How residencies took over the music industry

WHEN Harry Styles took the stage at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on Wednesday (Aug 26) for the first of 30 performances in his residency there, it was the latest and perhaps most ambitious example of the concert industry’s favorite trend: putting on more shows in fewer places.

Last year, Bad Bunny held a 31-date residency in Puerto Rico, brimming with local pride. In 2024, Billy Joel completed a 10-year run at the Garden, selling out 104 nights.

This year, Jay-Z is celebrating landmark albums with stadium shows in New York, London, Paris and Los Angeles. And in Las Vegas, the cutting-edge tech of Sphere has upped the multimedia ante for concerts everywhere.

For artists and their promoters, these concentrated runs have come about through a combination of budget-crunching math – the savings on trucking and fuel alone can be substantial – and a desire to level up the razzle-dazzle, according to touring and talent executives.

“Longer engagements allow artists to create experiences that simply aren’t practical when a production is constantly moving,” said Omar Al-joulani, president of touring at Live Nation. The company is putting on more than 470 residency shows this year, most of them in Las Vegas.

For his latest tour, Styles, the 32-year-old British pop heart-throb, is playing 67 dates in just seven cities around the world, a move that has made his tour the talk of the industry – and set off a frenzy over tickets. When pre-sales began in January, many fans baulked at prices that crested the US$1,000 mark but still snapped them up in huge numbers.

Thousands of seats for the Garden shows have been listed on resale markets at multiples of their original cost, even as Ticketmaster has trickled out more tickets in recent weeks for fans who joined nightly wait lists.

For veteran concertgoers, residencies are nothing new. Fans of Bruce Springsteen still wax poetic about his 10-show breakthrough at the Bottom Line in 1975. Prince played 21 nights at the O2 Arena in London in 2007.

When Styles last toured, from 2021 to 2023, he played a string of residency shows, part of an industry-wide adaptation to touring in the waning days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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The paradigm has evolved as artists have sought to freshen their shows and stand out in a crowded market. Festivals such as Coachella, which proved that fans would travel for a special show, provided a model, said Mitch Rose, the head of North American touring at the Creative Artists Agency.

“Coachella was a destination where people went for the hang, went for the music, went because they had Fomo (fear of missing out),” he said. “So I think of residencies as the same as a festival.”

Rose, who represents Styles, John Mayer, Katy Perry and other major acts, said that he was unable to comment on specifics about his clients’ tours. Styles’ managers also declined to comment.

Las Vegas, once derided as a landing spot for performers past their prime, has gradually been remade as a money-making capital for top acts.

Celine Dion was pivotal in this change, selling about US$660 million in tickets for two residencies starting in 2003. Elton John, Britney Spears, Adele and other stars followed. (After health problems, Dion will mount a comeback series in Paris in September.)

Then came Sphere, the US$2.3 billion brainchild of James Dolan, the executive behind Madison Square Garden, which has further transformed Vegas.

Since U2 inaugurated the venue in 2023, its futuristic visual display – and fans’ willingness to pay premium prices to be there – have set a new standard. Rose called Sphere the new “mother of all residencies”.

For artists and their crews, staying put can ease the wear and tear of the road and offer rare creature comforts, said Michele Bernstein, a former partner at William Morris Endeavor who has consulted with artists such as Bruno Mars and Dead & Company on touring.

“You can have some familiarity,” Bernstein added. “Brew your own coffee, keep your fitness routine.”

But when a residency replaces a full tour, it can place financial burdens on ticket buyers.

“It’s worse for fans,” said Jonathan Daniel of Crush Music, which manages the careers of Green Day, Miley Cyrus and Alanis Morissette. “But no artists think: ‘How can we make things worse for fans?’”

Promoters have found that even as prices skyrocket, fans are willing to pay, and to travel significant distances, if they think a show will be worth the expense – a phenomenon the industry now tracks as “fan tourism”.

Survey data collected by Live Nation showed that nearly six in 10 fans travel for at least one show per year, and 91 per cent of respondents said that a live event had “influenced their decision to visit a destination for the first time”.

Craig Church, a 38-year-old from the Bay Area, was one of thousands of Harry Styles fans bearing that research out. He said that when the tour’s pre-sales opened, he found himself scouring Ticketmaster in the middle of the night for tickets in New York and London. Playing any advantage he could, he scored two floor spots for himself and his wife at Wembley Stadium in London at about US$450 each, using codes earned from ordering vinyl copies of Styles’ latest album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally.

Church, who shared detailed receipts of his purchases with The New York Times, turned the concert trek into a week-long London holiday in June that cost about US$10,000, of which he estimated US$4,400 was tied directly to the Styles tour. “It wound up being worth the whole ordeal.”

The industry’s conventional wisdom is that only elite superstars – such as Styles, Adele or Joel – can headline the kind of big-ticket residencies that fill arenas and sell tickets by the hundreds of thousands. But indie acts, whose audiences may be smaller yet just as dedicated, can also pull off versions at their own scale.

Most years since 2001, Yo La Tengo, indie rock stalwarts from Hoboken, New Jersey, have held an eight-night Hanukkah series.

Now a celebrated tradition at the club level, it began as a lark after the band groaned about doing a Christmas party. “It just seemed funny and audacious,” Ira Kaplan, the band’s guitarist, said in an interview.

The band put up a plastic menorah at Maxwell’s, the beloved Hoboken club, invited guests and donated all proceeds to charity.

In 2017, after Maxwell’s had closed, the shows moved to the Bowery Ballroom in New York City. For the last two years, the band has contended with rampant ticket scalping, a plague more common to arena-level stars.

Yo La Tengo’s 18th year of Hanukkah shows will begin Dec 4, and by the run’s end Dec 11, the band will have played 144 concerts in the series.

“Take that, Billy Joel,” Kaplan said dryly. NYTIMES