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I’m Paul Krugman, Opinion author for the New York Occasions — normally about economics. Right this moment, I’m going to be speaking about reside music.

Everyone is speaking about how costly live performance tickets are, and I’m right here to let you know that reside music isn’t as costly because it could possibly be. In case you have a look at the leisure pages in any respect, and even the enterprise pages, you will have observed that there’s plenty of concert events occurring this summer season. There are a few large excursions — Taylor Swift, Beyonce — after which additionally possibly extra underneath the radar, simply tons and tons of smaller reside music occasions. I’m a 70-year-old wannabe hipster, and my subsequent live performance for which I presently have tickets is a band known as Warpaint, simply this very kind of offbeat, psychedelic, rocky stuff. It’s a beautiful $35 a ticket.

However by way of the 2 massive excursions, Taylor Swift and Beyonce, the checklist costs on the tickets are typically within the $100s. And we’re seeing numbers within the 1000’s. I don’t know fairly how excessive the most important numbers are and the way consultant that’s of what the typical concertgoer is spending. However we’re, definitely, seeing triple digit ticket costs on the market.

Clearly, it’s not low-cost should you’re spending lots of or possibly 1000’s of {dollars} for a Taylor Swift live performance. However, simply sporting my economist hat right here, should you examine ticket costs to individuals’s incomes, reside music is definitely a little bit of a discount in comparison with what it was, say, within the nineteenth century. Jenny Lind, arguably the primary kind of semi-modern model famous person, was a soprano from Sweden, the Swedish Nightingale, and did a mega tour of the USA within the early 1850s organized by PT Barnum.

And now we have some information on it. And we all know that her first live performance, which was in New York, tickets have been about $6 every. On the time, GDP per individual in the USA was round $120. It’s now about $76,000, or round 600 instances as a lot.

So should you have been to scale up by the truth that we’ve had inflation and financial progress, the Jenny Lind tickets have been the equal of one thing like $3,500 at the moment. So the truth is, individuals have been paying extra for tickets to see Jenny Lind than they’re paying to see Taylor Swift now. So famous person concert events, that are the particular factor right here, why are they cheaper relative to individuals’s earnings than they have been within the nineteenth century?

The reply, I believe, is that expertise has actually modified music. There are two massive breakthroughs. One is simply the flexibility to report music. So up to now, the one method to hear music was to go to a reside efficiency. And now, most of us hearken to most of our music in some recorded kind.

I watch reside musical performances each evening. And I don’t exit each evening. It’s simply that there’s YouTube.

However the different is that there was a technological breakthrough, a lot unheralded, within the late Nineteen Sixties that made it doable to have actually, actually massive concert events the place you could possibly really hear one thing. So one thing like The Beatles at Shea Stadium was purely about being there, as a result of apparently, by all accounts, no person may hear a factor as a result of they hadn’t really discovered how one can do it but.

However now, you possibly can really hear Taylor Swift, and what she’s singing, and a few sense of the standard of it with 80,000 individuals alongside you. And that actually signifies that this expertise of listening to your idol reside is one thing that everyone has entry to in a means that actually wasn’t the case up to now.

So it’s each demand and provide. Demand is down as a result of individuals can hearken to recorded music, which wasn’t doable up to now. On the availability aspect, reside music could be delivered to a lot, a lot bigger teams of individuals than earlier than due to trendy sound programs. And so elevated provide, lowered demand, cheaper price. That’s economics.

Reside music, particularly non-superstar reside music, is mostly a discount nowadays. So I’m going to provide a plug and say, go on the market and do attend reside concert events. Pay for these tickets — possibly not the tremendous costly famous person tickets, however the many, many different wonderful concert events you can go to.

As a result of ultimately, though we are able to hearken to music on recordings, and I do, tons of it, there’s one thing actually particular about reside concert events. And I really assume that folks do too little of it.