Maybe the show must not go on.

As summer concert season heats up, major acts on the arena circuit like Porter Robinson and Charli XCX are seeing sales massively underperform. Recently, rock group the Black Keys canceled its tour entirely. So what gives?

The Undersold Mystery Tour

Concert ticket sales had a massive 2023, as fans of Taylor Swift and Beyoncé shelled out big bucks to see the massive pop sensations live. In fact, Live Nation, the Ticketmaster parent company that’s in an antitrust fight with the Department of Justice, reported its biggest year ever, with revenue exceeding $22 billion. But this year hasn’t exactly proven to be an encore.

While Live Nation recently told The New York Times that ticket sales are actually up through June compared to last year, a closer look at some major tours tells a different story. Justin Timberlake’s arena tour has seen many resale tickets slip below face value, and rapper Future’s opening show in Kansas City in July is far from sold out. Ditto the Charli XCX/Troye Sivan joint arena tour. Coachella, typically an instant sellout, had tickets available for its second weekend. Jennifer Lopez canceled an arena tour that had soft sales though family issues were cited as the major reason.

Why is live suddenly dead? Well, theories abound:

• One idea is that too many acts became overambitious in choosing venues after last year’s marquee tours. In an expletive-laden tweet, Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney implied the group was given bad advice when it agreed to an arena tour; it’s since parted ways with its two managers (one of whom is a former Ticketmaster CEO), and announced a more “intimate” (read: small venue) tour to come.
• Another theory is that too many acts are touring at once, thanks to the streaming era flipping the nature of concert and record sales (records are now marketing for tours, not vice versa). One more leading theory is that last year’s “funflation” economy has simply passed, with fewer consumers willing to pay high prices.

Playing the Consumer Blues: It’s difficult to overlook the impact of Live Nation and Ticketmaster as a major factor. The Justice Department alleges Live Nation has a stranglehold on both ticket sales and music venues, possibly allowing it to push acts into trying to sell bigger and more expensive shows. “It’s just pure greed,” one anonymous veteran booking agent recently told Stereogum. “Live Nation needs to fill these big rooms, so they make aggressive offers and then the agents and managers take them.” The good news for anyone who didn’t spend an entire paycheck on Taylor Swift last year? That same money could get you into several poorly selling shows this summer.

Your personal data is like money in the bank. Even to banks. Maybe especially to banks. 

Chase Bank and PayPal have both announced new advertising divisions, meaning their users’ transaction data will be used for digital advertising purposes. Using that specific data poses some new privacy concerns that even a behemoth like Meta doesn’t pose.

Breaking the Bank Statement

What’s so special about our financial transaction data when we already generate mountains of online data? Jen Caltrider, lead at the Mozilla Foundation’s Privacy Not Included unit, told The Daily Upside that the data PayPal and Chase can access is more holistic than the breadcrumbs we typically leave scattered around the web. Sure, Amazon and Google know when we buy something on their platform, but they have to piece the rest together. “Google, at least, might not know that you spent $500 on Ben & Jerry’s in the month of June, whereas your bank statements will,” said Caltrider. Plus, your bank statement knows more than just how you shop, it shows how your money moves around. “It goes beyond just buying stuff at the grocery store or off of Amazon, it goes to sending money back home, or buying stuff off of friends,” she said.

Two SEO and digital marketing experts told The Daily Upside that transactional data is more sensitive than generic online activity data:

•  “I don’t think consumers realize how much data is involved in a purchase, or how much data can be shared via a payment device,” Joe Karasin, CMO and founder of digital marketing agency Karasin PPC, said. “If you think about the amount of info you share to get approved for credit cards or set up bank accounts, that’s a significant amount,” he added.
• “Data from online activity, while still sensitive, is more generalized and often anonymized to some extent,” SEO specialist Damilola Ademuyiwa said. “It’s about what users are browsing or interested in, not necessarily their direct financial interactions,” he said, adding: “The stakes are higher with transactional data because it’s directly linked to someone’s financial footprint.”

Caltrider also pointed out that despite its cultural ubiquity, we can choose to avoid social media, whereas avoiding banking and payment apps (PayPal’s payment app Venmo says it has over 83 million users) could make life really tough.

Buying Data In: Caltrider noted that while both companies promise not to sell users’ transaction data, they reserve the right to acquire data from third-party sources to build a profile of you. “Why would they [sell], that information has value,” Caltrider said. “They want people to come to them to pay to access that information. And the more valuable they make that information by knowing as much about you as they can, the more money they can make off of it,” she said.

Despite the occasional meltdown and implosion, the crypto market is very much alive and thriving, with the sector’s recent revival pushing total startup investment above the $100 billion mark. 

Decentralized Gold

Wait, is that gray? Crypto, for all its underground futuristic beginnings, is kind of a grownup now. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, provides investors with crypto trading options while El Salvador has adopted Bitcoin as legal tender. 

Will it eventually replace our dollars, pounds, and rupees? Meh, maybe not, especially when part of the story includes hackers stealing more than $19 billion in crypto since 2013 and catastrophes like the destruction of exchange FTX, due to founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraudulent activity. But that doesn’t mean crypto is down for the count:

• Since 2014, crypto startups have raised roughly $101.5 billion, according to data collected by DefiLlama. One of the biggest hauls came in 2018 when Block.one raised $4 billion in a yearlong initial coin offering to support its eos.ios blockchain platform.
• In March, Bitcoin reached an all-time high valuation of nearly $74,000. Though not quite as high-flying, Ethereum has managed to return to roughly $3,600, more than doubling in the last year.

No Way Out, No Problem: Investors would love the ability to exit their crypto investments via public offerings or blockbuster M&A deals to maximize their returns, but that hasn’t really been happening. Paul Verdaittakit of Pantera Capital told Bloomberg that exits have been limited in the past few years aside from a few trade sales — which don’t have the most ideal payouts — as well as Coinbase Global’s $86 billion direct listing on Nasdaq in 2021.

However, the lackluster exit environment doesn’t seem to worry investors all that much. In this year’s first quarter, crypto venture investments rose to $2.4 billion, a nice jump from just $1.9 billion raised in the fourth quarter of 2023, according to PitchBook. In March, AI software firm Together AI raised $106 million led by Salesforce. While crypto has had its newsworthy struggles, many investors can’t ignore an asset class that has the potential to double in value in less than a year.