Touring
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The excitement began on the plane: a half-dozen girls and young women exchanging notes on outfits (“You’re doing Lover?” “I’m doing Midnights!” “I’m going as Miss Americana”), making and trading friendship bracelets and even a few headed to the country without tickets, hoping for a day-of miracle. It continued at the bars and restaurants the […]
Olivia Rodrigo is ready to take a well-deserved break at the conclusion of her Guts World Tour in 2025. When asked what she plans to do after the tour — which continues next year in Brazil, Mexico, Ireland and the U.K. — Rodrigo told Billboard’s deputy editor Lyndsey Havens: “I’m so excited to just rot on the couch and eat so much food.”
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Rodrigo was presented with the touring artist of the year honor at Billboard’s 2024 Live Music Summit in Los Angeles on Thursday (Nov. 14) after her Guts World Tour grossed $184.6 million from over 1.4 million tickets sold, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore.
After shows on the tour, Rodrigo says she immediately gets offstage and ices her feet, which she joked is “really sexy.”
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“I jump around a lot, like my calves get sore. So, yeah, that’s what I do. Take a shower, take off my makeup, and head back to the hotel,” Rodrigo said. “It’s really not that exciting. It’s a really interesting shift to go from like being in front of 1000s of people to like being alone in your hotel rooms.”
While on tour, Rodrigo said one of her favorite songs to perform for catharsis is “All-American Bitch,” which features the young star floating over the audience on a crescent moon.
“There’s a part of the song where I make the whole audience scream and think of something that you hate or something that really ticks you off, and just let it all out and scream. I think that’s so powerful,” Rodrigo said. “It’s very cathartic. It feels like a rage room or something. There’s something so cool about being able to be in a room with 1000s of people and to be anonymous and get all your emotions out. I just love that aspect of music.”
Her energy onstage matches that of some of her all-time favorite live performers, which she said includes Beyoncé and Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
In October, Rodrigo released her tour documentary Olivia Rodrigo: GUTS World Tour on Netflix, and watching it back in film format, the singer said it was hard not to be critical of herself.
“I was trying not to be too critical the whole time. I’m just like, ‘Be nice to yourself.’ It’s really weird because I know that show like the back of my hand. I’ve done it so many times,” she said. “Watching it I was like, ‘Why are you so nervous? You got it, girl. You got it.’”
When asked if anything surprised her from seeing herself perform for the first time, Rodrigo said, “I was working out so much on tour and I watched things back, I was like, ‘Yeah, I got muscles in my arms for the first time in my life.’ That was surprising.”
Global touring has drastically changed in the last 30-plus years, according to Live Nation Concerts president of global touring/chairman Arthur Fogel. During a conversation at the Billboard Live Music Summit in Los Angeles on Thursday (Nov. 14), the veteran promoter said infrastructure around the globe has drastically improved and opened touring to nearly double the number of countries over that time.
“The first time that I went to South America was in the 1990s with David Bowie, so 35-ish years ago. It was a different world down there. It was a very different world everywhere,” said Fogel. “It was the Wild West. It was very difficult, despite the audience being great, but you fast forward to today and the level of expertise that’s been created. There’s the ability to do business on a very serious level.”
In conversation with Haus of Gaga’s Bobby Campbell, who is Lady Gaga‘s manager, Fogel explained that global touring is “night and day” compared to 35 years ago when North American artists would only have the opportunity to tour 15 to 20 countries. Now, Fogel said there are 60 to 70 countries available to them.
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According to Campbell, touring has become more than just an economic engine for artists; it’s become a marketing driver for the music itself.
“You used to have cycles where you put out the album, promote the album through talk shows and TV performances and award shows, then eventually you go on tour,” said Campbell. “Now tours are becoming a central part of the marketing plan for the album.” He added that artists will now change small aspects of their shows, such as the setlist or certain dance moves, to create new content for each stop.
