As any sort of awareness of the internet (particularly Paste Music’s news section) the past couple weeks will tell you, live music is back in a big way. The tour and festival lineup announcements are flying thick and fast, and live music hub Bandsintown has shared some hard data to quantify the chaos.
Upcoming concerts listed on the site have skyrocketed, from 87,000 at the start of 2021—many of which were likely livestreams—to 222,170 now (about a 2.5x multiplier), 78% of which will occur before year’s end. On daily average, artists are announcing more than quadruple the amount of concerts they were during the pandemic. The upward trend only continues in 2022, with twice as many artists on stages as there were before the pandemic, a staggering projection. Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. are the individual countries leading the way (though we’d point out that one of those countries doesn’t have Covid as under control as the others!).
As you might imagine, increases in show announcements have been followed by ballooning ticket sales; Austin City Limits, for instance, sold out in under three hours, a record for the Texas festival. Bandsintown has seen similar demand: “During May, we saw between 250,000 and 550,000 fans per day clicking to buy tickets. We can now predict that the number of fans purchasing tickets is on track to surpass pre-pandemic levels by the end of June,” said Bandsintown’s Fabrice Sergent in a statement.
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Catch up on all the latest tour and festival lineup announcements right here.