It’s official: concerts are back. You’ve probably seen your favorite artists talking about upcoming tours as well as the return of festivals like Primavera Sound, Governors Ball, and Lollapalooza.
Meanwhile, the first major concerts in New York occurred back to back this month: The Foo Fighters played to a packed Madison Square Garden last week, and the Strokes played a support gig for New York mayoral candidate Maya Wiley. And according to Thinknum data, event companies are benefiting from all the buzz.
Web traffic and job listings for the two biggest ticket companies, Live Nation and Ticketmaster, are beginning to bounce back to pre-pandemic levels. If you’ve ever wanted to work in the concert industry, now’s your chance.
In the last three months, Live Nation’s hiring has shot up 538%. Job listings for the company have risen to 1,110 after an all-time low of 45 in January. The last time Live Nation reached this many listings was May 2020, while the pandemic was still shaking up the event industry. Before the pandemic, Live Nation was on a hiring spree, reaching a high of 1,810 listings on March 15, the same week the country shut down. Although the company’s listings aren’t as high as they were pre-pandemic, they’re expected to reach March 2020 levels at some point in the near future.
Ticketmaster is also seeing a resurgence in job listings, albeit a smaller one. The company currently has 138 jobs open, more than the 123 it had on March 26, 2020, the earliest available data.
Web traffic for Ticketmaster is also jumping back to previous levels as concertgoers begin searching for available tickets. As of June 14, traffic reached a high of 57.4 daily pageviews per million, a number not seen since February 2020, right before the industry began to suffer from the pandemic.
Although live events are nowhere near as common as they were pre-pandemic, the first signs of a major resurgence are already here, from festivals to arena shows to concerts happening all over the world.
About the Data:
Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online, jobs, social and web traffic, product sales, and app ratings, and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue, and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales.