Long Promised Road

Long Promised Road: Canceled Tours and an Uncertain Future

The time has come for the other proverbial shoe to drop. While the post-pandemic boom saw a meteoric rise in concerts and festivals with the return of Coachella and massive tours from Harry Styles, Olivia Rodrigo, and Elton John, now a harsh reality has taken hold. With staggering inflation, ever-changing COVID restrictions, and the differences a two year hiatus can make on consumer behavior, touring is no longer feasible for the majority of independent musicians.?

Even in the era of YouTube and TikTok super-stardom, artists still rely on touring to survive.? Going out on the road makes up a huge portion of an artist’s life and the lion’s share of the industry’s revenues. Ticket sales, merchandise, signings/appearances, and sponsorships are all reasons that an artist wants and needs to get out on the road. Touring is also important for emerging artists to find new audiences. Opening for a larger act, or landing a gig in a prestigious venue can capture the attention of local radio, important journalists, and of course, new fans.

ON THE ROAD AGAIN (?)

First, the good news. By the numbers, concert frequency and attendance is up. LiveNation, among the largest concert management groups, reported 12,500 shows in the second quarter of 2022 alone, which is 2,500 more than in 2019, before the pandemic. Attendance for LiveNation shows was up 20%, and by July they saw record sales of 100M tickets for the year to day, versus 2019’s 74M.?

But for non-superstar artists, it’s a different story. Touring is expensive, risky, and incredibly complicated in 2022. With the surge of rescheduled shows at the beginning of the year, and the closing of many important small venues due to the pandemic, competition for ticket sales and venue space is fierce. Inflation isn’t helping either, as many of the shows booked in 2019 with pre-pandemic financing are struggling to make the numbers work in a more expensive climate.?

There have been more than two times?as many show cancellations in the first half of 2022 compared with the first 6 months of 2019, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

And of course shows are still being canceled due to Covid outbreaks with band and crew members. Venues all over the world were quick to remove mask and vaccine restrictions, and the bands are paying for it, taking calculated risks each time they perform in front of a large audience.?

Kyle Morton, the lead singer of Typhoon noted,

“Tours have to be planned so far in advance and there’s a considerable amount of startup costs and labor that go into them. I’m renting vans, paying crews. Depending on the level of the tour, it’s a significant amount of investment and then if you go out, play a show, get COVID-19 and have to scrap it, that’s a financial disaster. And not to even mention that, this is what you’ve been planning all year. This is the big tour and then it’s done and now we all need to find jobs or whatever it is. A lot of people count on revenue from this and it’s been really hard and that’s part of the calculus for folks touring again is.”

PUTTING THE ART BACK IN ARTIST?

Some artists have had to put on the brakes entirely, and have taken the opportunity to also speak out about how these challenging times are affecting artists on a fundamental level. Santigold, the moniker for multi-instrumentalist singer and songwriter Santi White (whose live performances are nothing short of legendary), recently canceled her tour citing numerous concerns with not only the financial risks associated with touring, but also the emotional and creative toll it is taking on artists today.

“As a touring musician, I don’t think anyone anticipated the new reality that awaited us,” she wrote. “After sitting idle for the past couple years, [musicians] rushed back out immediately when it was deemed safe to do shows. We were met with the height of inflation, many of our tried-and-true venues unavailable due to a flooded market of artists trying to book shows in the same cities, and positive [Covid] test results constantly halting schedules, with devastating financial consequences. All of that, on top of the already-tapped mental, spiritual, physical, and emotional resources of just having made it through the past few years. Some of us are finding ourselves simply unable to make it work.”

It's an important dialogue about touring that we rarely talk about. The glitz and the glamor is apparent, but the truth of being an artist on tour is altogether less whimsical. In response to Santigold, British singer Lily Allen added “F*cking hell, it’s so brutal out there. You’re right, we don’t talk about it enough.”??

