The music industry is reportedly $30 billion behind where it would have been this year if COVID-19 hadn’t wreaked havoc on the world.
According to a Pollstar report dated Friday (December 11), 2020’s events caused the performing industry to take a major hit, which includes a calculated loss of $9.7 billion at the box office alone, and an additional $20 billion from sponsorships, concessions, merch, transportation, restaurants, hotels and more.
2020 was actually set to be a recording-breaking year at the box office with a projected $12.2 billion in revenue, but when things came to a total halt in March, it was all downhill from there. But with a vaccine now looming in the near future, the President of the company that oversees Pollstar assured that things will soon be back to normal.
“It’s been an extraordinarily difficult year for the events industry, which has been disproportionately impacted by the Coronavirus,” Ray Waddell said. “As painful as it is to chronicle the adversity and loss our industry and many of our colleagues faced, we understand it is a critical undertaking towards facilitating our recovery, which is thankfully on the horizon. With vaccines, better testing, new safety and sanitization protocols, smart ticketing and other innovations, the live industry will be ramping up in the coming months, and we’re sure that at this time next year we’ll have a very different story to tell.”
Countless artists cancelled scheduled tours and appearances as COVID-19 spread, and festivals quickly became a distant memory. Even Lil Baby, who was the first artist to go double platinum in 2020 revealed during a recent appearance on The Breakfast Club that he’d only had just one show this year because of the pandemic.
“Since I started rapping, I been booked two, three times a weekend,” he told hosts Charlamagne Tha God and DJ Envy in the interview posted on Tuesday (December 8). “I only did one show this year and it’s the end of the year! That’s every bit a hundred shows maybe at least in a year, so it’s like a whole year, I did one show.”
Fortunately for the Quality Control rapper, his pockets haven’t really suffered.
“Even though I ain’t doing no shows, that number that [Charlamagne] calculated, I ain’t making that but I ain’t counting that,” Baby said. “I’m counting on whatever I used to make, shit I’m still in that bracket. I was supposed to make it to the $40 million, $50 million a year off touring bracket. But I’m still making more than what I was making when I just was getting $100 bands a show or whatever the case may be.”
Thank God. Shut down most these horrible mumble rap tours and concerts. That’s called Natural Selection.
Natural selection and God don’t belong in the same sentence.
Yeah, Hail Satan
Smart ticketing? What’s that? A vaccine is gonna be required to enter a concert? Good luck w that and you’ll all be broke for real FR.
fuck em all of em are rich anyway
No they’re not. The label owns them.
Shut your ignorant ass up
12B sounds right 30 bill is like these rappers not even close lmao i swear media weirdos dont think regular people cans math
I never been to a concert in my life. Even for my favorite rapper, how the fuck im gonna pay to see another man ? How the fuck ima catch another man jumping into a crowd ? Get the fuck outta here, thats some male groupie ass shit. I laugh at every male who attends a concert cuz what you getting for being a groupie ? Concerts are for chicks. I could understand if it was like woodstock where people smoking weed and having sex in the crowd, but that will never happen again in this feminist era. Now concerts are just masses of mindless drugged out zombies waving their arms in the air.
Burh you was on one early in the morning lol
So if theres the chance of getting dicked down and smoked out you’ll go to a concert?
Tragedy. Rest in peace to everyone that died from this shit and to everyone that has it, may u make a full recovery…
And that means what? Give a fuck about the music industry when people are dying every day.
So they DIDNT lose 30billion, they just didn’t make what they projected to make, as in what they WANTED to make. I hate these MFZ that count what they didn’t have as a loss.