As the world emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic, the live event industry was left to pick itself up off the floor. Having forcibly been shuttered amid the height of the lockdown, many artists and venues resorted to day jobs or even COVID-19 relief funds to keep their enterprises afloat, some more controversially than others.
To this day, the lasting effects of the pandemic continue to be felt in obvious ways. The current state of inflation and rise in fuel, lodging, travel, etc. costs are obvious challenges faced by touring musicians and the world at large, but they’re not the only problems still rippling through the industry.
Larger scale artists often employ a small army of touring professionals to help pull off their shows, from light riggers and production managers down to techs and stagehands. As the reality of the lockdown set in, many of those professionals were faced with the hard choice of pursuing a career elsewhere, some ultimately leaving the industry for good for their newfound employment.
The limited talent pool that remained thus became highly valuable and sought after, leading to scheduling challenges and higher wages being commanded. The eventual full-scale return of touring also presented challenges elsewhere, as after downscaling their fleets during the lockdown, companies responsible for providing touring transportation soon found themselves out of inventory, leading to numerous tours being spiked.
Still, with an eager populace having been starved for entertainment, 2022 and 2023 proved to be relative banner years for the live industry as touring ultimately came roaring back. In 2024 though, what were once fractures have now become undeniable cracks.
Numerous high profile festivals and tours were cancelled after failing to draw. The glut of shows and tours as everyone seemingly staged their comebacks all at once inevitably led to risky tours being booked, many of which did not pay off. Already reeling from the lean years of the pandemic, promoters and venues have increasingly become more risk-averse and guaranteed draws have been able to command higher fees in turn.
Of course, the problem has also been compounded by increasingly predatory ticketing practices, which have led to high-profile lawsuits. There’s also the increasingly sophisticated network of bots and scalpers snatching up tickets almost immediately to contend with, and the general lack of funding artists now receive from their labels as budgets evaporated amid the shift to streaming revenue. As such, the majority of touring bands are effectively forced to operate as traveling merch retailers to keep afloat.
And on top of that, there’s also only the growing concern of a select few heavier artists currently situated to carry the torch in a headlining capacity once the last of the old guard eventually retire. Avenged Sevenfold are one of the artists currently positioned to retain top billing and have long been an advocate for change in the touring industry.
Back in 2022, their vocalist M. Shadows publicly shared his thoughts on the ever controversial practice of dynamic pricing. While on paper intended to benefit the artists by undercutting the secondary market and allowing bands/promoters to essentially officially charge scalper prices for in-demand events, that artist opt-in practice has not sat well with many concertgoers.
In 2023, Avenged Sevenfold set out to change the industry with the launch of their blockchain-based ticketpass technology. However, despite their best efforts, the multi-platinum alternative metal band still face many challenges when it comes to heading out on the road. Shadows recently went into detail regarding that in a new interview with Bradley Hall.
Here’s what he had to say about it:
“It’s really crazy because when you get to our kind of level, everybody on the crew is ‘A list’ and they’re all being pulled in different directions, so they all make high-end amounts of money. More trucks, more drivers, more gasoline, more travel. And we’ve already seen a lot of bands canceling tours. You’re gonna see a lot more. ‘Cause I know where we’re at. I know what we make. And I know that it’s incredibly hard for us even.
Unless you can really put something together that keeps you in one city and not a lot of movement and keeps you in places where you can play multiple nights somewhere, you really are doing some of these things… Like, for instance, a big reason we’re going to all these different countries is because we can go to the same countries and make very little to no money, or we can go to new countries and make very little to no money. And so the idea has been, ‘Let’s go build the band out.’
Back in the day, we were starting out in Indonesia, which is our second-biggest market now. It was our biggest market when we went there in May; it actually had more listeners than America. But we’ve grown something in Indonesia that has been incredible. Back in the day, we would go there and nobody at the label would support it, really, or care because they couldn’t sell CDs.
They didn’t have the money to buy CDs or they didn’t have the production or people just didn’t collect physical music. With the change in getting paid by streaming services, the kind of hack is, like, you can grow all these Third World countries, Second World countries, places that traditionally couldn’t afford to buy from your webstore or buy a CD, because one stream in Indonesia is the same as one stream in Los Angeles.
And the more you grow the worldwide kind of coalition and get to these places that maybe aren’t introduced to Western music as much — I would say India, a place where it’s just so disconnected from what we’re all doing over in Europe and America. There are fans, but it’s just not a thing because bands aren’t going there and it’s just that whole thing hasn’t been developed yet.
It reminds me of Indonesia 10 years ago or 15 years ago. My belief is that if you keep going to these places and opening up new markets and kind of putting a flag there, that if you can get the whole world streaming, it’s gonna kind of supplement this sort of gap that we were missing in the ’90s and the early 2000s when the labels and no one would pay attention to these places ’cause there was no money to be made.
So, yeah, it’s one of those things where, again, going back to touring, touring is very hard right now for bands, It’s almost impossible. And you’re also having a big downturn in ticket sales right now. People have been blown out by ticket prices, because of the touring, because of the inflation, so every single thing stacks on top.
And then you’ve got people that are very upset about what ticket prices are, which I get. It’s kind of crazy to go see a couple of bands and it’s gonna cost you five, six hundred bucks, or if it’s country artists, it’s a thousand dollars if it’s Taylor Swift, it’s $3,200, or whatever it is. And there’s a whole argument there — there’s a whole argument of people not understanding how the ticketing works in the music business, people blaming and pointing fingers, but what really is happening is there’s inflation, there’s higher costs, it’s much harder to get around, and if you think about every aspect of a touring band’s life, it’s making it increasingly impossible.
