Roar of the live music crowd drowns out stadium income from sport

The writer is author of ‘Tarzan Economics’ and co-presenter of the Bubble Trouble podcast.

It’s a sign of the post-pandemic times that Wembley Stadium, England’s national home of the beautiful game, will have as many music concerts as football fixtures this year. And it hasn’t exactly been a quiet year for football: the women’s Euros final set its own attendance record. But the 16 matches, not all of which sold out and none of them with fans on the pitch, will be overshadowed by 16 concerts — all of which sold out and will see fans filling the entire pitch.

In total, Wembley will sell 1.3mn music tickets this summer — that’s the population of Edinburgh and Glasgow combined. And these are valuable events. Unlike football matches, where drinks can only be consumed during intervals, music fans can drink all night long. That combo of ticket, food and beverage, sprinkled with scarcity and often sentimentality, all adds up. Of the six acts to perform — Coldplay (six nights). Ed Sheeran (five), Harry Styles (two), Westlife, Capital Radio and Foo Fighters Tribute — each show can expect to gross above £5mn. 

This bonanza isn’t just restricted to Wembley. Across London, it reads like a Premier League table: West Ham hosted three music shows (Foo Fighters cancelled two), Tottenham four and Arsenal two. Nor is it “a London thing”: the number of stadium shows and festivals up and down the country is set to exceed 2,000 this year, double-digit percentage growth on the 1,786 that took place in pre-pandemic 2019. This phenomenon isn’t going away. Wembley is expanding its concert series to 26 next summer, and many stadiums are doing likewise.

So great is the demand that Eurovision 2023, which the UK, runner-up after Ukraine, is due to host on behalf of the war-torn winners, will struggle to find a venue in any of the British cities in the running.

FT readers and their offspring may be part of this remarkable rebound story, perhaps in this weekend’s migration to Wembley to see the start of Coldplay’s week of fixtures. But if you are coughing up £120 for a ticket — a year’s worth of Spotify — and that again in beer and grub, you’re part of a wider phenomenon: go big, or stay home.

In a market with more choice, we demand more hits. A decade of data, sourced from PRS for Music, the copyright collective, backs this up. Back in 2012, the year of the London Olympics, UK gig-goers spent £1.2bn on concert tickets; by 2019, the year before live music was all but silenced, that increased to £1.7bn. Yet all that growth happened at stadiums and festivals, which increased their share from 23 per cent to 40 per cent. By the end of this year, stadiums and festivals will probably capture the majority of UK box office spend for the first time ever. That’s at the expense of theatres, clubs and grassroots venues, which have felt squeezed out, in absolute and relative terms.

The UK’s live industry has never been so hit-heavy — where the spoils go to so few events. The reasons why gig-goers would rather splash out on a big night are threefold: pandemic, streaming and disposable income.

Larger events owned by larger companies may have been better able to comply with the moving target of government restrictions during the pandemic — and better placed to rebound afterwards.

Meanwhile, the pandemic silenced music on stage while it surged on our phones. But music streaming presents a “paradox of choice” with 82mn available songs — according to the theory, some choice is better than none but it doesn’t necessarily follow that more is better than some. Only a few can afford to stand out in the cacophony of such a market. For the live industry, that means the bigger the talent and the bigger the event, the more likely that a promoter can create a point of differentiation and draw a crowd.

Finally, with wallets squeezed this year and next, inflation feeding into ticket prices and the pandemic’s residual anxieties keeping us nervy about indoor crowds, consumers may be more risk-averse about smaller shows; fans are rebalancing their entertainment portfolio to fewer and bigger outdoor events.

This isn’t just about music. It affects the entire entertainment industry as it figures out how the “new normal” will look. Intuitively, because we’ve been settled into our sofas for so long, the experience economy has to raise its game to get us off our back sides.

Consider the enlightening story of American football team the Atlanta Falcons, who took the bold decision of improving the quality of catering inside their glitzy new stadium while slashing ticket prices. On-the-night spend (or Arpu) went up 16 per cent. They identified competition at home — a 72” smart television, say — and outside too, in the US culture of tailgating, where sports fans drink beer and barbecue food by the backs of their cars in stadium car parks. The Falcons realised they were competing for attention on and off the pitch.

Those who can up their game will stay in the game — the stages of stadiums and festivals have the scale to survive. But with the virtual threat of the metaverse just around the corner, everyone else in the experience economy needs to realise it’s a battle for infrequent, if enthusiastic, spending.