Why Live Music Matters in the Streaming Age

I've been to nearly 300 concerts since 1982.

Some have been unforgettable. Others less so, but I've never regretted buying a ticket.

That might seem strange in an age when almost every song ever recorded sits in my pocket for less than the price of a couple of pints each month.

If music has never been more accessible, why does seeing it performed live feel more valuable than ever?

The answer isn't just that concerts are a good night out.

It's that music itself has changed.

Growing up in the vinyl age

When I was young, music wasn't something you sampled.

It was invested in.

If you wanted to hear a new album you had to buy it, or maybe borrow it from a friend (and tape it!). If you liked it that much you bought it for yourself later.

Maybe your older brother or sister owned it and you listened to their collection. If your parents liked it, you avoided it.

Our musical education was shaped as much by our wallets as our curiosity.

Buying an album was a gamble.

Sometimes you discovered a masterpiece.

Occasionally you realised you'd blown your money on forty minutes or so of mostly disappointment.

Either way, you kept listening. Partly because you'd paid for it.

Albums often revealed themselves slowly. You experienced the artist's vision by listening to each song as part of a whole rather than in isolation.

Songs you skipped sometimes became favourites later.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether scarcity made us more patient listeners.

The greatest music library ever created

Streaming changed all of that.

Today I can listen to almost anything ever recorded within seconds.

I honestly think it's one of the greatest technological developments of my lifetime.

Not because it's made music cheaper.

Because it's made music bigger.

Ironically, I'm discovering more "new" music in my fifties than I did in my twenties.

Some of it isn't new at all. It's simply new to me.

I've spent the last few years discovering artists like The Zombies and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young as well as other bands I somehow missed the first time around.

At the same time, my sons have introduced me to the likes of Billie Eilish, Gary Clark Jr. and Father John Misty. Very different genres. All equally accessible.

Without streaming, I'm not convinced any of that would have happened.

Algorithms help, but family helps more.

Music no longer flows in just one direction.

Parents may still introduce their children to Pink Floyd or The Beatles.

Increasingly, children are introducing their parents to entirely new artists as well.

I love that.

Streaming hasn't just transformed the way we listen.

It's transformed the conversations we have, and the relationships we share with our children.

Why concerts have become more important

At the same time, something unexpected happened.

As recorded music became almost free to access, live music became more valuable to the artist and tickets to gigs more expensive.

For decades, artists toured to sell albums.

Now albums often exist to support touring.

The economics of the industry have almost completely reversed.

We sometimes complain about ticket prices—and often with good reason—but it's impossible to understand modern concerts without understanding how dramatically the business has changed.

That, though, is only part of the story.

More than just a gig

Concerts have become one of the ways I spend time with my sons.

We've travelled together.

We've seen artists we'd all loved for years, and others who were completely new to all but one of us.

We've argued about support acts, discussed set lists and debated an artist's back catalogue on the drive home.

I've introduced them to music that shaped my own life.

They've introduced me to artists I'd never have found without them.

Those evenings are about more than music.

They're about us.

When I was growing up, that wasn't really how families socialised.

If adult children spent time with their parents outside the house, it was more likely to be over a pint in the local pub than at a concert or in a theatre.

Today, shared experiences have become the meeting place between generations.

Music.

Theatre.

Comedy.

Sport.

Instead of talking across generations, we experience things together.

That's a wonderful change.

The emotional baggage

Stewart Copeland once said something that has stayed with me.

Talking about The Police reunion, he suggested that Sting could write the greatest song of his career tomorrow and it still wouldn't carry the emotional weight of one of the band's classics because those older songs now have decades of "emotional baggage."

It's a brilliant expression.

He didn't mean baggage in a negative sense.

He meant life.

Our first kiss.

Our wedding.

The holiday where that song played every evening.

Friends who are no longer with us.

To quote Led Zeppelin, the song remains the same.

We don't.

Perhaps that's what we're really paying for when we buy a concert ticket.

Not only to hear music, but to revisit a part of our own lives.

The legacy premium

However, there's another reason ticket prices have risen.

The audience has changed.

The people who grew up with The Eagles, Bruce Springsteen, Iron Maiden or Roger Waters are no longer teenagers saving up pocket money.

Many are now in their fifties, sixties and seventies. Their mortgages may be paid off, their children may have left home and, for the first time in their lives, they have genuine disposable income.

Promoters understand that. So do the artists.

More importantly, so do the fans.

Seeing a favourite artist is no longer just buying a concert ticket. It's a birthday present. An anniversary. A weekend away. A chance to relive forty years of memories.

That's why many people are willing to spend £150 or £200 on a ticket.

That's not exploitation, it's supply and demand economics meeting a generation that finally has the means to buy experiences they could only dream about when they were twenty.

Of course, that creates another problem.

It risks pricing younger fans out of the market.

A teenager discovering Bruce Springsteen today shouldn't need several hundred pounds to experience him live.

Finding a balance between commercial reality and accessibility is one of the biggest challenges facing the live music industry.

Still creating

That doesn't mean all legacy artists have stopped creating. Quite the opposite.

Paul McCartney is still releasing new music more than sixty years after Beatlemania.

David Byrne continues to make music and stage shows that refuse to stand still.

Every new song they write has to compete with a catalogue that has become woven into people's lives.

That's an almost impossible challenge. Yet they keep doing it anyway.

That deserves admiration in my opinion.

The GOOD Thought

Technology has given us almost unlimited access to recorded music.

What it still can't reproduce is the experience of being there.

You can stream an album a thousand times, but you can never recreate the feeling of standing in a crowd, hearing the opening chord and sharing that moment with thousands of strangers—and, in my case, with my sons.

Perhaps that's why live music matters more than ever.

Not because it's rare.

But because genuinely shared experiences have become precious.

Of course, that leaves one obvious question.

If concerts have become so valuable, why have they also become so expensive?

That's exactly what we'll explore next.