a sense that everything has to be heralded by a live event of some scale, so that will be a recession-resistant area of work.
Prognosis? Upbeat, So Far
This is a very, very good time to be making and amplifying live music, and it has been for much of the century so far. The trick is figuring out what the next one will be before it gets here.
