While the music industry celebrates growth in the concert and festival business, this very growth creates a new challenge to the “eco system” of the music industry as a whole. This happens at a time when the recording industry has left much of the work in talent development and marketing to the live sector.

The music business has always been a source of juicy behind-the-scenes stories, but it has never attracted more attention than after the crisis in the record business began in the late 1990s. Thousands of articles have been written about the death of the record industry. By contrast, the growth in the live sector is commonly described as a story of success. Yet, one of the biggest challenges to the music industry – and to the ecologies of musical life more generally – is a new and more narrow commercial exploitation of live music. Continue reading The hidden crisis in the music industry →