By Larry Fitzmaurice, Vulture | Touring was a minefield before COVID; the pandemic just threw a few thousand more mines onto the field. Anyone within spitting distance of live music over the past two years — from road-warrior musicians to anxious ticket-holders and every behind-the-scenes toiler in between — has been plenty aware of the precariousness surrounding tour schedules in general. All it takes is a positive rapid test on an artist’s team, or travel-prohibitive supply-chain issues, or a mental-health crisis, or a straight-up lack of funding to derail an entire run of shows.
Ever since “things opened up” again (was anything ever really closed to begin with?), showgoers and entertainers alike have practically grown numb to intermittent waves of gig cancellations. So when U.K. rap sensation Little Simz announced that she was nixing her U.S. tour this past April, the news initially resembled a drop in an increasingly miserable and disappointment-filled bucket. But Simz’s statement explaining the canceled dates gestured to even tougher struggles for touring artists on the horizon. “Being an independent artist, I pay for everything encompassing my live performances out of my own pocket and touring the U.S. for a month would leave me in a huge deficit,” she said at the time. “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.”
For casual music fans unaware of the music industry’s financial, perpetually rusty nuts and bolts, the news that Simz lacked the scratch for an 11-city tour — a decently substantial run of dates, if not quite a full country-spanning schedule — had to have been shocking. The 28-year-old phenom’s fourth full-length, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, was her most critically and commercially successful album yet, marking the first time she appeared on multiple Billboard albums charts alongside year-end-list-topping accolades and a Mercury Music Prize nomination. She even appeared as herself in the delightfully silly global smash Venom 2: Let There Be Carnage. Simz is closer to being a global household name than ever before — so why can’t she afford to hit the road and engage in, paradoxically, one of the only professional rituals through which musicians can even make money at this point?
As 2022 has worn on, it’s clear that she’s not the only one who faces this predicament. Last week, pop scion Santigold, who recently released her first album in six years and was name-checked by Beyoncé as a generational icon on the Madonna-fied remix of “Break My Soul,” revealed that she was pulling the plug on the entirety of her North American tour — citing unsustainable costs due to inflation, as well as the increasingly untenable situation of post-COVID touring life in general. “I think it’s important for people to know the truth of what it’s like out here for artists,” she said in a lengthy statement explaining the cancellation, “and I don’t believe enough of us are talking about it publicly.”
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https://www.vulture.com/2022/10/the-live-music-industry-is-broken.html
The Live-Music Industry Is Broken
