Tours de force can still fill rockers’ pockets

Live touring as the main vehicle for making money in the music business is nothing new.

AC/DC perform in Melbourne.

Live touring as the main vehicle for making money in the music business is nothing new. For as long as download platforms such as iTunes and streaming services such as Spotify have been in operation, the value of recorded music has taken a pummelling. The glory days for major record companies, when a CD (remember them?) cost $30 or more, are long gone. So too, to a large degree, are the royalties artists could expect from record sales.

So it was inevitable that touring would become an economic necessity for artists in the modern world. Hitting the road is how performers can generate the bulk of their income, which at the top end includes significant revenue streams from merchandising as well as ticket sales.

Only time will tell if a new generation of acts is able to sustain arena-filling careers in the way the pioneers of rock and pop, such as the Rolling Stones, have done. To suggest that no one can fill the gap left by the increasing number of artists from the formative years of pop music who are dying off is speculative at best, however.

Try telling that to Adele, for instance, who at 28 sold an incredible, record-breaking 600,000 tickets to her recent Australian tour, including 190,000 across two nights in Sydney, eclipsing previous records by AC/DC and Dire Straits in the process. Given her talent and her appeal across all ages, who’s to say she won’t be filling football stadiums into her dotage?

The list of US tours in the main story has Adele, Bruce Springsteen, Guns N’ Roses, Justin Bieber and Coldplay, all of whom have toured successfully in Australia in the past few months and who will likely do so again. There’s a broad demographic of ticket buyers in that list and probably not a huge crossover, other than some Belieber mums, and dads at the Bruce gigs. But there’s a hunger for live music in this country that shows no sign of waning and fans will pay significant sums for the pleasure. It’s true that the bulk of that spending on tickets comes from an older demographic with expendable income, but young people are spending money as well.

This week comes the announcement of the line-up for this year’s Splendour in the Grass festival in Byron Bay, NSW, in July. It’s the main drawcard of the year for the younger rock and pop audience and a perfect example of the trend mentioned in the accompanying Wall Street Journal article: that young consumers can get more value for money, as well as a communal experience, by attending festivals where they can see a host of acts in one hit.

It’s no accident that the world’s biggest promoter, Live Nation, has just bought into that event and its sister, the Falls Festival, just as it has done buying up festivals overseas. That’s where the next generation of music fans is gathering in numbers. That’s the audience live promoters want to grab for the future, but it doesn’t mean we won’t see a new generation of Adeles and AC/DCs filling stadiums 20 years from now.