Paging Will

Where is all this new money for arena and stadium tickets coming from?

Will Page is the UK music industry’s favourite economist. Between 2006 and 2012, Will was the Chief Economist at PRS for Music, before moving on to deliver the same role at Spotify. He has a firm grounding in data and evidence, and he’s someone who has earned the right to be listened to and have his analysis and views considered.

Yesterday, a new interview with Will appeared in IQ Magazine (you may need to be a subscriber to read it). The general tone of it aligns itself with the current mood and tone of the biggest players in the live music industry, following similar lines of thought from Michael Rapino (Live Nation). Tim Leweike (Oak View Group), Melvin Benn (Festival Republic), John Giddings (Isle of Wight) etc; live music is doing fantastically well, having it’s best year ever, and they see only golden times ahead.

The IQ piece is fair and balanced. It includes a good reaction from Jon Collins (CEO at LIVE), who makes the counterpoint that although headline numbers may be significantly up, the reality is that this success is not evenly shared and there are real challenges being faced by the grassroots, and even medium level, touring circuit. Will touches upon some of this challenge in his analysis, which shows that substantially more money (more than £2 billion for the first time ever) is being made off significantly fewer events (down 26% between 2019 and 2022).

In the middle of the interview, Will Page makes the following observation;

“But, we have to be careful with knee jerk reactions here – especially when people argue the explosion in stadium shows is at the expense of the grassroots. The majority of those fans who went to see Coldplay at stadiums, I don’t think they would be interested in going to Camden on a wet winter night to support the grassroots… to reiterate the demand-side point, I don’t think this explosion in demand for stadium shows is stealing business away from the grassroots.”

If you’re a regular reader of these pieces, you already know that there’s always a BUT or a HOWEVER in my opinion pieces. If you’re new around here, strap yourself in.

My response is that Will Page, just like the rest of us, doesn’t actually know if that’s true or not. The impact of arena and stadium shows on the purchasing habits of music consumers has never been explored sufficiently, either broadly or on the specific issue of its impact on the music ecosystem, for anyone to say with any authority whether it does or does not have an impact. Will is telling you what he feels, what his guess is, which, sorry Will, is not a great position to take in the middle of an interview about otherwise data based work.

Will’s stated position appears to be that the huge growth in consumption of live music, both in terms of economics and the number of arena and stadium events, is reflective of a significant growth in the purchase of tickets by new live music consumers. Will believes that someone who purchases a ticket to see Arctic Monkeys has not chosen that ticket above any other choice of live ticket they might otherwise have made in the music ecosystem, specifically that they have not made a money based decision to exchange that experience for one, or more likely several, watching similar acts at smaller events. My instinct, and over 45 years of attending live events, tells me that’s not what a very large number of gig goers would tell us.

My feeling, my own stab at predicting it, is that Will is wrong about this. In this case, neither of us can be certain one way or the other, but he’s had his guess so now you can read mine. And my guess at least has some data to back it up, although, hands up, that data is flawed because we haven’t, due to the absence of any adequate study, been able to tie it directly to the growth in arena and stadium events. We don’t have evidence of causation, leading to Will’s guess, but we certainly have massive evidence of correlation - not least, Will’s own work - which leads to mine. So let’s take a look at that.

I should say that those of us actively working to understand the grassroots music sector have a lot of discomfort with the data basis of some of Will’s work. That’s not a criticism of the analysis, always excellent, but simply that we are aware that the data does not include the vast majority of live music activity taking place in the grassroots circuit. The reasons for this are discussed in a previous piece you can read here but to summarise, Will’s data is drawn from PRS for Music. Very significant amounts of activity taking place in the grassroots sector aren’t adequately represented in that data source; in fact, the majority of it isn’t represented at all. An example of how much activity is ignored by the PRS data is the fact that 22 million people attended grassroots music venues in 2022, a period in which PRS for Music and major retailer data indicated that the total number of tickets sold for all live music events was only 30 million. Either grassroots music venues are generating 2 out of every 3 live music experiences, in which case they should make me the new CEO of UK Music immediately because they need someone who can talk on behalf of work that has been massively under-represented, or there’s something very, very wrong with the data set. NB: If anyone wants a very long explanation of how the data set came to be this inaccurate, and why it hasn’t yet been corrected, I’ll be happy to provide one in the comments.

