She's always going to have a monopoly on being Taylor Swift. Sure, you may also like some other musician, but it's not like you can just drop in replace her with a different singer.
Art is, somewhat by definition, a monopoly. There's no way around that, the only thing you can do is have more concerts/supply of it, but that's literally more work for the artist involved.
I think it's Garth Brooks that's notorious for planning his tours where he'll just keep adding more concert dates in a city until they stop selling out at $30 tickets and then move to the next town and repeat it. That works, but you also have to be willing to play the same town 10 days in a row or something, which isn't free for a musician to do in terms of exhaustion and effort.
It's better than playing 10 days in a row in 10 different cities. In fact it seems to me to be to be the best way to do it. Roll into town, set up once, do all your shows, and then pack up once. And everyone gets to sleep in a hotel bed instead of a tour bus rolling down the road to the next town.
I would have thought it would be unusual to have a venue with 10 dates in a row available though. I guess if you do this far enough in advance it would work in many places, but I would think most big arenas would have only a few consecutive dates at the most, working around the sports and other artists and conventions and whatever else is going on there.
Yea, I think that strategy works because whichever artist it was just books a smaller venue. Most cities only have 1 venue that could do a concert as big as what Taylor Swift does. If you're operating in the 1k capacity space though you can easily just broker between 2-3 venues in most towns and play at different spaces around other already-booked shows if needed. If you're competing against the NFL or whatever for space, it's a whole different story.
The issue that you run into with the "just keep adding dates" is less that you're stuck somewhere for 10 days, but more that instead of your tour being a tight 2-3 months and you're done, there's not really anything that stops your 10 city tour from taking 10 months if people keep buying the tickets.
> there's not really anything that stops your 10 city tour from taking 10 months if people keep buying the tickets.
Yeah, but some artists actually do like to tour. And its where they make the most money, since record sales aren't really a thing anymore. Even when they were, I think touring was still the bigger moneymaker for most acts.
That's a really interesting solution to the problem! I wonder why Swift keeps planning these giant "big bang" tours instead of trying something similar. Maybe some artists don't like being perpetually on tour? I'm sure living out of an RV or hotel in a random city and playing a concert every night or two feels pretty constraining.
I think it's also different how much of a show it is. If your concert is mostly just you with a guitar and a mic, then it's easy to just load that up and stay somewhere for as long as needed, and it's easier to find smaller venues where you can play a week of shows.
If you're Taylor Swift or the like, you're playing 30k person stadiums and have a stage setup that takes most of a full day or two to set up and tear down. You likely have to book the venue years in advance, and the logistics of getting you, your 30 backup musicians and dancers, all your stage tech, and god knows what else around the world is the sort of thing that's not really amenable to just adjusting on the fly.
Once you're big enough that you're competing with like... international sports events and entire music festivals for space, you're just working in a different world of constraints. In some ways, it's similar to scalability in computing. If your personal website or side project blows up, it's easy to find the space to double or even 10x the resources. If you're Netflix and somehow you double your demand, there may not even be available resources in the world to help you, and you can't just fall back to doing something smaller by choice.
Art is, somewhat by definition, a monopoly. There's no way around that, the only thing you can do is have more concerts/supply of it, but that's literally more work for the artist involved.
I think it's Garth Brooks that's notorious for planning his tours where he'll just keep adding more concert dates in a city until they stop selling out at $30 tickets and then move to the next town and repeat it. That works, but you also have to be willing to play the same town 10 days in a row or something, which isn't free for a musician to do in terms of exhaustion and effort.