Why Megatours Now Make Millions

If you thought record sales still paid the bills for big-name musicians, think again. Live concerts have quietly become the music industry’s main cash machine — and one tour can now change the game. Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour is the headline example: it smashed previous records and showed just how lucrative a modern megatour can be. The BBC’s World Service recently ran an episode exploring how stadium runs like this have reshaped the economics of music, and the picture it paints is stark. As streaming replaced physical sales, income from records dwindled; the value once held by albums has migrated to something you can’t download — the live experience. Putting on shows at stadium scale is expensive. Massive production rigs, elaborate staging and global logistics require huge upfront spending and technical know-how. That makes these tours more like large commercial productions than the grassroots gigs of old. At the same time, promoters and artists create limited availability — fewer dates, fewer seats — which fuels intense demand. That scarcity, combined with fervent fanbases, pushes ticket prices upwards and turns tours into multi‑billion‑pound ventures. Technology and fandom play their parts too. Advances in sound, lighting and stagecraft allow ever-more spectacular shows, while social media amplifies excitement and drives global buzz in hours rather than weeks. The result is an economy where exclusivity — being there in person — has become the product. Concerts are not just performances; they’re status, shared experience and content fodder for platforms with billions of users. Experts from across the music business, academia and journalism weighed in on the programme, which runs about 23 minutes and was broadcast on the World Service in January 2026. Their consensus: modern megatours combine tech, appetite and commercial savvy to create enormous returns — but they also concentrate power and access. Big artists and well-funded promoters can mount these global spectacles, while smaller acts increasingly rely on different models to make a living. For music fans, the shift has obvious trade-offs. You’re getting more extravagant shows, yet the price of admission has risen. For the industry, the stakes are higher — tours can be career-defining windfalls, but they demand massive investment and carry big risks if things go wrong. Megatours have remade the music business into something closer to a blockbuster film industry: costly to stage, spectacular to watch and hugely profitable when everything lines up. The question now is whether that model serves music as a whole, or mainly the very biggest names. --- Managing your business finances? TaxAce provides smart online accountancy services for UK businesses with flexible monthly plans. Image and reporting: https://www.bbc.co.uk | Read original article