Big acts such as Taylor Swift’s Eras tour don’t reflect the wider industry, Will Page writes.Lindsey Wasson/The Associated Press
Will Page is the author of Pivot: Eight Principles for Transforming Your Business and authored Laying the Foundation for Canada’s Online Stream Act’s Success. He co-presents the Bubble Trouble podcast.
Canada’s live music industry bounced back big time after being silenced during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN), the countrywide rights agency that collects money on behalf of music creators, reported that concert revenues stood at $32-million in 2023, up almost 40 per cent from 2019.
Live music was booming, until now.
Around the world, there’s a sentiment that 2024 was the year the live-music bubble burst. There might have been big acts, such as Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, but those don’t reflect the wider industry. Canada has been reporting many cancellations, with festivals such as the Muskoka Music Festival pulling the plug. Across the pond, the United Kingdom has seen over 50 cancellations, and Australia announced a parliamentary inquiry because of the scale of their cancellations. South of the border, the U.S. has seen soft demand from Burning Man to Bonnaroo.
Erin Benjamin, president and chief executive officer of the Canadian Live Music Association tells me: “Our members confirm what we’re hearing from other parts of the world, that the convergence of inflation, changes in fan behaviour, lingering effects of the pandemic, the cost of doing business – all atop razor-thin margins – continue to mean challenging times for certain segments of the live music ecosystem.”
Let me unpack these challenging times into four causal factors that explain the promoter’s dilemma.
First, there’s the issue of inflation and costs. There’s a credit crunch hitting festival promoters around the world, regardless of ticket sales, and Canada is no exception. Festivals and Events Canada, the trade body representing the sector, notes a 30-to-40-per-cent cost increase compared to 2019, with insurance being the main factor, and there is no rising demand to cover those costs.
This is especially true in Canada as, because of the country’s size, most of its festivals occur in its cities, and the costs of doing so continue to increase. For example, the bill for policing events in Toronto increased by 14 per cent in 2023 to over $90 an hour per police officer on paid duty. This was reported as one of the largest cost increases for Caribana, a staple Toronto cultural festival.
Second, fan behaviour is changing before our eyes (and ears). One notable trend across English-speaking markets is that multigenre festivals are being hit hardest. The collapse of what observers like to call “human editorial impact” on streaming services may explain why.
Festivals are curated events. There’s a person or group exercising judgment on what to include or not, and that’s a problem. In Canada, the actual audience for a top human-curated playlist wouldn’t sell out the Rogers Stadium.
That’s because the pain of human curation trades with the gain of the algorithm. With the rise of streaming services such as Spotify, our playlists are now curated not by humans but by machines. The result is that everyone’s consumption is highly personalized, and that’s a problem. Glenn McDonald, author of the book You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song, argues that “a genre-unfocused festival-poster lineup starts to just look like a playlist that has been made and personalized for somebody else.”
Third, there’s demand. What we are witnessing is counterintuitive consumer behaviour. It’s not a race to the bottom; it’s a race to the top – people draw up priorities for their spending (e.g. holiday, city break, dining out, favourite act, and festival) and when they rationalize, the most expensive wins. This applies to festivals and restaurants alike. They’ll go to see Taylor Swift as it’s at the top of their priority list, but they’ll strike out taking a chance on a promising new festival with unknown elements to it.
Lastly, there’s the lingering effects of the pandemic. When British festival promoters conducted focus groups to understand why target audiences were shunning their festivals, an increasingly common response was that ‘they didn’t think they had friends to go with.’
This hurts, and it’s understandable. Remember the target market for many of this year’s festivals – school leavers (18-19 years) and graduates (21-23 years) – these age groups were caught in the awful crossfire of the 2020 pandemic. Either they entered high school on Zoom calls or university from the confines of their dorms. They missed out on what it means to be part of a new community. Healing that wound may still be a work in progress.