The live-music industry is broken. This was a common refrain throughout 2022 — over and over, we heard about how the concert business is falling apart and needs to be reimagined in order to be saved. Think back to the start of 2022, and the enthusiasm many of us felt about the first fully “normal” year for shows since the pre-pandemic times. That fresh-out-of-solitary-confinement optimism is all but gone now. What happened?
What happened is that there were two parallel problems that at first glance seemed contradictory, but upon closer examination were revealed to be intimately related. First, many artists could not tour this year due to a variety of factors, including inflation, high gas costs, supply-chain shortages, overbooked music venues, and poor mental health. Animal Collective — a veteran indie act with a loyal audience — canceled a European tour, which many observers took as a bellwether illustrating the shrinking-to-the-point-of-nonexistent middle class in the music business. Other cancelations and postponements, by artists ranging in prestige and popularity from Santigold to Justin Bieber to Anthrax to Arooj Aftab, only reiterated the impression that performing live is no longer financially viable for the majority of musicians already squeezed by minuscule streaming royalties.
Second, a much smaller number of artists this year — most notably Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift — found that touring for the industry’s top one-percent is almost too viable, in that the shadowy corporations who run the live-music business (take a bow, Ticketmaster and Live Nation) were able to gouge consumers for hundreds (if not thousands) of extra dollars above the original face value of tickets. So, live music is broken because many artists can’t tour. But live music is also broken because the industry can leverage high-demand tickets in a manner that is blatantly exploitative. We are starving ourselves to death, and also binging ourselves to death. Either way, death is the common denominator.
If I were a business reporter, I would attempt to offer a top-down explanation for all of this, putting the focus on CEOs and superstar performers and the need for systemic change. That’s an important conversation, but I’m not interested in having it here. (Besides, I published a book this year about the band who stood up against Ticketmaster 30 years ago. Check it out for a history lesson.)
I’m a music critic, which means I’m part of the audience. Therefore, I want to make a bottom-up argument. Luckily, bottom-up arguments were in curiously short supply on this topic in 2022. Amid all the apocalyptic prognostication about the final days of concerts, the audience has been mostly overlooked. Let’s change that. How are we feeling, fellow audience members? Here’s my educated guess: Not great!
Any analysis of the current state of live music must start with the audience. We are the most important component, even more than the artists, and not only because our money funds the whole operation. We are the receivers, the sounding board, the raison d’être, the magical element that transforms the art of playing music into a show and a business. As the French painter Marcel Duchamp famously observed, art is completed by the viewer. Or, to put it in more rock ‘n’ roll terms via The Hold Steady, they couldn’t have even done this if it wasn’t for you.
We aren’t just passive customers, we are collaborators involved in the creation of once-in-a-lifetime moments, the very thing people pay for when they purchase a concert ticket. We matter, even if this industry we pour our dollars into doesn’t always act like it.
Heading into 2022, being a member of an audience seemed like an anxiety-inducing proposition. Every festival last year was scrutinized as a potential super spreader event. And then the Astroworld tragedy highlighted the very real possibility of a concert leading to bodily (and possibly lethal) harm. But as the current year unfolded, the anxiousness around concerts felt less like a matter of life and death and more like an unresolvable negotiation regarding two precious (and limited) resources: time and money.
When you read coverage of the concert business, there’s an unspoken assumption that the audience for live music is inexhaustible. But if 2022 proved anything, it disproved this belief. I will speak anecdotally on this, though I think my experience was pretty common: There were too many damn concerts to see this year. On multiple occasions, I had to choose between two or more shows booked on the same night, and this happened far more than I can recall from the pre-pandemic era. During the busiest weeks of the summer and fall, there might be four or five consecutive nights packed with numerous attractive live-music choices, establishing a pace that was impossible to keep up with even for the most die-hard concert-goer.
I live in a secondary Midwestern market — I can’t imagine how oversaturated live-music schedules in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago were this year. Plus, I’m fortunate as a privileged media worker to have access to guest lists; if I had to pay for every concert I wanted to see, I would have to be far more selective. But that was the thing about the abundance of options on the live-music menu in 2022 — there were so many acts on the road that it somehow limited your choices. I frequently had to miss out on seeing bands that I like in order to see other bands that I like. The market created a Dawinian scenario where everybody on the road was pitted against each other, night after night, in every town, with us in the audience caught in the middle.
