After a miraculous 2023 (studied exhaustively in the VIP+ special report “Peak Performance”) propelled by the likes of Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, the live music business in 2024 would seem to have nowhere to go but down.
And yet …
Live Nation Entertainment last month reported hitting new highs once again in Q2 2024, with over $6 billion in revenues and $446 million in operating income.
A month before LNE posted those quarterly results, Pollstar conducted a midyear live music assessment of its own, analyzing the top 100 global tours that occurred between November 2023 and May 2024. And the data confirms there is an unprecedented amount of money flowing in — $3 billion-plus total gross to be exact, up 8.7% from the same period last year.
But how do those data points square with other indicators that all is not well in the concert business, as seen in those tour cancellations by several major artists that grabbed headlines earlier this year?
Then there are the empty seating charts and lower turnouts noticed by fans as of late and the fact that music festivals that once sold out in minutes have struggled to do the same this season — if they even put on a show at all.
While this evidence could be a case of the internet seeing what it wants to see, the empty venues that fans have documented nonetheless run counter to a live music business that’s apparently making boatloads of money.
So what gives?
Look beneath the gravity-defying topline numbers from LNE and Pollstar, and you’ll see data points with a potentially more worrisome interpretation, namely that the concert business is achieving its record profits by pursuing aggressive ticket pricing instead of growing audiences, squeezing every drop of revenue out of audiences in the short term despite the risk of sparking a longer-term backlash.
Pollstar dates notes the average gross per tour is down almost 7% from 2023, and while total tickets sold was close to last year’s tally, average tickets sold per tour decreased by almost 15%. Along with total gross, the only other metric with an upward trajectory was average ticket price, which was up 9.4% in 2023 to an all-time high of $127.38.
In other words, more money is being made overall due to pricier tickets, but audiences aren’t growing enough to increase what each individual tour is making, resulting in a record-setting total gross and yet a decreasing average.
But Pollstar’s findings only cover top-selling major tours, which primarily consist of major artists playing top-capacity venues. LNE’s report, meanwhile, shows that the number of concerts held, attendance and tickets sold for the first half of 2024 have all hit new highs, likely due to the increased attendance for amphitheaters (up 40% versus Q2 2023) and theaters/clubs (up 15%) compensating for the slower growth from large-venue shows.
At first glance, these figures signal that Pollstar’s analysis only applies to the top levels of the industry and that LNE — and by proxy most of the live music industry (just ask the Justice Department) — is still escalating. These metrics’ annual growth rates, however, reveal that the skyrocketing growth of the past few years is hitting the brakes.
While number of concerts went up a percentage point from the first half of 2023 to now, fan growth dropped from 25.1% in 2022-2023 to less than 11% this year. Ticket sales, meanwhile, only saw growth in the single digits (4.4%) compared to nearly 18% this time last year.
Suddenly, LNE’s data is singing a similar song to Pollstar’s. More concerts plus costlier tickets are enough to offset the flatlining headcount for now, but as money remains tight for many, fans are more likely to pick and choose more carefully which shows they’ll attend.
The wealth is also being spread across more shows than ever, and audiences aren’t increasing fast enough to lift all ships, which is why we’re seeing smaller crowds despite the revenues. It’s also important to remember that the ramp-up in smaller-venue shows LNE reported only pertains to LNE-owned or affiliated venues. Independent venues that choose to operate outside of LNE’s reach are ultimately struggling most in the current market.
Regardless of these emerging challenges, 2024 is still on track to be a huge year for live music, but it’s clear that industry players shouldn’t expect consecutively record-setting years for much longer. To be fair, LNE is aware of this fact, as the company’s CEO, Michael Rapino, said in a Q2 earnings call, “We never predicted that the industry was going to grow at 30% a year going forward.”
Ultimately, we won’t know where live music business is going until it happens. Data from the current summer concert and festival season should be particularly enlightening. Until then, the numbers we do have show that the industry’s biggest names are playing a treacherous game by inflating ticket prices and testing fans’ threshold for spending on concerts.
It might be working for now, but as life continues to cost a lot for the average person and independent venues continue to close at alarming rates, current live music trends should perhaps be raising more cause for concern than the numbers let on.
Of course, an industry downturn isn’t necessarily a huge problem to a monolith such as LNE — the Justice Department is currently a more pressing threat. For now, as Rapino himself said on the matter in the earnings call, “It’s business as usual.”