Live Music Blues: Are Black Keys, Jennifer Lopez Just the Beginning?
One year following a record-breaking summer for live music led by Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, and 2024 has so far been defined by thin crowds and canceled shows.
Last week saw the one-two punch of music veterans the Black Keys and Jennifer Lopez canceling their respective U.S. arena tours, seemingly due to low ticket sales. These announcements arrived as screenshots of blue-specked Ticketmaster seating maps and videos of empty shows have become regular sightings on social media.
The concern from fans and mild schadenfreude from online rubberneckers might distract from the artists currently pulling big numbers on tour, including Olivia Rodrigo, Bad Bunny and Morgan Wallen, to name a few. But seeing multidecade road warriors such as the Black Keys or multihyphenate household name J.Lo not selling tickets is nonetheless surprising — and possibly reflective of a few realities the live music industry must contend with going forward.
The first reality affecting touring artists is the same one impacting music festivals: The cost of going to a concert is eclipsing consumer demand for live music. Before J.Lo quietly scrapped several dates and rebranded her tour as a greatest-hits show, tickets were generally in the $150-plus range, with the highest price being $224 at Las Vegas’ T-Mobile Arena.
The Black Keys, meanwhile, have historically packed the likes of Madison Square Garden across numerous tours, but a noticeable increase in ticket prices seemed to deter even die-hard fans this time around.
As noted in Variety Intelligence Platform’s 2023 “Peak Performance” special report, tickets in the $150-$200 range are hitting the threshold of most consumers’ willingness to shell out for concerts. Also, the top deterrents to attending a concert for most of those surveyed were ticket prices and add-on fees.
Even as the average resale price for upcoming summer shows is slightly lower than this time last year, audiences are contending with rising costs and tighter budgets, and therefore are likely being more selective about the artists they’ll pay to see.
The other possibility behind the concert drought is the post-pandemic live music surge is leveling off. Such a shift doesn’t happen overnight, of course, and maybe seeing Taylor Swift boost local economies and other tours make a killing last year led some artists to reach overly optimistic conclusions ahead of 2024.
Reality is the post-pandemic boost may not have been as potent as prevailing narratives assumed. VIP+’s “Peak Performance” report found that only 30% of respondents said the pandemic impacted their willingness to buy VIP-level tickets, while over half said their stance was unchanged.
Given that ticket prices across all levels, from the front row to the nosebleeds, have seen price hikes, it’s not a stretch to assume audiences have only become more frugal since last year.
The result is that legacy acts are now feeling the growing pains of a shifting, more costly industry and are unable to sell venues they might have packed a decade ago. Current artists, meanwhile, may be miscalculating what they can realistically sell in today’s economic environment, leading to them taking bigger risks than anticipated.
Sure, cool-kid pop darlings Charli XCX and Troye Sivan might bring in crowds in NYC and L.A. on their co-headlining tour, but can they fill an arena in Dallas on a Wednesday?
The final explanation is that audiences and artists alike are plain old tired of Live Nation Entertainment’s antics. The hulking company created from Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s infamous merger has received increased accusations of price gouging, intimidating both artists and venues and excessive hidden fees in recent years. And, of course, to cap off the bad press there’s the new lawsuit from the Department of Justice accusing LNE of monopolizing the live music business .
But even for those who don’t know anything about LNE, the process of buying a ticket from Ticketmaster, often the only option outside of resale sites, has become an excruciating experience. At this point, it seems only intervention by the DOJ or Congress will make the process easier, and until then, artists are ultimately the ones who have to weather the storm.
