It’s very difficult to not take pain meds,” Bonnie Raitt said in the Rolling Stone piece. “We’re all older, and people are starting to have carpal tunnel and injuries from playing. A somber examination of music and the opioid crisis by Rolling Stone pointed to the grueling demands of constant touring and performing as a probable cause for the painkiller addictions that later killed Prince and Tom Petty. By the same coin, the current music economy demands that they work harder, tour more, and generally wring their bodies out to exhaustion. If their voice wears out or they break a hip from all the speaker-jumping, their career is handicapped - or finished, perhaps. Sellers like Ticketmaster also realized they could implement variable pricing for concerts - kind of like plane tickets, which fluctuate based on demand - and fans would still shell out to see a beloved act.Ī musician is their own most valuable asset. Bloomberg reported that as piracy eroded music sales in the 90s, artists began leaning more heavily on touring to bridge the gap - not a hard thing to do if you’re a star like Swift or Beyoncé, and can make more money from a couple of tour dates than you can from a year of album sales. U2 topped the list the year prior, making $54.4 million in 2017 - with $52 million of the band’s take-home pay coming from its Joshua Tree tour.Īccording to the researcher Pollstar, the average price of a ticket to the most popular tours has nearly quadrupled since 1996, up from $25.81 to $91.86 nowadays. Taylor Swift made the most money in 2018, bringing in $99.6 million in the year - and $90.5 million of that was from touring. But nowadays if you take a look at the revenue breakdown for the world’s highest-paid musicians, you’ll see that the vast majority of their wealth comes from touring.īillboard publishes its Money Makers list every year, chronicling the highest-paid acts in the world. Before the streaming age, artists raked in the bulk of their money from album sales. It’s way more expensive to buy concert tickets today than it was just a couple of decades ago, and we mostly have the internet to thank.

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