Who profits when the club is full?

From community culture to extractive industry (we just learned this word..)

When the queue stretches outside, ticket prices have gone up “because everything has increased”, the bar charges a beer as if it were vintage, and the dancefloor is full, we tend to believe the entire ecosystem must be breathing, paying its bills, maintaining jobs, supporting local scenes, and, ultimately, continuing to produce what we still habitually call “a culture”. Except that, precisely, today’s live music no longer looks like an economy that circulates; it increasingly resembles an economy that concentrates, and the real question, the one music avoids with striking elegance, is not “who is playing tonight?” but who profits when it’s full, and who, on the contrary, absorbs the risk, the wear, the hours and the precarity.

What makes this discussion uncomfortable is that it forces us to confront a taboo: in music, and particularly in cultures that describe themselves as “alternative”, we are quick to criticise platforms, politicians, “big groups”, wealthy executives and predatory shareholders, but we hesitate strangely when it comes to looking directly at the enrichment of artists themselves, as if the artist, by definition, should fall outside the scope of economic critique, protected by a moral aura, immunised by talent, by “genius”, sanctified by the fact of having “given” emotions. Yet if we want to be adults for two minutes, we must acknowledge that the moral immunity of artists is not a proof of justice, it is a political blind spot, and that this blind spot feeds exactly the kind of model we claim to hate elsewhere. In the end, it is a pyramid in which success primarily benefits success itself, where visibility turns into market power, and where money, instead of irrigating an ecosystem, climbs toward the top and settles there (to stay…).

The Harry Styles scandal, or the moment the fiction cracks

The moment it became impossible to ignore was when the debate exploded on Twitter following the announcement of Harry Styles’ global residency “Together, Together” and the revelation of prices that shocked even audiences accustomed to being drained: in the UK, non-VIP tickets listed at up to £466.25, and VIP packages reaching £725.45, complete with the contemporary folklore of desire and exclusivity monetisation, “early entry”, “fast pass”, “laminate”, lounge access and “drink tokens”, in other words, the clean conversion of a night out into a series of premium options designed to sort audiences by $$$.

What is most interesting in this sequence is not the anger of fans (it is predictable when a cultural experience turns into luxury), but the logic it reveals, because for once the debate shifted away from “Ticketmaster is the eeeevil” toward a far more disturbing sentence: if these prices exist, it is also because artist teams have a say, and sometimes even the final say, in the mechanisms that maximise revenue. This has been documented quite directly by industry specialists: in an analysis of “dynamic pricing”, professor Andrew Mall explains that Ticketmaster does not implement this system without artist buy-in, meaning agreement, and that artists can negotiate or even refuse these terms.

In other words, when fans shout “greed”, they sometimes aim at the wrong target (the ticketing platform), while the decision is also built on the artist side, management, agents and promoters, with one key factor: the certainty that people will pay, because FOMO and the sacralisation of artists have created an economy where cultural experience is sold as proof of belonging, and missing a concert feels like a small social death.

This is where the moral fault line of live music appears. In politics, a private jet triggers outrage (rightly so); in music, the same jet becomes an aspirational postcard, a “goal”, a sign of success that escapes judgement, as if music had invented a space where money, when attached to art, is no longer quite the same money.

Dynamic pricing did not “derail”, it is a system with accomplices

Dynamic pricing has become the symbol of this shift, because it exposes what live music tries to wrap up: pricing is no longer about access, it is an algorithm of capture, and if audiences get used to prices rising “because there is demand”, then music quietly adopts Uber-like logic, the more you desire, the more you pay. The problem is that this mechanism is often justified through rhetoric claiming it is better for money to go to “those who take the risk”, or better to capture the margin rather than leave it to scalpers. But when we look at where the margin actually goes, we mostly see a value chain that becomes increasingly vertical, where the very possibility of saying “no” exists, but is not used, because it costs revenue.

The most striking proof is that some artists have explicitly said so: Robert Smith (The Cure) called the system a “greedy scam”, and Neil Young explained that he removed “platinum tickets” because “the money was going to him” and it “didn’t feel right”. This sentence matters because it removes the favourite alibi of those who benefit from it: no, this is not a natural phenomenon, and no, it is not a technical inevitability. These are contractual and political choices, and the industry knows it very well.

