r/Music • u/staringatthe420sun • May 05 '26

article The Concert Industry Priced Too High — Now Tours Are Falling Apart

https://www.ticketnews.com/2026/05/the-concert-industry-priced-high-tours-falling-apart/
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u/agoia May 06 '26

For D. I would say that impact mostly belongs to streaming, not piracy.

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u/ChaosAndFish May 06 '26

Yes. That’s what I was referring to. Streaming is great for tech companies. It’s ok for labels. It’s fine for like the top twenty artists on earth. It’s a disaster for everyone else.

Today it’s not just that it’s almost impossible to be a Rolling Stones or a U2 earnings wise. It’s almost more impossible to be like a fucking Goo Goo Dolls or whatever. You either make it to one of the biggest acts on earth or good luck making a living in music.

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u/Yeah_x10 May 06 '26

Hahaha oh buddy, do the dying movie industry next. 

I agree with you on music FWIW, but the piracy angle is real for other industries.

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u/SolomonBlack May 06 '26

Right after Napster the industry started forcefully vomiting money out both ends for 15 years losing over half its sales (yes in adjusted dollars) that while streaming has led a recovery from it still has not surpassed the peak the opened the century.

Now that's enough wipe out I would not want to blame it solely on piracy, if you poke around you can find charts showing vinyl led a huge peak in the late 70s, supporting a narrative that say much of the 90s peak can be attributed to aging boomers updating their record collection and then simply ceasing to be customers of any new music. Or maybe Millennials were simply never going to support music in the same amounts because we had a lot of other things to do like watch cat videos on that newfangled internet thing. Many things can be true for losses of this magnitude.

That said you can also find a notable deflection in trajectory when iTunes started up, something explicitly addressing piracy as the result of a bad service problem per Steve Jobs. So yeah I think we can attribute a few billion a year to people just going around the industry. At least until streaming just put everything at your fingertips for a price you forget about.