Am I Wrong About the Live Music Resurgence? - by Ted Gioia

“The idea flies in the face of the trending changes” points out one reader. “If live shopping, eating out, movies, etc are all going online, why would music trend in the opposite direction?”

If I go to a live concert, I can easily pay $200 or more. (The average expenditure for a fan attending Taylor Swift’s Eras concert tour was a thousand dollars—so this is a very reasonable assumption.)

This is where the comparison with other forms of online shopping just fall apart. Most products cost roughly the same if you get them online versus in-person—but in music the amount spent on real world consumption is hundreds of times more than a digital transaction.

And the difference in profitability is even more extreme—because profit margins in streaming are tiny, while ticket sales for live events are very profitable.

For many years, streaming generated no profits whatsoever. Spotify didn’t make money until this year—after raising subscription prices.

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