Since The Wiggles, I’ve been lucky enough to attend concerts of popular artists like Harry Styles, Coldplay, and Taylor Swift. These concerts not only allowed me to listen to great music, but also improved my mental health. Lisa Badanes, the chair of the Department of Psychological Sciences at Metropolitan State University of Denver, states that people who attend concerts have increased levels of endorphins and oxytocin. Additionally, dancing with others in a crowd can lead to increased feelings of belonging.
However, it’s not always easy to attend a concert. Most of the artists I’ve seen only stopped in Los Angeles, not my hometown of San Diego. While the two hour drive wasn’t the worst, it did require planning, gas money, and often buying a hotel for the night. And, for many Americans, especially rural Americans, it is even more logistically challenging to get to the city where their favorite artist tours. For example, in Harry Styles’ Love on Tour, he only stopped in four cities in the United States: New York, Austin, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
Aside from distance, the price of tickets have become more of an obstacle for the average concert goer since the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2019, the average ticket price was $96.17, in 2024 the average ticket price was $123.25. Thus, for many rural Americans, traveling to attend a concert with already expensive tickets is not financially feasible.
Take for example, Gunnison County in Colorado, which was recently mentioned in a previous blog post. Gunnison County workers devote 32 percent of their income on average to rent. After factoring in other necessities like food or medical care, they likely do not have the discretionary income to attend a concert out-of-state.
This is not to say I don’t understand why big artists only include major cities on their tour. Musicians like Taylor Swift can fill NFL stadiums, and all 30 NFL stadiums are located in major cities. Additionally, many artists prefer large venues in big cities because of the better security practices in place.
So, how do we make it easier for rural residents to attend concerts and see their favorite artists live? While the Justice Department’s antitrust lawsuit to break up the Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly could drive down ticket prices, that doesn’t solve the high costs associated with traveling to another city. Thus, one answer is to promote festivals, as that seems to be one of the major ways to get big artists to visit rural areas. A festival, as opposed to a concert, usually takes place over multiple days with different artists performing.
For example, the music festival “Hinterland” takes place in Saint Charles, Iowa, which had a population of 640 people in 2020. This August, the festival’s lineup includes Tyler, The Creator, Lana Del Rey, and Kacey Musgraves.
Holding festivals in rural areas both allows rural residents to see live music from popular artists and invigorates the local economy. For example, the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival happens annually on a 700-acre farm in Manchester, Tennessee (population around 12,200), and generates approximately $50 million for the surrounding region. Tax revenue from the ticket sales and increased local spending funds the county’s schools, public safety, and infrastructure projects, and Bonnaroo has further donated more than $7 million to community programs since 2002.
Plus, music festivals are usually held outdoors, which circumvents the logistical challenge of finding a venue big enough for traditional concerts in rural areas. In fact, when it comes to festivals, rural areas should be the preferred option as they usually have more outdoor space than urban areas.
However, despite the possible incentives for holding festivals in rural areas, of the 26 largest music festivals, only three take place in rural areas. This is because corporations are more likely to sponsor an event held in a city since those festivals often have more attendees.
While I understand why ticket sales may be greater in cities, the success of festivals like Bonnaroo should prove to companies that we can entice people to travel to rural areas, and benefit those rural areas’ economies at the same time. Not to mention, a backdrop of mountains and a sunset while listening to Taylor Swift certainly doesn’t sound like the worst thing in the world.
4 comments:
I think you make really good points about how music festivals can serve as stimulants to local economies. As a long-time attendee of Hinterland, part of the beauty of it is all of the space and nature near the festival — I think that's something many urban locations can't offer. I was really shocked to learn that only three major music festivals are in rural areas. I hope people consider this as a larger solution!
Wow! My first concert was also the Wiggles! I definitely hear what you’re saying with the post. As someone who grew up attending Outside Lands music festival in San Francisco, it was an easy commute for me because I lived 15 minutes away. However, once I got out of the city and went to school in Washington, I was really disappointed to learn that a lot of the big concert venues were in more rural places. I never thought about how this might have been better for people who lived closer to venues like The Gorge (which is a really popular amphitheatre) in George, WA. I also thought about how the Washington State Fair is held in Puyallup every year and how this must bring in a lot of business and is easier for people in the area to attend.
It’s true that rural fans are often left out of the live of music experience due to cost and geography. This mirrors the broader trend of rural exclusion in areas like healthcare and public transit. We can compare Taylor Swift’s concert history to Beyonce’s. She has never performed anywhere rural either. It’s even more ironic now because she released a country album. Her “Cowboy Carter Tour” is only scheduled for stadiums in major cities like Los Angeles and Paris.
This was wonderful, Sophie! I love how you couched a concert not as a luxury, but something deeply integral to the human experience, and the benefits that attending one provides. When reexamined in that way, deciding where to hold a concert is not just balancing the red and black in a ledger, but takes on a kind of ‘public service’ aspect, which I think we should encourage as a society wherever possible.
I have had the opposite experiences with concerts. I had a great time going to both Hozier and The Crane Wives this last year, but Hozier was the first concert I attended in eleven years. But I know that I’m an outlier, and have been given quite a bit of lip for habitually commuting without music. Jordan Porterfield got me into Taylor Swift, and I was quite surprised to learn that an artist who incorporates so many country elements in her music does not appear to have much interest in sharing it with those communities.
Your post also made me consider another issue that’s been surrounding Taylor Swift for quite some time—the environmental impact of her extensive use of a private jet. On one hand, it is probably harder to make it out to an airstrip or suitable quality, let alone distance, that an elite musician and performer might expect. On the other hand, detouring to rural places might have more of an environmental impact, as they are further away from city centers than, well, the city.
But the emissions that accompany a concert in an NFL stadium (which all have a seating capacity of at least 60,000 people) are vast. That’s 60,000 people that have to commute to the venue, which could by itself offset the emissions of visiting a rural area.
This is also addressed with your suggestion of promoting more rural music festivals—the environmental cost of multiple artists (and attendees) traveling to a rural area for a number of days is likely comparable to the environmental cost of each performing at a high-traffic venue along their tour. Furthermore, the financial influx of the festival was staggeringly higher than I anticipated, and could serve as a much-needed form of investment in these areas. I have recently written about the issues surrounding extractive economies, and this seems like the inverse of that. So even from a general equity standpoint, this could serve to encourage attendees from outside the area (I know Bonnaroo has quite a few city folk attending) to engage with and visit the community even after the festival is over.
Finally, with a number of rural areas (including historically fossil fuel communities) adapting to a more amenity-focused economy, this slots in nicely with how rural areas are transitioning some aspects of their way of life, and could even serve as a much-needed form of reciprocity from the urban areas that disproportionately benefit from the production of rural ones.
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