The History of Live Music in Britain, Volume III, 1985-2015

From Live Aid to Live Nation

Simon Frith, Matt Brennan, Martin Cloonan, Emma Webster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781317028802
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Britische Geschichte der Neuzeit

To date there has been a significant gap in existing knowledge about the social history of music in Britain from 1950 to the present day. The three volumes of Live Music in Britain address this gap and do so through a unique prism—that of live music. The key theme of the books is the changing nature of the live music industry in the UK, focused upon popular music but including all musical genres. Via this focus, the books offer new insights into a number of other areas including the relationship between commercial and public funding of music; changing musical fashions and tastes; the impact of changing technologies; the changing balance of power within the music industries; the role of the state in regulating and promoting various musical activities within an increasingly globalised music economy; and the effects of demographic and other social changes on music culture. Drawing on new archival research, a wide range of academic and non- academic secondary sources, participant observation and a series of interviews with key personnel, the books have the potential to become landmark works within Popular Music Studies and broader cultural history. The third volume covers the period from Live Aid to Live Nation (1985– 2015).

1New times

Above me the sky was blue. The sun seemed at its zenith and it filled the stadium with the brilliant untainted light of an English summer’s day … Before me was the largest audience the world has ever known … This was 13 July 1985. It was Live Aid.

(Bob Geldof 1986:10)

So what exactly is Red Wedge? Is it a cynical device via which the Labour Party hopes to get the vital youth vote for a general election now just over two years away? A front for a faction like Militant? A Live Aid for Lefties? An ideologically sound haircut?

(New Musical Express January 18, 1986: 19)

Mass production, the mass consumer, the big city, big-brother state, the sprawling housing estate, and the nation-state are in decline: flexibility, diversity, differentiation, mobility, communication, decentralisation and internationalisation are in the ascendant. In the process our own identities, our sense of self, our own subjectivities are being transformed. We are in transition to a new era.

(Stuart Hall (1988: 24)

Introduction

In some ways the live music world in Britain changed remarkably little in the decades after 1985. An analysis of global box office returns in the first decade of the twenty-first century found that the Rolling Stones were the top grossers (“the wizened rockers made more money than any other touring band this decade, earning almost $1bn over 264 gigs”) just as they had been in the 1980s,¹ while Les Misérables continued its run in London’s West End.² In 2015, there were still five London-based symphony orchestras and the BBC still ran its Concert Orchestra and its orchestras in Scotland, Wales and Manchester. There were still regular discussions in the 2010s about the Arts Council’s support for the Royal Opera House and Edinburgh City Council’s support for the Edinburgh International Festival. The summer holidays were still marked out in the media by the Glastonbury and Reading festivals, and by the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall; the promoters and agents who had been important players in the live music business in the 1980s (Harvey Goldsmith, Barrie Marshall and Barry Dickins, for example) were still important players 30 years on.

In other ways, however, the role of live music in the cultural economy changed radically, something brought to public attention by a widely reported Mintel finding in 2008 that “spending on live concerts and festivals has overtaken recorded music for the first time since the birth of rock’n’roll”. Mintel estimated that in 2007 Britons had spent £1.9 billion on live music and £1.5bn on CDs and downloads³; it concluded that the music industry was undergoing a profound redistribution of power as the internet drove down both the price and sales of records:

The traditional relationship was one in which the LP or CD was the focus, with concerts primarily there to sell more records. In today’s downloadable world, where the price of music has tumbled, and in some cases is even given away free, records, CDs and downloads have been demoted to the status of promotional tools for selling tickets and merchandise. Album sales are in meltdown. Much of the action is moving to the live arena. Live music has become a key route to profitability.

(quote taken from Evening Standard, 10 September 2008: 21)

The arrival of digital technology in the form of CDs had initially restored the fortunes of the record industry following the 1970s recession. Introduced into the UK market in 1983, initially for classical releases, CD sales took off in 1985 with the release of Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms and overtook vinyl and cassette sales in 1989.⁴ Digital technology did not become a sales threat until the end of 1990s, with the development of mp3 files and file-sharing services such as Napster, which operated between 1999 and 2001, the year iTunes and the iPod were launched.

US economist Alan B. Krueger has suggested persuasively that the beginning of the end of what in Volume 2 we called “the rock era” relationship between the recording and the live music industries predated Napster’s launch. It was in 1997 that “the price of concert tickets took off and [overall] ticket sales declined”, and it was this process that was accelerated by file sharing.

In the past, when greater concert attendance translated into greater artists’ record sales, artists had an incentive to price their tickets below the profit-maximising price for concerts alone. New technology that allows many potential customers to obtain recorded music without purchasing a record has severed the link between the two products. As a result, concerts are being priced more like single-market monopoly products.

(Krueger 2005: 1, 25–26)

CDs and concert tickets were, in other words, no longer treated as price-competitive goods. If artists and their managers had previously been wary about making tickets for a concert much more expensive than the record it was promoting, they now followed a new economic model: maximising returns from live performance; treating a CD as a promotional cost. In his detailed analysis of changes in the “wallet share” of musical expenditure in the UK (the percentage of people’s disposable income spent on live and recorded music), Will Page shows that between 2000 and 2010, when the average price of an album fell from £11.99 to £7.99, concert and festival ticket prices more than doubled: a full-price ticket for Scotland’s T in the Park festival, for example, rose from £75 to £195 (Page 2011: 4).

