Seems like acts play much bigger/more shows relative to record sales now. Could be substitution or just live sales not going down in same way, not sure which.
A couple of years ago I read an Economist piece on the music biz which pointed out that while live music revenues were on the up, this growth could be almost entirely explained by a very rapid rise in ticket prices rather than an expansion of the audience for shows, which hadn’t declined but wasn’t growing fast either. The biz itself tends to paint live music as a growth area in general - and the economic (& I daresay moral) virtues of shows are one of the few areas pirates and pirate-hunters agree on - so this report was a surprising bit of cold water. How right it was I don’t know.