These small adjustments are a far stretch from the dramatic changes tours would have to make decades ago as they crossed continents, explained Fogel, who said that artists used to create a touring show specifically for North America and then scale back and change it for other parts of the world.
“There are so many new state-of-the-art venues coming online that have really helped propel the ability for artists to go and play all kinds of different places,” said Fogel, who pointed out that Africa, essentially the last frontier on the touring front, has recently opened up.
“South America, Central America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, India, South Africa, Eastern Europe — all those territories and regions of the world that were once very hard to access in terms of touring have really developed dramatically over the last decade and a half,” Fogel added. “To provide the opportunity for an artist to go basically anywhere in the world at this point and connect with their fans is really a pretty interesting and important piece. Maybe it’s the most important piece in terms of development in our business.”
Louis Messina reflected on his storied career in touring on Thursday (Nov. 14) at the Billboard Live Music Summit in Los Angeles.
Speaking with Melinda Newman, Billboard‘s executive editor, West Coast and Nashville, Messina spoke about the working with some of the biggest names in music, with the 11-artist roster of his Messina Touring Company including Taylor Swift, George Strait, Kenny Chesney, Ed Sheeran, Old Dominion and recent signee Zach Bryan.
“I’ve worked with a lot of really goofball acts in my career,” said Messina. “All the acts I work for right now, there is not one that’s an asshole, there really isn’t.”
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Messina credited Strait with launching his own career, saying that “if there were no George Strait, there would be no Messina Touring Group.” He also spoke about helping develop Kenny Chesney, starting his work with Taylor Swift when she was 17-years-old, his impressions of Chapell Roan and much more from his historic and thriving career.
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Below, find highlights from the conversation.
On George Strait, Who “Connects With Everybody In the Audience”
Messina’s first client, George Strait, recently made history by selling 110,905 tickets at a June show in College Park, Texas, for what was the biggest ticket event anywhere in the United States in history.
Messina reflected on Strait’s special (and massive) appeal, saying that “When you’re at a George Strait concert, no matter where you’re sitting, you feel like George is singing to you. His eyes are his show, besides his voice and his music. But he connects with everybody in the audience and that, to me, is the secret of every artist… Every star artist, they know how to connect with the audience, and the audience then connects to the artist. To me that’s the key thing, and that’s what I always look out for: how does the artist and audience connect, and how do they fall in love with each other? That’s George. Every superstar artist, they know how to do that.”
On Working With Taylor Swift Since She Was 17
Newman noted that Swift’s Era’s tour, which wraps up in a few weeks in Vancouver, has grossed well over a billion dollars, then asking Messina what he’s saw in the superstar from the start. “She’s outworks everybody,” said Messina. There’s no one I’ve seen with a work ethic like Taylor Swift. I met her when she just turned 17… She had one song on the radio… By the third night [of seeing her on tour] I just knew. I saw the twinkle in her eye, I saw her work ethic, and here’s a 17-year-old girl singing about high school boyfriends and just had the audience in the palm of her hands. And then every morning, she was the first person in the production office, after she visited radio stations, and she signed notes to everybody. Fans, DJs that played her music… She would be the first one in the building and the last one in the building. That’s what’s special about Taylor Swift, because she’s one-of-a-kind and she will outwork everybody. I was just blessed to happen to be there and see that connection that she had to everybody.”
On The “Magical” Chapell Roan
Newman closed the conversation by asking Messina which artists he hasn’t worked with that he’d like to. He said he’d love to work with Beyoncé and Bruno Mars, adding “and who doesn’t want to work with Chappell Roan, though? What a superstar; what a unique artist. I haven’t seen anybody like her since — she reminds me of when Madonna first started. That attitude; she’s unique. I saw her at ACL and she blew me away… she’s one of a kind. She’s magical.”
