Concert ticket sales represents a tiny slice of the total number of paid musicians.

A band playing at bars and bar mitzvah’s are just as much live music as someone playing in front of 50,000 fans at a major venue.

I would bet that increase in revenue has much more to do with the skyrocketing ticket prices than actual attendance.

For example, U2 ticket prices have gone from $17 in 1985 to around $130 today. That's way more than can be accounted for by inflation (if inflation alone were responsible, you'd expect ticket prices around $44).

https://gametime.co/blog/how-u2-concert-ticket-prices-have-c...

I know I rarely go nowadays, and that's entirely due to the outrageous ticket prices.

Personally, there’s just rarely any shows I want to go to. A large majority of stuff seem to be cover bands, or just something I’m not that much a fan of. Venues have also been falling off, I know at least one local place I’ve been to hear had to shut down because of covid. And then, at the last show I went to, they charged you for goddamn cups of water at the bar.

Is this sufficient to call it a "complete fabrication"? Climbing concert revenue is plausibly consistent with a disappearance of lower-overhead non-ticketed live music, like at a bar. In fact, those two are very compatible with each other: where I live now, it 's harder to see live music casually, so my bar for whether I want to go to a ticketed concert is lower.