4 months ago
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As Kaiser covered yesterday, J.Lo finally pulled the ripcord on her This Is Me… Live tour that was scheduled for this summer. The album the tour would have been promoting, This In Me… Now, was not well received when it dropped in February (nor were the musical film and documentary released alongside it), and within a month of announcing the tour, show dates were already being canceled. Jennifer spent a hot minute trying to spin the lackluster sales into no-big-deal, but I agree with Kaiser that canceling the whole tour was the right, sound move for J.Lo to make. And she’s not alone! Many music artists are canceling shows lately, so much so that NBC News did a deep dive to try and suss out what’s not working in the current touring model. It kind of boiled down to three things: monopoly, money, and an oversaturated market.
Live Nation & Ticketmaster are still making money: Many of those tours are being sold through Ticketmaster and its parent Live Nation. And prior to facing landmark accusations that it is a monopoly, a claim it denies, Live Nation reported its biggest first quarter ever, with $3.8 billion in revenues. Its concerts business alone was up 26% to $2.9 billion, while “estimated fans” globally were up more than 20%, and up 42% in North America.
It’s the economy, stupid: Dave Clark, editor of Ticket News, which tracks the live entertainment industry, said the period of explosive live music growth following pandemic reopenings may in hindsight be seen as an aberration: People were simply more eager — and more financially able — to go to as many shows as they could after months cooped up indoors. This year, Clark said, a reckoning may be emerging. “The days where there was enough demand to sell out arenas at top dollar just isn’t there in this live events economy — outside of people like Taylor Swift who can sell whatever they want wherever they want,” he said. At a time when many consumers are struggling to pay for basic necessities, he said, “people are seeing some of the prices they’re asking and just saying, ‘Hard pass.’”
‘A very overloaded market’: Another factor may be a supply issue, Clark added: too many acts trying to tour at once, or too many times. In the pre-streaming era, bands would go on tour as a way of marketing an album. These days, he said, it’s reversed, since the returns on recorded music have shrunk dramatically. “Now they’re making records to sell the tour,” he said. “That paradigm has a lot to do with it. It’s just a very overloaded market.”
Fewer small venues mean more expensive tickets: But experts say recent economic trends in the live-music industry, especially the types of consolidation the Justice Department is now targeting, have translated into fewer smaller-sized venues. That’s made it more difficult for a given tour date to make financial sense for the artist, venue and promoter. “Some shows, they can’t afford to drop prices; they can’t afford to wait to try to sell out the rest of the building,” Clark said. If there is uncertainty about all stakeholders being able to at least break even, he said, the show might get canceled.
One K-pop fan from NJ speaks: Such realities have collided with a more circumspect concertgoer. Brittney D’Mello, a 23-year-old K-pop fan from New Jersey who works in corporate marketing, posted to X about her frustrations with the current touring landscape. “The tickets are too expensive,” D’Mello said. “There’s only a SMALL amount of people (10%) that will spend $500+ on vip/floor/premium,” she said. “The rest of us have budgets and won’t spend $100 on nosebleeds,” she said, referring to seats that are typically the farthest away from the stage. … “I will only go see two artists that are my tried-and-true favorite artists,” she said. “But I won’t be casually going to concerts anymore.”
The system as it is now cannot hold. I’m cautiously optimistic about the DOJ going after the Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly, which it definitely is, despite Live Nation’s denial. They basically admitted as much in their clapback to the lawsuit: “Live Nation can offer and has offered fans, artists, venues and the rest of the performance ecosystem better prices and better services than they would receive if these complementary businesses were separated.” To the minions at Live Nation PR, this is not the rebuttal you think it is. “But it benefits everyone if you just let us run every aspect of the business!!!” Yeah, so this is a good start — going after the biggest player, the group that has done the most to consolidate resources and venues. But I still can’t figure out the way around rising production costs translating to higher ticket prices, which in turn leads to the results reviewed here: consumers opting out. Cause Ms. D’Mello is right, $100 for nosebleed seats is outrageous and $500+ for good seats is highway robbery. Plus if we’re talking Madonna tix, then you also have to factor in the legal costs for when you end up suing her for starting egregiously late. This Is Me… Broke!