On Sphere
While reflecting on the differences between venues, Messina reflected that ultimately “It’s the artist’s name on the ticket, not the building, except the Sphere. That’s a whole other ballgame.” Newman then asked if any of Messina’s artists might play the boundary-pushing venue, to which Messina said, “Yes I have a couple of artists that are potentially playing there.” Newman deftly observed that given that Messina has 11 artists on the roster, there are only a certain number of acts it could be.
On Guiding the Rise Kenny Chesney
Messina has been working with Chesney since the country superstar was opening for George Strait. “He was third or second from the bottom,” Messina said of the lineup he had Chesney on, “and I just saw him, and I saw his merchandise numbers, and he came back the next year, and everybody was in the stands early and he was outselling merchandise more than anybody… I just saw this magic that he had and the connection… We put Kenny on Tim [McGraw’s] tour, and then I said ‘It’s time to headline now.’ He looked at me and said ‘You’re absolutely crazy. I’m going to be playing to grass every night. I’m going to be playing to seats.’ I said ‘No you’re not. You’ve gotta trust me.’ And he did. This year was my 25th anniversary with Kenny. Kenny believed in me, and I got him to believe in himself, and then we got people to believe him.”
Linkin Park is heading back on tour with new co-vocalist Emily Armstrong, and the band’s co-founder Mike Shinoda is opening up about returning to the stage with the group seven years after the untimely death of frontman, Chester Bennington.
In an upcoming interview with The Zach Sang Show alongside Armstrong, Shinoda shared that getting back in the swing of Linkin Park has been “amazing,” despite his initial nervousness. “Part of it is going from the band being an indefinite hiatus or whatever it was — we didn’t put names on it, it was just like, ‘We’re not doing it anymore.’ From it being that to standing on the stage doing it, there were all these weird little moments that were so surreal,” he explained. “Getting in a room and doing it was so cool.”
He added that there were moments that were “stressful,” because he wanted to “set aside enough time for us to get this right,” continuing that with Armstong’s vocal talent, “We were changing keys on songs we played for 20 years. I had to relearn ‘Breaking the Habit’ from scratch basically.”
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“It’s like, having a thing that you felt like it was taken away and then being able to get it back like, ‘Oh, you can’t play shows as Linkin Park anymore,’ even though Linkin Park is like Part of my DNA,” he added.
Shinoda concluded by noting, “Linkin Park is part of my DNA. Everybody’s got a core identity diagram, like, this is who I am. If you were to sit down with a piece of paper and write down the things that make you you, that’s a crazy exercise when you think about it. It’s things you love to do, your family, your kids, your spouse, whatever. The things that make you you and your beliefs, right there in the middle of it is Linkin Park for me. There are many other things too, but to have that one out was painful. To have it back in, there’s nothing like it. There never will be anything like it.”
Ahead of their 2025 tour, Linkin Park is set to drop their eighth studio album, From Zero, on Nov. 15 via Warner Records. Check out the exclusive clip from the interview via Billboard below, and catch the full episode of The Zach Sang Show on Friday (Nov. 15).
When the music world was shutting down for most artists in 2020, it was just gearing up for John Summit.
At Thursday’s Billboard Live Music Summit, Summit and his manager, Metatone’s Holt Harmon, joined a panel discussion titled “Inside the Rise of John Summit,” moderated by Billboard‘s Katie Bain, to detail how they managed to take the dance world by storm over the past four years.
Summit’s Billboard-charting career began in 2020 with “Deep End,” which peaked at No. 26 on Hot Dance/Electronic Songs that year. Since then, he’s racked up his first two top 10 hits on the chart — “Where You Are” and “Shiver” (both peaking at No. 8 and both with singer Hayla) — and crisscrossed the globe to play the biggest festivals, set up shop in dance havens like Ibiza and Las Vegas, and wow crowds around the world.
Below, find highlights from Summit and Harmon’s conversation, starting from the beginning of their journey through the release of his first full-length album Comfort in Chaos over the summer.
