The Music Industry in the COVID-19 Pandemic – Live Nation

The COVID-19 pandemic hits the live music sector hardest since the end of World War II. The sector has been shut down since March 2020 in most of the countries. Concert and festivals were cancelled or postponed due to social distancing and lockdown measures. A report of Media Insight Consulting[1] estimates that 64 per cent of the UK’s live music workforce of 262,000 full-time employees will have lost their jobs by Christmas. Thus, 170,000 cultural workers in the music sector – most of them self-employed and freelance workers – will be out of work. At the end of March 2020, the German music industry associations estimated a loss of revenue for the live music sector of EUR 4,543 million for the period from April to September 2020. We can expect a much higher revenue loss for the last quarter 2020 due to the continued lockdown of the German music festival and concert sector.

However, the live music sector is highly fragmented and diverse. The international concert promoting market is dominated by large live music conglomerates such as the US-based Live Nation and Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) as well as the German CTS Eventim. They control an oligopolistic industry with myriads of small music venues, concert promoters, bookers and management agencies that have no impact on the market structure and processes. These medium and small sized live music organizers struggle for survival and are dependent on public financial support. However, how is the situation for the large conglomerates? Is their existence also at stake? This blog post tries to answer these question by analysing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the world’s largest concert and ticketing conglomerate Live Nation. Based on the quarterly reports from January to September 2020, it is analysed how the live entertainment giant has been affected by the pandemic and highlights Live Nation’s strategy to weather the storm.

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Music Business Research 2016 – in retrospective

Dear readers of the music business research blog,

2016 seems to be the pivotal year in the recorded music industry. Although no annual statistics have been published until yet, we can take it for granted that the positive trend of 2015 continued in 2016. In 2015, the global recorded music market expanded by 3.4%. The US-market slightly grew by 0.9% and the German recorded music sales even increased by 4.4%.

The booming music streaming market was of course the main driver for the economic recovery of the recorded music business in 2015 and we can expect a further growth in 2016 and the upcoming year. The revenue growth of the streaming business compensated for the decline in CD sales, despite decreasing music download sales as highlighted in “The fate of the CD – an international CD-market analysis”. However, an in-depth analysis of the statistics unveils very different market dynamics in various countries. Whereas music streaming is the main business of the recorded music industry in Scandinavia, CD sales are still relevant in Germany and in Japan (see “The Music Streaming Market Revisited, 2011-2015”).

Book Review: The Death & Life of the Music Industry in the Digital Age by Jim Rogers

Jim Rogers’ PhD-thesis at Dublin City University was recently published under the title “The Death & Life of the Music Industry in the Digital Age” at Bloomsbury/London. He interviewed 30 music business professionals in the UK and Ireland from 2007 to 2010 to answer the main research question if the Internet caused a crisis in the music industry that is signalling its final collapse or if it, in contrast, resulted in an intensive restructuring and reordering within the industry.

He concludes that the music industry has not undergone a fundamental structural upheaval but was reshaped by an evolutionary change. Rogers observes more continuities than discontinuities in the music industry and states that most of the music industry actors do more or less the same things but in a different way. In the following I highlight how the author comes to such a conclusion.