The Big Topic: How will festivals survive the next future-threatening obstacle?
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Credit: Far Out / Chris Ainsworth / Magnus Lunay
The Big Topic: The harsh reality of touring
Following the painful death of physical album sales, touring has been a saviour to artists and allowed them to keep doing their profession. However, the days of non-stadium-sized acts relying on their profits from the road seem to be dwindling as touring heads towards becoming a luxury that will only be available to a select few.
Grammy Award-winning singer Arooj Aftab has been on tour this summer and has played countless festivals on both sides of the Atlantic, but the experience has left her out of pocket. Aftab has performed at the likes of Primavera Sound in Barcelona, Green Man Festival in Wales, and even headlined the Barbican Centre in London, yet, her bank balance suggests otherwise.
The festival circuit used to be where musicians earned their money which would see them through the year and could be invested in studio time. However, when you’re travelling across countries and have to pay the wages of your band and crew, the costs soon outweigh the appearance fees.
She took to Twitter to write: “Touring has been amazing. We headlined a ton, had massive turnouts and have proven ourselves in all the markets. Yet still, running 10s of thousands in debt from the tour and I’m being told that it’s “normal”. Why is this normal. This should not be normalized.”
Aftab continued: “This is after artists already lost so much income during Covid. Now post covid flights fuel visas taxes and hotel prices are outrageous, promoters afraid to raise ticket prices, audiences still nervous to go out… what a fking mess and we are expected to take the hit. And shaming artists when they advocate for themselves and for better fees is one of the worst socially normalized things in the industry and I refuse.”
It’s a sorry state of affairs. Artists are still expected to accept their payment in exposure rather than cash, but while there is a natural appetite to be hopeful for the future of art, things look set only to worsen. It’s also hurting music as a whole because artists breaking through can afford to make a loss on touring, stopping working-class artists from breaking through.
Without touring, it’s still difficult to build an organic fanbase even with the help of social media, therefore, pricing many out of careers. Aftab’s experience shows that even artists who can headline sizeable venues like The Barbican are still in the red is proof the system is built wrong.
Mark Davyd, CEO of the Music Venue Trust, recently spoke to The Face about the rise in ticket prices and explained why artists are being forced to charge fans more for their shows. “Your ticket price includes the electricity needed to put on the show, the price of trucking the production to the venue and the cost of staffing the event,” he said.
Davyd continued: ”The margins that the live music industry works on are extremely tight. Even on some of these very high-value tickets, it would probably be surprising to people to know how little profit margin there actually is. When you see a three-digit ticket price, you probably assume somebody’s making a lot of money. But that usually isn’t the case, because the production costs are getting insane.”
As Davyd alluded, the current touring issues affect artists of all levels. Although Coldplay sold out five nights at Wembley Stadium, they admitted that if it wasn’t for last-minute investors, they’d have had to cancel their tour because it would have lost them too much money. It is worth caveating this by noting it’s likely Coldplay’s carbon neutral plans which made their costs surge.
However, Little Simz is a Brit Award-winning artist, and earlier this year, she had to shelve her plans to tour the United States, citing financial reasons. “I take my live shows seriously and would only want to give you guys nothing but the best of me,” she tweeted. “Being an independent artist, I pay for everything encompassing my live performances out of my own pocket and touring the US for a month would leave me in a huge deficit. As much as this pains me to not see you at this time, I’m just not able to put myself through that mental stress.”
Speaking nihilistically, it currently seems nothing will change, and most artists who successfully break through will be those to whom money is no object, which will greatly reduce the number of diverse voices.
Even before prices soared in every thinkable direction, artists still felt the pinch, but now it’s simply become unsustainable. If the industry shifts this way, it will put off those who could have the most to say. Music was once an art form accessible to all, and the story of The Beatles showed how it could turn ordinary kids into superstars, but that dream is close to terminating.