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No Rules
Holt Harmon: “Part of the beauty of working with young people and being young ourselves is, nobody had put a title on what we were already. So honestly, it was like the beauty of the unknown and the beauty of being able to tackle anything — not living by rules that we didn’t know about.”
John Summit: “If you don’t know the rules, you can’t break them.”
Picking Up During Shutdown
Summit: “I just knew that the whole world was online because everyone was stuck at home. So I was doing streams every single day, posting every single day, sharing my music, sharing the process. … I think a lot of artists took it as a time to relax and see their families for once. But because I was living in my mom’s basement at the time — shout-out Tamara in the crowd! — she kept me fed while I cooked the beats.” [Laughs]
Harmon: “COVID was kind of like the great reset. It’s like, anybody who was leaning or — I hate to put it like this — but anybody who was being lazy and leaning on touring, and that was their entire career, not putting out great music, not putting out great art, but just leaning on that they could tour, didn’t have that to lean on anymore. Didn’t have that crutch. So it more or less reset the industry.”
Changing It Up
Harmon: “You come to a John Summit show, expect the unexpected. He’s gonna play whatever he wants stylistically. He might throw dubstep in. He’s gonna throw drum and bass in. He’s gonna do his thing. … For me, it’s so cool to watch him be able to be like a chameleon. But it allows him to do different things and not get pigeonholed.”
Summit: “That’s where I think songwriting really comes into play, that I can change the productions for a song. … I think kind of changing around the production for songs and adapting, but then also, you know, staying true to yourself.”
His Second Home…To a Point
Summit: “What makes Vegas so nice is that I do 20 days a year, and it’s a different crowd every single weekend. You can’t do like 20 weekends in Chicago, because it would just be the same. Because [Vegas is] a tourist destination, much like Ibiza. That’s what keeps it really fun and entertaining, that keeps things fresh, and the hospitality is so great there that I feel like it’s a second home for me. … But it would my hell if all I did was a residency and it was the same thing every weekend, so that does freak me out.”
Tyler Childers is gearing up for an extensive headlining tour in 2025, when his Tyler Childers: On the Road makes stops at venues including Lexington’s Kroger Field (April 19), two nights at New York’s Forest Hills Stadium (Sept. 29-30) and two nights at Nashville’s GEODIS Stadium (Oct. 10-11), as well as shows at Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl (June 10), Las Vegas’ MGM Grand Garden Arena (June 7), Minneapolis’ Target Center (April 9) and Boston’s Xfinity Center (Sept. 25).
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The tour launches April 3 in New Orleans and runs through Nov. 15, ending with a show at the 02 in London.
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Joining Childers on the trek are guests Wynonna Judd, Charley Crockett, Robert Earl Keen, The Hold Steady, Medium Build, Deer Tick, Hayes Carll, S.G. Goodman, Cory Branan and SOMA.
Artist presale tickets will be available beginning Nov. 19 at 10 a.m. local time, with general onsale launching Friday, Nov. 22, at 10 a.m. local time. Presale registration is open now through Sunday, Nov. 17, at 11:59 p.m. ET.
Those who purchase tickets on Ticketmaster and can’t attend will have the option to resell their tickets at the original price paid using the Face Value Exchange. To protect the Exchange, Childers has requested that all shows ticketed by Ticketmaster — except those in New York and Virginia, where Face Value Exchange can’t be mandated — use tickets that are mobile-only and restricted from transfer. For AXS-ticketed events, fans will be able to resell their tickets for face value plus fees through AXS Official Resale Marketplace.
Last year, Childers’s Rustin’ in the Rain album debuted at No. 10 on the Billboard 200. The album’s single “In Your Love” was nominated for Grammys including best country song and best country solo performance, and marked the singer-songwriter’s debut on Billboard’s Hot 100.
$1 from every ticket sold will benefit both Hickman Holler Appalachian Relief Fund (HHARF) and REVERB. Established in 2020 by Childers and Senora May, HHARF brings awareness and financial support for philanthropic efforts in the Appalachian Region. REVERB’s efforts reduce environmental impact in live music and fund carbon impact programs.