Again, this is anecdotal but it feels like a universal truth: Audience members were forced to prioritize like never before in 2022. Who do I really want to see? And who do I think I won’t be able to see again? For me, that meant carving out time for reunion tours by Pavement and the Gaslight Anthem while being choosier about mid-level acts who are always good live but I’ve already seen a couple of times. Many others felt naturally compelled to blow their entire annual ticket-buying budget on one show, whether it was by “biggest pop star in the world” Taylor Swift or 73-year-old Bruce Springsteen, who likely has entered his twilight years with the E Street Band.
When pressed by Rolling Stone about the backlash against dynamic pricing — a truly abhorrent practice in which prices instantly increase based on demand, meaning that Ticketmaster essentially scalps their own tickets at the point of sale — Springsteen was casually pragmatic. “We have those tickets that are going to go for that [higher] price somewhere anyway. The ticket broker or someone is going to be taking that money. I’m going, ‘Hey, why shouldn’t that money go to the guys that are going to be up there sweating three hours a night for it?’”
He’s not wrong. Ticketmaster might be evil, but their evil is inadvertently completed by our eagerness to see our favorite artists on stage. One simply is not possible without the other. That’s why, when people say that the concert industry is broken, they’re really ignoring the inherent unfairness of capitalism. The unfairness is a sign that the system is working exactly as designed. The bug is the feature. In this case, we’re talking about supply and demand — when demand far outstrips supply, you either increase the supply (Bruce plays 25 shows at Madison Square Garden so that everybody who wants to see him can get in at a fair price) or you decrease demand (by pricing out all but the richest and/or most devoted fans). Even if he wanted to attempt the former, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea at his age. That leaves the less savory option.
A question that’s usually left unasked in “state of the live-music industry” conversations is: What is it exactly that we in the audience want out of this? The weird music-business paradox of the past few decades is that as the value of recorded music (which the listener can purchase for a relatively small fee and can then theoretically keep “forever” — or, at the very least, for many years) has fallen to practically nothing, the cost of a concert ticket (which only gets you access to a fleeting experience that lasts a few hours) has skyrocketed. So: Why is that? What value are we projecting onto that ticket?
At the start of 2022, the answer was simple: People want to be around people again. And we want to share what’s hopefully a transcendent, memorable event. But this year our live-music spaces revealed that people still don’t know how to be around people. And that created an unusual tension between artists and fans. In March, indie star Mitski offered a familiar complaint about audience members experiencing concerts via their personal screens, though she stopped short of Jack White, who drew the ire of extremely online people by confiscating their phones before allowing them to enter his arena tour. And White didn’t go as far as rising phenom Steve Lacy, who smashed a fan’s camera on stage this fall in New Orleans.
Lacy was reacting to some cretin throwing a camera at him, an incident captured and broadcast on TikTok and YouTube. “People throwing things at musicians” was a bountiful viral-video genre this year. Tossing shit at performers transcended all genres — pop pin-up Harry Styles was pelted with chicken nuggets and Skittles, country singer Luke Combs dodged a cup of ice, and rappers Tyler The Creator and Kid Cudi were forced to beg fans to not put them in the crosshairs.
What this behavior suggests about the state of us in the audience is that even when our bodies are out there, our minds are still in here, back in that early 2020s lockdown state of being. Large gatherings might provide a sense of community, but they can also be another place to hide, supplying the same feeling of anonymity to which we have become accustomed in the virtual world. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but it seems as though the people inclined to send mean tweets about pop stars online have now graduated to shotgunning tangible projectiles at their idols in real life.
More than ever this year, being in the right audience was the primary factor in determining whether a concert was fun or not. Seeing Bartees Strange in Utah this summer was a highlight for me in large part because I could feel the audience being electrified by the performance. Ditto for the club gig I witnessed by the indie-jam band Tonstartssbandht in front of a small but appreciative audience, or even the Jackson Browne gig I saw on a perfect summer night with a crowd of easygoing boomers. And then there were the countless gigs that were dampened by various bozos, drunks, and close talkers. A great audience feels like a single-minded organism. But going to shows in 2022 sometimes meant being part of an organism at war with itself.
My fear for the future of the live-music business is that it’s going the way of cinema, in which top-of-the-line spectacles feel like the only game in town because the lure of a superstar blockbuster is the only way to get people to leave their houses. That’s not what live music should be about. It needs to be more holistic, allowing for all kinds of experiences — large, intimate, bombastic, subtle, aggressive, gentle, sublime, raucous.
Are we in the audience ready for that yet? Judging by 2022, we seem like a work in progress. Personally speaking, I still want to see bands. It’s the rest of you I’m not sure about.
(@bakedalaska)