Live music is back.  After being completely upended by the pandemic, the music industry is seeing surges in ticket sales for live shows.  For example, live music discovery platform Bandsintown says it has seen an increase of eight million users in just the last six months. Fabrice Sergent, co-founder and managing partner at Bandsintown, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.

Closing Bell

Music Industry Seeing Boom in Demand for Live Shows

Welcome back to closing bell on cheddar news everyone and live music is back after being completely upended by this pandemic. The music industry is seeing surges in ticket sales for live shows? For example, live music discovery platform bands in town says it's seen an increase of eight million users in just the last six months. And joining us now is resurgent bands and towns co founder and managing partner. Thank you so much for joining us. Congrats on this resurgence. What other trends is your company seeing uh in terms of show demand for live music and how it's been growing during this time, Isaiah. Yes, thanks for having us. It's it's a pleasure. It's it's very good and important time for artists and fans because if one thing that has been proven is that the pandemic staff, the fans and really preventing them from experiencing this tribal experience. You know, the moment where you really experience something as a communal moment, cheering for the same artist for the music and the altogether um sharing one experience. So the starvation now created, pent up demand, an unprecedented level of pent up demand from the fans as as well as an unprecedented level of offer with twice as many artists on tour as it used to be pre pandemic. And on the demand side, We now see ticketing companies selling as many tickets within six months as they as they used to sell within one year, wow within six months, that's what they did in one year. And it makes sense. I think we all kind of forgot just how incredible of an experience these live music shows are, What other data does your company have around recent trends when it comes to live music? Is there a specific genre or a type of live show or concert that is seeing the most demand right now? Yes, actually. Um so everything that relates to latin music is really hot and you can see that trending at festivals, the programming of festival vastly increased the number of artists playing. Such music work shows pretty strong in in fact vibrant activity with new acts and a lot of emerging artists trying to compete in this area. And obviously that the the usual suspects big tours of pop stars going on. We also see that geographically behaviors are very different. Clearly americans feel really confident and much more confident about the future because they rush to buy tickets Right now. And while you know, and while in Europe you can see that there are 30% more shows listed on the platform. We currently offer 375,000 shows, upcoming shows to the fans everywhere in the world, still in Europe fans are way more reluctant to buy tickets much earlier ahead of the show. So it was very, and that's a change of behavior because prior to the pandemic fans were buying tickets really last minute. It was like a big trends going on now. Post pandemic fans now realized that they have to get really ahead of time. It struck me that today we learned that Coachella announced its 2023 dates and starts selling tickets right now. Um Like it's almost a year ahead of the of the events. Um That's that's that's an unprecedented. That's incredible. Yeah, really interesting. And Live Nation also recently reported an uptick in concert ticket sales. Can you speak on what the company's recent earnings report reveals about the shift in consumer behavior there around ticket buying and worth noting they're not cheap. They're very expensive to make up for this recovery from the pandemic look all players in this ecosystem also face huge challenges, venues and promoters, the crews are way more expensive than they used to be. Clearly it's way more difficult to find people. Some simply left industry During the pandemic. You know, it sounds like it was like 10 years ago, but you know a few months ago there was no shows at all. So a lot of people left and didn't want to come back then. The cost of production, electricity and everything that is an important part of the cost of an event also exploited as you know as they do for all consumers. So this is definitely driving um to get price up on top of obviously this uh ratio and this this high demand that comes from the fence. I'm glad that you mentioned the cruise because I would definitely pay more if I knew it was going to trickle down to everyone who's a part of this ecosystem. But I also want to shift topics a bit and talk about N. F. T. S. And their potential impact on live music. How could a digital ticket in the form of an N. F. T. Really continue to be a game changer for live events? Well that's that's pretty um um self explicit in your way. And N. F. T. Is a gateway, is like a key to provide utility, right? And the ticket is in the real life, pretty much what it is. It provides you access to an experience. But the experience is multifaceted usually was you know, shows and consumption of alcohol and things like that. That's the same. I think the N. F. T. Will be very helpful to build the experience before during and after the show while the ticket is essentially during the show. And so for example we launched an emerging artist program called Big Break and we did we wanted each artist to play live stream. And if you attend the live stream we enable the fans to claim an N. F. T. That proved the attendance. This N. F. T. Is a way to connect the fans with these emerging artists. And should the emerging artists become famous and or at least successful, they will be always supported and followed by these fans which creates a new form of fandom. Yeah, I absolutely think in the N. F. T. Space it's very saturated. But this is one of the applications that has a very promising future that if, I mean I don't think the N. F. T. Space is saturated. What is saturated is the perception that the N. F. T. Would be limited to a certain type of use case. Um There are so many use case to invent, there are so many use cases that we don't even think of right now that you will see that what is perceived as being saturated today because there's been too probably too too many and too quickly. Um too many initiatives in this space. You will see that this is going to diversify and and flourish actually beyond the current challenges that the industry is facing. Really appreciate that perspective fabrice. Sergent, co founder and managing partner for bands in town. Thank you again for joining us.