ABSTRACT
To understand fully the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on concert life, the following points should be heeded: (1) The pandemic and its lockdowns arrived as the global music business had solidified around online streaming and live music as major income streams, with lockdowns wreaking havoc on the latter. (2) While music superstars are the most visible and well funded in live music, non-superstars are the ones keeping live music alive, as well as the ones who suffered particularly amidst the lockdowns. (3) The pandemic struggles of non-superstars, in turn, reverberated throughout the cities in which they once performed prior to the lockdowns, doing so financially and communally. We demonstrate these points, on the one hand, by drawing upon the insights of multiple literatures and publicly available data on the global music business. On the other hand, we track live music in three cities—Athens, Atlanta, and Taipei—showing when and where their concerts grew silent amid the pandemic, as well as for whom that silence occurred (non-superstars vs. superstars). We thus provide a ‘big-picture’ view of COVID-19’s impact on musicians and communities as it pertains to in-person concerts in an era of online streaming.