See the full list of tour dates below:
https://twitter.com/TTChilders/status/1857109117543833902
Tate McRae has two major pieces of news that’ll satiate even the greediest of her fans. In addition to announcing her third studio album, So Close to What, the 21-year-old pop star revealed Thursday (Nov. 14) that she’s going on tour in 2025 — all just hours before her new single “2 Hands” drops. Posting […]
When Toronto-based entertainment and hospitality magnate Charles Khabouth heard that Taylor Swift would be bringing her record-breaking Eras Tour to the city he’s called home for more than 50 years, he knew immediately what to do.
“I opened a bottle of Dom Perignon to celebrate,” Khabouth, the founder/CEO of INK Entertainment, which operates a series of hotels, bars and restaurants and produces live events in the city, says, laughing. “I’ve been around 43 years in this business; I’ve never seen this hype in my life around anything. We do, I don’t know, 200, 300 live shows ourselves every year. We’ve had everybody in the city from the Stones to Madonna to Prince. This got much bigger support from everybody than ever possible.”
The city of Toronto is about to play host to one of the most significant events — culturally and economically — of the past two years, as Swift and her legion of fans descend upon the city for six nights across two weekends (Nov. 14-16, 21-23), the penultimate stop on a tour that has spanned two years and five continents and changed the fortunes of several cities along the way. And Toronto — known as a savvy, cosmopolitan city in its own right, though one that has at times had to fight to be considered in the same category as cultural capitals such as New York, Los Angeles or Chicago — has risen to the occasion.
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On Nov. 4, the city of Toronto and Rogers Communications renamed Blue Jay Way — the street in front of the Rogers Centre that is usually home to its hometown Major League Baseball team and extends from Nathan Phillips Square to the venue — as Taylor Swift Way, complete with 22 ceremonial street signs that will be auctioned in support of the Daily Bread Food Bank after the run is over. (Rogers is also matching donations to the Daily Bread Food Bank up to $113,000 — a nod to Swift’s favorite number, 13.)
And that’s just the opening enchantment that the city would eventually roll out. Since then, the city has announced a poetry-inspired pre-concert initiative overseen by Toronto Poet Laureate Lillian Allen, while other announcements have included the Toronto’s Version: Taylgate ’24 event, which is expected to draw some 60,000 people; an Eras! Eras! Eras! performance by the singing group Choir! Choir! Choir!; and a 13-site scavenger hunt tied to different songs from Swift’s catalog spread across the city, among many other things. There are Eras-themed city tours, dance parties, drag and trivia nights and pop-up shops around the city, plus giveaways from a slew of businesses. Destination Toronto — the tourism bureau for Canada’s biggest city — expects some $282 million in economic impact from Swift’s two-week mini-residency, including $152 million in direct spending, 93% of which is expected to come from tourists flocking to Toronto — an astronomical uplift for the city’s local businesses.
“We’ve seen the entire city getting caught up in the action — from a Taylgate party at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre to Taylor-themed hotel rooms and special menus at restaurants around the city,” says Kathy Motton, Destination Toronto’s senior manager of communications. “Major events like Taylor Swift bring visitor spending into Toronto, and that spending circulates long after visitors return home impacting a broad set of businesses. The obvious positive benefit is for hotels, restaurants and other tourism-related businesses, but that benefit also extends to businesses that are indirectly impacted by visitor spending.”
And many of those establishments have met the moment by overhauling their own properties to cater to the estimated 500,000 tourists flooding into the area.
