
Ticket prices are at record highs, but most working musicians are losing money on the road. The math does not add up, and the live music industry knows it.

After years of spending billions on content, every major streaming platform is cutting costs, raising prices, and admitting the growth-at-all-costs model was a fantasy.
The dream of unlimited content for ten dollars a month is officially dead. Every major streaming platform raised prices this year, and most added ad-supported tiers that would have been unthinkable when the streaming revolution began.
Disney, Warner Bros Discovery, and Paramount have all scaled back their content budgets dramatically. Netflix remains the market leader but has shifted focus from subscriber growth to revenue per user. The era of peak TV is giving way to the era of peak efficiency.
The real losers are consumers who now pay more for multiple services than they ever paid for cable, which is exactly the outcome everyone predicted and the industry pretended would not happen.
What comes next is consolidation. Smaller platforms will merge or die. The survivors will look a lot more like traditional media companies than the disruptors they claimed to be.

Ticket prices are at record highs, but most working musicians are losing money on the road. The math does not add up, and the live music industry knows it.