The economic effect of treating concerts as “single-market monopoly products” was immediately obvious in the USA. For example, in 1981 the top 1% of artists took 26% of US concert revenue; by 2003 they were taking 56% (Budnick and Baron 2011: 55). An analysis of the top 35 music income-earners in the USA in 2002 found that only four “made more money from recordings than from live concerts”, while “for the top 35 artists as a whole, income from touring exceeded income from record sales by a ratio of 7.5 to 1” (Connolly and Krueger 2005: 4). Such figures also illustrate the increasing earnings gap between the superstars and everyone else on the live music circuit and their realisation that, as “heritage” or “legacy” acts, they no longer needed to keep ticket prices below their market value in order to “buy” the loyalty of fans for future releases or appearances. Fan loyalty was established firmly, if not always permanently, by an act’s previous record sales. Agent John Giddings remembers the change in the music business power structure in this way:

They [record labels] were the powerful people, they controlled all the money, they controlled all the tools. They could make groups successful by spending lots of money marketing them. And so we used to listen to what they had to say. But I remember one classic moment when Virgin Records said to me, “You’re doing the Iggy Pop tour before the album’s released” and I said, “Who cares about a new Iggy Pop album? They’re playing to people who want to hear The Passenger.” And the swing in power between record companies and live music has been incredible.⁵

Krueger’s second point about the changes in the live music market must also be stressed here: increasing ticket prices for the big stars meant decreasing ticket sales for everyone else. For the majority of musicians, who had always got most of their income from performance rather than recordings, this was a significant problem. In the 1960s, as veteran promoter Jef Hanlon remembers, even a band as internationally successful as Herman’s Hermits spent most of their time on tour because their record deals were “so crap”. Fifty years later, Guy Garvey (from another successful Manchester band, Elbow) was equally clear that, “You couldn’t really live on the money you’d make from an album these days.” Now, though, even constant touring was not always viable given both the lack of suitably sized venues and audience competition from superstar tours. As Garvey concludes, “It’s lucky there are so many festivals.” We will come back to the festivals business and its growing importance for all music worlds in Chapters 5 and 6.⁶

From another economic perspective, the changes in the UK live music sector over the last 30 years can be described as “Americanisation”. This has partly been the effect of US live music companies directly buying up British promoters but also describes the changing role of British agents and promoters in the global live music economy. London-based agents have long expected to represent artists for “all territories outside the USA” and this has remained the case, but as the market has been globalised so the UK’s role has increasingly been to support American corporate concert-promotion power. The UK’s status as the key English-speaking country in Europe has enabled UK agents and promoters to consolidate their value as the organising centre for EU tours and beyond. On the one hand, UK companies have become subsidiaries of US companies; on the other, the UK live sector has been integrated into the US model of arena tours and venue chains (thus achieving new economies of scale). We describe the emergence of this model in detail in Chapter 2 and examine what it meant for British promotional practices in Chapter 3.

In introducing this volume, however, there are two points we need to emphasise about our approach to live music history. First, we do not think it is possible to treat live music as a business in isolation from other kinds of music commerce. Rather, our aim is to situate live music in a dynamic relationship with other music businesses—recording, broadcasting, the cinema, telecommunications and so forth. Second, this is a social rather than an economic history and, while changes in the live music business provide a context for everyday musical activities, those activities have their own causes and effects. It could be argued, for example, that the biggest changes in live music culture in this period reflected the impact of electronic dance music. DJ-ing, a musical practice that was once considered either antithetical or marginal to live music-making (we had to justify its inclusion in Volumes 1 and 2) now holds more sway over the popular music night out than the previously dominant gig conventions of rock and pop. We discuss these issues in Chapter 7 (on the rise and effects of rave and acid house) and Chapter 8 (on the rise and effects of jungle and grime).

Our argument here is that live music practices have not only adapted to the digital music business, but have also helped shape it, and in this volume we explore these processes with reference to rock, classical, jazz and folk musicians (Chapter 9), audiences (Chapter 10) and venues and localities (Chapter 11). We conclude in Chapter 12 with a discussion of the various ways in which “the value of live music” is now understood.

A key factor in value arguments, of course, is ideology. What do people involved in music think live music is for and how and why do these ideas change? In Chapter 4 we address these questions with particular reference to policies of the state, but changes in political ideology are central to the story we tell throughout this book. We can best introduce this theme by describing two live music enterprises dating from 1985, our starting point for this volume. The contrasting fortunes of Red Wedge and Live Aid can be seen to symbolise the ideological transition between musical eras with which we are concerned.

Red Wedge

“One of the most striking economic shifts of the eighties,” wrote sociologist Bill Osgerby in 1998, “was the massive decline in the numbers of youngsters entering full-time employment” (Osgerby 1998: 156).⁷ Between 1985 and 1992, the number of 16- to 17-year-olds in full-time education rose from 37% to 66%; by 1991–92, roughly a third of 19- to 20-year-olds were entering full- or part-time higher education. As Osgerby shows, the rise of youth unemployment in the 1980s was not simply an effect of economic recession; it was more significantly the result of a “deep-seated restructuring of the British economy” and, in particular, of the reduced number of jobs in the manufacturing sector:

This shift impacted especially on young people since many of the jobs that disappeared were the less skilled manual occupations that had been the bedrock of youth employment during the fifties and sixties [and, we would add, the underpinning of the rise of rock ‘n’ roll...