And you’ve gotta think, if there’s not gonna be CDs coming in to the record label, there’s no tour support. They’re not making that kind of money anymore. So you’ve got this whole situation that is kind of dire, when you, when you think about it that way. That’s why you’ve gotta kind of pick and choose what you’re doing.”
Shadows also weighed in once again on the practice of dynamic pricing, which while often blamed on promoters and ticket providers, is understood to be agreed upon in advance by artists and their representatives. He said of that:
“If I was to get into numbers right now and show you what we make at a show and what it costs, I think you would just go, ‘Are you kidding me? How can you bring in that much money and then no bandmembers make anything?’ And you’d be, like, ‘There’s gotta be somewhere in there that you have someone that’s just messing up.’ But it’s a true thing.
It wouldn’t even be appropriate to get into that; it just doesn’t make sense. But just know that there are crazy amounts to get 38 people on a crew that need to be there… To headline Rock In Rio, you’ve gotta have a show. You’ve gotta have the show, and everyone’s got to fly in, and they don’t have the right pyro and you’ve gotta bring it in from Germany because they don’t have the right things in Brazil.
And there’s four or five days of pre-production and hotels. It just becomes insane. And then I also think that people, they want to ignore that we live in a capitalist society where there’s two things going on. Artists want to be compensated for whatever the fair market value is for their work.
So what that means is if there’s two thousand seats in a venue, the artist could be really nice and charge 50 bucks and not make any money or go do it because they just wanna do it. And then you could have a reseller that could sell a few hundred of those tickets for up to a thousand dollars because there’s fans that will pay a thousand dollars.
Now, the reason dynamic pricing even ever got introduced is because the artist and the management said, ‘Why is the reseller making 10 [times] what the artist that’s on stage is making? There’s this many tickets that will sell for this much. Why aren’t we charging that much?’ And so what Ticketmaster did is they created a tool that allows artists to opt into this dynamic pricing.
Now it’s very clear Ticketmaster created a tool to allow artists to opt into this. It’s not Ticketmaster just taking all the top end. It’s the artists. And artists love to hide behind Live Nation and Ticketmaster and go, ‘Oh. We had no clue. Can’t believe it.'”
The reality is if you ask most people and you say, ‘If someone’s buying a ticket for a thousand dollars, do you want it going to a reseller or the artist?’, most people will say, ‘We want it going to the artist.’ But they also don’t want the ticket to be that highly priced.
And then they also don’t want you to take away their ability to resell the ticket, because that’s very un-American. You don’t buy a Range Rover and they tell you you can’t resell it. You don’t buy a house and they tell you, ‘Oh, can’t resell it. Sorry. Housing market’s getting too high. You’re not allowed to resell your house.’
So, the ticketing kind of falls under that same thing of, like, we’re giving you something that you’ve purchased. Now, if we tell you you can’t resell it, it’s almost unethical in a way. So you have all these little arguments and there’s macro and micro arguments about all of it. And that’s really what’s happening. So, at the end of the day, ticket prices go up when somebody in the queue sees … there’s too many people in there, [and] they raise the prices until people stop buying. And that is what the music industry calls fair market value.
Now, I don’t think people would disagree with the premise. They just don’t like when it’s happening to them. And so that’s the situation we’re in. And I’m not here to make a statement on whether they should be mad or not. It’s just that’s what’s really happening… And if people can afford it, the artist would rather see that upside than the guy that bought 20 front-row tickets and now he’s selling them to all your biggest fans.”
When asked if he sees a darker or brighter future for touring artists, he responded:
“It’s hard to say, because right now it just seems like it’s on a complete runaway. It feels like, what brings us back in? Is it regulations on pricing? Is it bringing down inflation? And bringing down inflation is hard because then do you get people to bring their prices back down?
And that goes for so many things in the economy and not just the bands. Because for the bands to bring their prices down, you’re gonna have to have hotels go down, flights go down, gasoline go down, workforce go down. So, so many things have to happen for the band to get their costs down. Rental gear, lighting, staging, venue, rental… So many things have to happen for their costs to go down for that to happen. And maybe people just need to stop going to concerts, and then it resets everything.
“I really don’t know what the solution is, but I do know with the runaway pricing, it’s just gonna bring ticket prices up for the fans, which is just gonna supplement what the costs are already for the artists.
And then the artists are gonna stop going on tour, which you’ve already seen. You already see artists put tickets on sale and they cancel. And that’s kind of the biggest trick in music right now is throw out a crazy price, throw out a festival, and if it doesn’t sell out within the first day or two, you cancel the festival, because that money coming in is what’s paying for all the artists on the back end and being able to get that thing set up. It’s better just to cut your losses right away.
And we’ve been seeing that recently. And so that’s kind of the M.O. of what people are doing. And the whole thing is just not healthy. And that’s why, again, the best mindset has to be a completely different mindset of not getting in the weeds of all this and just kind of going where you wanna go. Am I gonna be happy going there? Do we wanna hit fans that have never seen us? Cool.
Are we gonna make any money? No. But what are we gonna get from it? Well, we’re gonna get in front of people that never got to see us, never thought they were gonna get to see us, and hopefully that kind of spreads in the streaming world and it just plants a flag that maybe in five years we’ll come back and maybe it’ll be a little bigger.
You’ve kind of just gotta think macro… And don’t make yourself miserable. Don’t go grind in Europe for six weeks, be away from your family, make no money, maybe lose money, and basically play the same places you played 25 years. You’ve just gotta change the mindset. You’ve gotta free yourself from that and just go, ‘Well, we don’t need that. I don’t care. We’re not doing that.'”