REVISITING MENTAL HEALTH AND THE MUSIC INDUSTRY

Our March 2020 issue of The STORM Report featured an article entitled “Where is My Mind: Mental Health & the Music Industry.” In the early days of the pandemic and as anxieties mounted for what the future might hold, we decided to shine a spotlight on mental illness in the music industry.? In that article, we cited a 2019 study published by Swedish digital-distribution platform Record Union that 73% of independent artists have battled stress, anxiety, and depression. The study showed that three primary drivers for mental health issues in musicians are financial instability, the pressure to please fans, and substance abuse. And perhaps no place is more dangerous for all of these drivers than on the road? - on tour.

Earlier this year, UK rap sensation and 2022 Mercury Prize winner Little Simz announced that she had canceled her US tour. “Being an independent artist, I pay for everything encompassing my live performances out of my own pocket and touring the U.S. for a month would leave me in a huge deficit,” she said at the time. “As much as this pains me to not see you at this time, I’m just not able to put myself through that mental stress.”??

And she isn’t alone. In the past couple months alone, nearly a dozen young acts including STORM alumni Arlo Parks, Yard Act, Sam Fender, Animal Collective, Shawn Mendes, GAYLE, KennyHoopla, and Lil’ Baby have canceled their tours. Many have cited either a decline in their mental health, burnout from being overworked, or the unlivable costs and demands of navigating travel in uncertain times. In many cases, it is a toxic combination of all of the above.?

WHAT ABOUT THE FAN?

How are fans faring amidst a touring industry in flux? From changing consumer habits including the “gravitational pull of the couch” to these increased prices, consumers are looking at their overall entertainment budget and allocating more carefully than they have in the past.??

Ticket prices keep climbing, especially as the practice of dynamic pricing (which allows a company that sells tickets online to adjust prices on the fly in response to market demands) continues to take hold for large-scale shows.

According to concert trade publication Pollstar, the average ticket price for the top 100 grossing tours in North America for the first half of 2022 was $108.20, up from $91.86 in 2019. But attendance is dropping, with 15.6 million tickets sold for those top 100 tours in 2022, vs. 16.9 million for the same top 100 tours during the first half of 2019.?

People are also waiting longer to buy tickets, making forecasting for promoters very difficult. For example, this year 30% of the tickets to Lollapalooza in Chicago were sold within 10 days of the festival, compared to when it would sell out instantly in years past.

THE SHOW MUST GO ON

The pressure that the industry puts on artists to tour is palpable because it’s lucrative. But, like Santigold, there is a rising tide of artists who are rethinking what making music professionally means in a post-pandemic world.? Garbage’s Shirley Manson recently came forward to highlight the problem as a systemic issue with the industry itself.?

“Live music is under enormous strain. We are seeing so many precious talents buckle under the economic injustice of a system that does not pay the creative for their artistic output.” She warns that it may be detrimental for impressive talent and new musicians, which goes beyond threatening our immediate consumption and into the future of media.?

Let me put it to you another way: So many of the artists that we revere and hold dear throughout history would have been utterly destroyed by this system entirely. Musicians cannot survive without being paid fairly for their music. And if the live scene fails, the whole ship goes down entirely.

All you will be left with is the mainstream. No alternative perspectives. Nothing loud. Nothing dangerous. Nothing weird. Little that lasts more than one album cycle. That strikes me as a great sorrow for our culture as a whole."

We are at another tipping point in the music industry, full of disruption and challenges, but we are hopeful for innovation on the horizon.? The new normal is a moving target and even though the live music industry might not be able to future-proof itself, it’s important that we strive to find solutions for a sustainable future for independent artists and venues.

The “coming together’ that live music inspires is part of what builds community and gives us joy. It’s a hopeful sign that artists are speaking about their challenges and raising awareness to inspire some real change in the industry.?

Here’s hoping that the long promised road is worth the journey.?

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This article appears in Issue 84 (October/November, 2022) of memBrain 's monthly music magazine, The STORM Report.

Check out the latest issue here and visit our website to subscribe.

Contributing writing & research by: Grace Slansky