Live music is running at 10% — This shows that simply lifting restrictions doesn’t get us back to normal.
Back before the world hit pause to deal with the pandemic, the streets were filled with music, at least that’s how I remember it. Now, walking about in the evening, there’s an eerie silence. It turns out that this dampening of the soundscape isn’t localised-it’s nationwide.
Data from Hearby, an AI powered live music tracker app, shows that across the US and Canada, live music is at below 10% of what it was in February in terms of the number of live shows.
In many cities it’s struggling to hit even this low bar.
Now, it would be reasonable to assume that we’d see numbers fall off a cliff in March/April as the wave of global shutdowns struck and see those numbers creep back up in the summer as restrictions were lifted, however, it’s only the first part of that assumption that the data shows.
February saw 50,202 shows performed across the 70 largest metropolitan areas across the US and Canada. This number was generated before Hearby started to factor in “incidental music”-that is live music which is played but not the focus of the event, such as bands playing in restaurants and so on.
In comparison October saw just 4,451, including live background music- a drop of over 90%.
Perhaps most shockingly, this is neither a particularly low point nor a high point- in the midst of the pandemic, operating at around 10% of capacity is looking distinctly average.
During July, when the lockdown policies from the first wave were widely seen as having done their thing and were being lifted as the virus seemed to be in retreat, live music hit its biggest slump, even as things were beginning to reopen. The height of summer saw just 2,131 shows performed in the covered cities.
Looking back on September, just as the second wave struck, it actually looked like a small scale recovery was underway with 6,016 shows being played across the 70 cites. To put just how small a recovery that is in perspective, New York alone had 4,628 shows in the normally relatively quiet month of February before factoring in things such as restaurants etc.
Now with the number of cases of the virus surging as the second wave hits and some states which were previously lifting restrictions re-imposing them, predictions for the next few months look grim.
Nearly halfway through November and Hearby have managed to identify just 3,701 shows across their top 70 US and Canadian metropolitan areas this month-including incidental music.
What is perhaps most interesting is that in the US, where many states have lifted most restrictions, the uptick in shows is fairly minimal- far below what we might expect. Hearby’s data allows us to look at this on a local level.
Tennessee, for example, where 89 of the 95 counties are now open as normal (save for social distancing and masks), plays home to Nashville- Music City as it bills itself. Nashville, normally the heart of the live Americana scene hosted 2071 shows in February.
In October this year that number was 734. Spread across 114 venues, that means each is hosting roughly 6.7 shows, roughly one third of the number pre-pandemic. Depressingly, in terms of the metropolitan areas covered, Nashville is the stand-out success story in terms of musical recovery. To go along with this re-opening, infection rates have risen.
This suggests that simply lifting restrictions doesn’t equal a return to normal- at least not straight away. The trade-off between the live music economy and infection rates doesn’t seem to pay off. Where restrictions are lifting, recovery is slow and infection is high.
Whether this stunted recovery in performance is down to fear of the virus, business closures, economic worry or a change in culture- there are simply not enough live shows happening to ensure that everyone is getting paid.
Playing livestreams and finding creative ways to bring the show online only stretches so far. For the big rock stars who would be filling arenas and stadiums, this isn’t a problem- they’ll pack living rooms just as easily as any venue.For the local band on the verge of making it, or for those just starting out, the audience just isn’t there for it to be economically viable long term.
Even worse, there is simply no online equivalent for all the bar and venue staff who rely on shows happening to pay their rent.
Until such time as the vaccine is rolled out en mass (spring at the earliest and with the majority of people who attend gigs regularly being in the lowest priority demographic, likely summer) and public confidence is restored, we’re likely to see this start-stop pattern repeat itself.