Ignoring that issue, here’s the graphic of income that Will’s work based on PRS for Music data creates:

It’s not very clear what some of this terminology means in terms of live music choices. By ‘Theatres’, I think this PRS definition might also include Concert Halls, so O2 Academies, Rock City, etc, and by ‘Clubs’, which to be clear has no agreed definition whatsoever, I think they *might* be wrapping together some nightclub licensing and some grassroots music venues (GMVs) licensing. GMVs probably also feature in ‘outliers’, but given that PRS for Music has no data at all on the majority of activity in GMVs, and certainly not figures for attendance, I think it’s reasonable to conclude that the absence of the description ‘Grassroots Music Venue’ in this data isn’t accidental. In case you’re wondering, Grassroots Music Venue is a term recognised by government, mayors, local authorities and other key stakeholders which has an actual definition. “Clubs” isn’t.

Let’s do some more ignoring, just for speed, and just look at the chart. The data says Stadium, Arena and Festival events now take up 66% of the entire market, leaving everything else sharing just 34%. That’s a shift from a 46/54 share in 2019.

Will’s view appears to be that all of that growth in stadium and arena income has happened because of new consumers. So let’s look at available data for the grassroots music venue sector during this period which would support or oppose that, and please keep in mind that in the absence of a robust study analysing causation what I am offering you as evidence is correlation. I can’t say that one thing caused the other, but I can say that stating that it didn’t when there is this much correlation seems somewhat optimistic.

In 2022, the average grassroots music venue capacity was 308, of which 40% was utilised per event. This is 11 percentage points down from 2019 when the average percentage capacity attendance was 51%. This translates into 124 attendees per event in 2022 against 157 attendees per event in 2019. On average, each venue presented 184 events in 2022, which translates into 22,784 audience visits per venue annually in 2023. A decrease in events was observed across the sector with an average weekly number of 3.5 events per week, down from 4.2 in 2019. This is down 16.7% from 2019 when GMVs put on an average of 218 events per year, which translates into 34,226 audience visits annually per venue in 2019. You’ve read that correctly - each venue experienced 11,442 less visits in 2022 than in 2019.

I shouldn’t attempt to put words into Will’s mouth, so instead I’ll just leave what he has said to stand on its own and offer my own analysis: A massive growth between 2019 and 2022 in the demands made on music consumers’ wallets by arena and stadium shows was accompanied by a extraordinary collapse in the attendance at GMVs during the same period, caused both by fewer people at each event and less events being delivered (which resulted from an inability on the part of grassroots artists to make touring at this level affordable, causing fewer tours to be scheduled and fewer dates per tour to be delivered).

My theory is that those two things, massive growth at one end, huge decline at the other, are absolutely connected. My guess is that if you ask music consumers to spend hundreds of pounds per person to see a stadium event, that eats up their budget for live music and they simply cut back in other areas. I also think, just based on my own personal experience, that people who took a chance and went and saw the Arctic Monkeys at the Princess Charlotte or The Dublin Castle are still going to see them at Emirates Stadium, except the money we are now leaving in the wallet isn’t enough for them to also check out Vlure, Michael Aldag, Big Moon or Luke La Volpe (all of whom you really should go and see before it costs you £150 to stand at the back of an arena). And I absolutely disagree with Will; this type of consumer, and there’s a lot of them, definitely was doing both in 2019 and is compelled by pricing and the economic circumstances to choose between them now.

I suspect that somewhere between Will’s optimistic take that the arena level growth is all new customers and my pessimistic counter-argument that all we’ve done is move people, and their money, around, there lies a reality that we should be able to assess, analyse and act upon. To be completely clear, I don’t think I’m right and Will’s wrong, I think we’ve presented two sides of an argument. I also suspect that Will and I would agree that the absence of that data is a huge flaw in that debate and it needs to be corrected.

As per my column last week, this data and evidence really should exist. The fact it doesn’t is a serious challenge not just to this whole debate, but also in considering whether, when, and how, arenas should be built, what responsibility our largest entities have to consider the full impact of their programmes, and, most importantly to me, in ensuring we build full and adequate recognition, including financial support, for grassroots music venues into the success being enjoyed by the live music industry.

Will’s interview concludes with the following observation:

“There’s a dependency issue to explore on the supply-side on the need for grassroots to generate headliners of tomorrow. Protecting those stages is as important as ever and beyond the scope of the research here.”

On that point, we are 100% in agreement.