“We’ve got so much happening on property,” says Liza McWilliams, director of marketing at the 1 Hotel Toronto, which transformed its Flora lobby lounge into the Folklore Lounge for the next two weeks, complete with a moss-covered piano, tapestries hanging on the wall with lyrics from Swift’s Folklore album and daily acoustic performances open to guests and the public. They also partnered with the Little Words Project, the original word-based friendship bracelet company, which is doing a pop-up shop in the 1 Hotel’s lobby for the first time in Canada. “I think it’s just really fun to be that much more creative and to dream up some really amazing things that kind of stay with the guests for a longer time,” McWilliams says. “Other than the [Toronto International] Film Festival, I would say we’ve never really been this specific when it comes to an actual city event.”
“This is like preparing for Toronto’s Super Bowl,” says Aaron Harrison, general manager of the Bisha Hotel, a short walk from the Rogers Centre. The Bisha also redesigned its entire lobby space (it went Reputation era), while the common spaces on each of its seven hotel floors are also getting era-themed makeovers, one suite has been entirely rebranded The Taylor (which had been running around $4,000 per night if you could snag it), and the hotel will be offering friendship bracelets, a glitter station and themed food and drinks for guests, among other things, in its Lover Lounge. “We wanted Bisha Hotel to feel like the ultimate fan headquarters,” Harrison adds.
In downtown Toronto, it’s almost more difficult to find a bar or restaurant that hasn’t leaned into Taylor-mania than one that has. (Talk about champagne problems.) The night before the shows kicked off, on Nov. 13, the iconic space needle was flashing rainbow colors in honor of Swift, and bartenders and restaurant staff were all talking about the influx of people in town for the shows. Streets are closed off, the city has dedicated websites aimed at helping both tourists and locals alike navigate the area, and Rogers spent $8 million to upgrade the 5G wireless service at the Rogers Centre ahead of the concerts.
Of the more than half-dozen people who spoke with Billboard for this story, almost all equated the preparations for the Eras Tour to those that go into the build up to TIFF — one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals, held in the city each September — but all said the Eras Tour hype went beyond even that. Some hospitality officials and locals are looking at it as a test run for the FIFA World Cup, which will stage six matches in the city in the summer of 2026, and as helping to prove that Toronto can accommodate, and with aplomb, the types of huge events that are often staged in the great cities of the world, ones that invite people to fly in from all over the globe.
There is one thing, however, that nobody is particularly looking forward to: “It’s going to be hell on earth in a sense of the traffic and the amount of people,” Khabouth says, laughing again. (He’s planning to ride his scooter through downtown “with a smile on my face” on the days of each show to avoid driving.) “But it’s a happy moment for all of us in Toronto, to have that energy, that vibe. It’s a concert that’s very positive, you’re gonna see a lot of happy faces, people excited. It’s a very good opportunity for Toronto to stand out and say, ‘Hey, we can play with the big boys.’”
LONDON — The British government is calling on the live music industry to introduce a voluntary levy on stadium and arena tickets sold in the United Kingdom “as soon as possible” to “safeguard the future of the grassroots music sector.”
“We believe this would be the quickest and most effective mechanism for a small portion of revenues from the biggest shows to be invested in a sustainable grassroots sector,” said the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in a report published Thursday (Nov. 14).
Earlier this year, a cross-party committee of MPs said a new levy on arena and stadium tickets was urgently needed to stem the tide of small grassroots music venue closures in the United Kingdom.
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According to the Music Venue Trust (MVT), the number of grassroots music venues (defined as limited capacity venues regularly staging live music) in the U.K. declined from 960 to 835 in 2023, a fall of 13%, representing a loss of as many as 30,000 shows and 4,000 jobs.
Responding to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee’s report on the grassroots live music sector, published in May, the government said Thursday that it was “deeply concerned” with the rate of venue closures and that “a small industry-led levy within the price of a ticket” would benefit the U.K.’s live music system “as a whole.”
The government said it wanted the voluntary levy to come into effect “as soon as possible” so that it could be applied to arena and stadium music shows taking place in 2025. How the funds raised will be used to support small and low-capacity music venues should be clearly explained to ticket buyers, said the government.
