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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

The Dead End of Rock Touring

June 6, 2014 by Scott Timberg

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JUST go on the road! Musicians who’ve seen their earnings from recorded music collapse should just tour more often, digital utopians tell them. But a new report shows that even with ticket prices getting higher, a 60 percent growth in touring revenues since 2000, and a supposed recovery from the depths of the recession, the musicians are making less money touring than they used to. Here’s the Music Industry Blog:

The live music value chain is an incredibly complex one with multiple stakeholders taking their share (ticketing, secondary ticketing, venues, booking agents, promoters, tax, expenses etc.).  The share of live revenue that artists make from live has declined every year since 2000.  The impact on the total m200px-Gibson_Custom_50th_Anniversary_1959_Les_Paul_Standard_(2009)_brightenarket is that  total artist income (i.e. from all revenue sources) has declined every year too since 2009.

This comes from a report about music’s growing superstar economy: Both the Internet and the music industry serve as the cutting edges of inequality. I’ll keep tracking this as best I can.

Filed Under: arts & tech, Inequality, music, rock music

Comments

  1. Pete Bilderback says

    June 7, 2014 at 6:33 am

    Mitt Romney was right. In our economy there are makers and there are takers. Artists continue to find new ways to make things, while silicon valley parasites and venture capitalists find new ways to take.

  2. Scott Timberg says

    June 7, 2014 at 1:32 pm

    This may be the first time I’ve seen Mr. Bilderback quote Mitt Romney approvingly…

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

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