No trickle-down…

At this point, we can return to clubs and festivals, because the logic is the same, simply at another scale: prices rise, audiences tighten their belts, organisers grit their teeth, and yet essential roles—technical crews, security, hospitality, bar staff, production—continue too often to be treated as adjustment variables, paid the legal minimum or barely more, even as demands and responsibilities explode. What many people refuse to see is that revenue inflation does not mean redistribution, and that it is perfectly possible to have full rooms, “sold out” signs (we’ll talk about that one soon too), endless queues, while maintaining an economy that, in concrete terms, provides neither stability nor dignity to the majority of people who make the night happen.

In electronic music, Resident Advisor has clearly documented how rising fees, boosted by the post-lockdown boom, “benefit disproportionately large names and major agencies”, while smaller clubs and promoters are forced to negotiate harder, reduce risk, or give up altogether. And when top-line fees increase, everything else becomes compressible, meaning cuts are made where they are not visible (working conditions, safety margins, build times), while what is visible is sanctified (the star, the image, exclusivity).

Festivals on pause and clubs closing

There is a simple way to check that this is not a fairy tale: look at the health of structures, not the shine of headliners. Over the past few years, a wave of “paused” festivals, cancellations, fragile venues and reduced programming has become impossible to ignore. On festival cancellations, Resident Advisor quotes John Rostron (Association of Independent Festivals) speaking of a “credit crunch” among operators, with reserves burned since Covid and far tougher supplier payment terms, meaning organising has become riskier, more capital-intensive, and therefore mechanically less accessible to independent actors.

When the sector “professionalises”, it does not necessarily stabilise, it can also lock itself in, because professionalisation in a deregulated market often looks like rising barriers to entry, selection by financial means, and once again, concentration. And we return to the gentrification of the scene…

We hate big bosses, we love star DJs

There is a cultural reason why this situation is so easily accepted (and why it angers us): we have learned to see the artist as a moral exception, and this exception feeds collective indulgence, sometimes even emotional complicity, making us tolerate in music what we reject elsewhere. This is exactly what the Harry Styles scandal made visible: fans who, for once, do not simply say “it’s the system’s fault”, but write plainly that if prices are so high, it is also because “they know people will pay”, meaning there is a strategy of maximisation.

This shift matters because it breaks a myth: the artist is not only a worker like any other, once they reach a certain level, they are also an economic actor capable of arbitration. The industry knows this so well that observers explicitly note that artists have the ability to opt in or out of certain pricing mechanisms.

In many clubs and festivals, a DJ’s fee, sometimes even for a “small” headliner, equals a month’s salary for a permanent employee of the structure, and it is not uncommon that in certain contexts, one hour of set represents the equivalent of a year, or more, of salaried work for someone who keeps the venue running all year long, in production, administration, technical roles or communication. This is not a question of artistic merit, nor a moral accusation, but a structural gap that mechanically raises questions, because when a single fee forces ticket prices up, we must ask who truly pays for the value of the night. The audience, of course, through increasingly expensive tickets, but also the ecosystem itself, since this inflation directly contributes to the gentrification of parties, the gradual exclusion of certain audiences, and the transformation of live music into a socially filtered experience, closer to occasional luxury than shared space.

When success no longer feeds anything around it

By turning parties into premium products, tours into optimisation machines, programming into financial arbitration, and access into algorithmic competition, we end up doing what extractive industries do: taking a shared resource—here, attention, collective desire, shared culture, community—and converting it into private, concentrated value, protected by contracts, exclusivities, agencies and bidding logics. Then we act surprised when clubs close, festivals take “a year off”, local scenes dry up, and live music becomes a class experience.

That is precisely why the question “who profits when the club is full?” is not a moral provocation, but a political one, because it forces us to look at live music not as a celebration, but as a structure of redistribution, or non-redistribution. And today, many signals point toward the latter: an economy where the top continues to prosper, sometimes even to display its success, while the base—the people who materially produce the reality of the party—remains compressed, invisible and replaceable.

Music can continue to shine, but if money, power and recognition remain concentrated in the same place, then something fades, slowly and without noise: not the party itself, but the idea that the party belonged to those who made it, together.


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