“We urge the live music industry, and in particular the biggest commercial players who will have the biggest impact on the success of an industry-led levy, to act and to do so swiftly,” said DCMS.
Exactly what form such a levy on arena and stadium shows will take is still to be determined. While there is broad support throughout the U.K. live music industry for a voluntary levy, some promoters would prefer that it is applied on a case-by-case basis and stakeholders are divided on whether the levy should be included within the ticket’s price or as an additional fee on top of the face value of the ticket.
The size of venue the levy would be applied to and its cost/rate is also yet to be decided, although the Music Venue Trust has previously called for a £1 levy ($1.26) to be applied to arena and stadium shows above 5,500 capacity, excluding festivals. Discussions are currently taking place between live executives around what charitable body should collect, manage and distribute proceeds from the fund.
In a statement, Jon Collins, chief executive of live music industry umbrella organization LIVE, said driving forward “an industry-led solution to the challenges currently being experienced by venues, artists, festivals and promoters remains our number one priority.”
The idea of a voluntary arena tickets levy to support the grassroots music sector is one that has already received support from several high-profile U.K. artists and organizations.
In September, Coldplay announced that it would be donating 10% of the band’s proceeds from their 2025 dates at London’s Wembley Stadium and Hull’s Craven Park stadium to the Music Venue Trust.
Other acts backing the initiative include rock band Enter Shikari, who donated £1 from every ticket sold on its February U.K. arena tour to the trust, and Sam Fender, who has pledged to do the same on his forthcoming U.K. dates. This year, Halifax-based venue The Piece Hall became the first U.K. venue to give ticket-buyers the option to donate to the charity.
A similar scheme to support grass roots music creation exists in France, where a statutory 3.5% levy on the gross value of all concert tickets sales goes into a central fund administered by the Centre National de la Musique (CNM), France’s public agency for the music industry.
“This is the beginning of a way forward,” Kwame Kwaten, director of artist management company Ferocious Talent, whose roster includes Blue Lab Beats, Hak Baker and Caitlyn Scarlett, tells Billboard.
“If [the levy] happens, it will at least begin the process of addressing something that has been left out to dry with humongous consequences, especially at the kind of levels that we have to operate at before an artist gets to the arena, stadium level, which is where 80-90% of [touring] artists are,” says Kwaten, who gave evidence to the CMS committee during the inquiry.
“We are standing at a massive crossroads,” he says, “and we have now got a chance to do something about it.”
In a statement, CMS Committee chair, Dame Caroline Dinenage, said she welcomed the government’s recognition that “swift action on a levy is needed from the bigger players who pack out arenas and stadiums,” but warned that “the lack of a firm deadline for movement risks allowing matters to drift.”
“Without healthy roots, the entire live music ecosystem suffers,” said Dinenage, who is calling for government ministers to set a clear deadline for the industry to act. If no significant progress is made within six months, she said the CMS committee will hold another hearing with representatives of the U.K. live music industry.
“Every week I hear from music managers trying to do the impossible and bridge catastrophic shortfalls in their artists touring budgets,” said Annabella Coldrick, chief executive of U.K. trade body the Music Managers Forum (MMF), in a statement. Coldrick says it is “imperative” that the music industry comes together to establish a ticket levy on “all large-scale live music shows” to support smaller scale touring artists. “The current situation is untenable,” she says.
The U.K. government’s support for an arena ticket levy is the latest in a long line of Parliament-led interventions into the music industry that have taken place in recent years, including a nine-month probe into the music streaming business and a subsequent review of the sector by the U.K. competition watchdog.
More recently, authorities have turned their attentions to the live industry. In September, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched an investigation into Ticketmaster over its much-criticized use of dynamic ticketing for Oasis‘ reunion tour, which prompted hundreds of complaints from fans and fierce condemnation from British politicians.
The British government has also said it would be looking into the practice of dynamic pricing for music concerts as part of its consultation into the secondary ticketing market, which is due to begin in the coming weeks.