Music is a social accelerator
Is music a luxury, or simply undervalued?
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Let’s dive into today’s topic:
Music is a social accelerator
In a world optimised for individual experiences, the thing society needs most has the worst business model.
Why it matters
Festivals in the Netherlands (arguably the world’s strongest festival market) are struggling to sell out. Governments are pulling back on cultural investment. While AI companies attract billions in funding and streaming platforms grow their subscriber base quarter after quarter, the live music industry is left to explain why a ticket costs what it does.
Princeton economist William Baumol observed in the 1960s that certain sectors can never become as productive as manufacturing or software. He used a string quartet as his example: it takes four musicians forty minutes to perform a Schubert quartet. No technology can change that.
When wages rise across the economy, driven by productivity gains elsewhere, sectors like live music, theatre, and childcare must raise prices to stay afloat, even without the productivity gains to justify them. Baumol called this ‘cost disease’.
Author Alex Mayyasi recently argued that cost disease is one of the hidden drivers of social isolation. Their piece inspired me to reflect on this subject and apply it to music. They state that the economy has systematically rewarded what scales: digital entertainment, streaming, and AI.
Netflix can add a million subscribers without hiring a single extra employee.
A festival cannot add ten thousand attendees without proportionally more staff, infrastructure, and security.
The profit logic of scalable media favours individual, at-home experiences. The economics of communal experience remain structurally punishing.
This matters for artists because they are caught in the middle of this dynamic: producing something with irreducible human cost, in a market that increasingly funds what doesn’t need humans to scale.
How it works
The Pareto principle is evident throughout the music industry. A small number of blockbuster artists generate the majority of revenue. The vast majority of artists operate in an industry where income from music rights is negligible, live income is costly to produce, and government cultural investment is declining.
Earlier, I wrote about Durkheim’s concept of collective effervescence, the emotional energy that emerges when people gather in shared rituals like concerts and festivals.
A shared physical experience creates a sense of “we” that digital experiences, by design, struggle to replicate. It produces something beyond entertainment: identity, solidarity, and the felt sense of belonging to something larger than yourself.
Music does this more efficiently than most things. Fan communities form around artists and endure long after specific songs or albums. Shared taste fosters in-group identity. Festivals concentrate this social energy for tens of thousands of people over a single weekend. An investment in live music infrastructure is, on this reading, an investment in social cohesion.
The contrast with current funding priorities is stark. AI companies attract investment because their products scale infinitely. Streaming platforms grow because their marginal cost per user approaches zero. Governments fund what delivers measurable GDP returns. Music does neither in any obvious way. Its economic model is stubbornly labour-intensive, and its social returns are diffuse and long-term.
This is exactly the gap that music can address. Not by pretending to be more scalable than it is, but by making the case for what it uniquely offers: a social accelerator.
A technology for building shared identity, community, and belonging at a scale no streaming platform can replicate.
Yes, but..
The “arts need funding” argument has been made for decades without decisively shifting how governments allocate resources.
Government arts investment has a complicated history of favouring established institutions over emerging scenes and minority communities, which runs counter to what the social cohesion argument would support.
Take action now
Artists can make this argument themselves: When speaking to venues, local governments, grant bodies, or the press, they can frame what they do in terms of what it builds: communities, shared identity, and local belonging.
A sold-out show is not just a revenue figure. It is a room full of people who now have something in common. That is worth naming explicitly.
Your thoughts
Further reading
Why ‘Cost Disease’ Is the Secret Force Behind America’s Toxic Solitude (Alex Mayyasi at Derek Thompson)
Baumol, W.J. & Bowen, W.G. (1966). Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma. A study of Problems common to Theater, Opera, Music and Dance.
Durkheim, É. (1912). The elementary forms of religious life.
Why your live show should be more than just your album played loud (The Fanbase Builder)
Creating a strong sense of community (The Fanbase Builder)
The limits of business logic in music (The Fanbase Builder)
Why fans wear band shirts like football jerseys (The Fanbase Builder)
Great piece I’ve been trying to finish something the last few days about the reality of music audiences the last few days.. I think this is speaking on the same reality but in a different way.
Excellent edition. Wasn’t aware of the concept of cost disease!