Never before have there been so many pop concerts as in recent years, yet live pop music in the Netherlands is under pressure. This is the conclusion of researchers Britt Swartjes and Martijn Mulder in the second edition of the Live Music Monitor, which they published on Thursday present during the showcase festival and conference Eurosonic Noorderslag (ESNS) in Groningen.
The researchers counted a record number of 29,000 pop performances on Dutch stages and festivals in 2023. But the number of places where pop concerts are organized has decreased in recent years, as has the number of pop festivals. Pop concerts are increasingly concentrated in the same places, the monitor shows. The researchers also speak of a ‘de-festivalization of the Netherlands.
Accessible concerts in particular are declining: on small stages, in cafes, clubs, community centers and in public spaces. “These are precisely the informal playgrounds, where people can often come into contact with music without a ticket,” says researcher Martijn Mulder.
In 2008, more than a quarter of the concerts were still in such an informal performance space, in 2024 that will be only 8 percent. There is scaling up for both the audience and the artist. This way, emerging artists can gain less experience playing live in that informal circuit before they visit larger venues. Mulder mentions cost increases and the increased regulatory burden for live music as possible causes of the decrease.
The number of places where pop concerts are organized is decreasing faster outside the Randstad, with the exception of Groningen where the number of stages even increased. The number of stages decreased most rapidly in Drenthe and Flevoland: by 50 percent between 2019 and 2024.
“You could say that pop music is becoming less accessible, especially for people who are less likely to be able to afford a ticket,” according to Mulder.
This means that the pop sector is “really changing”, according to the researcher. “The power of pop music has always been its accessibility.” Also for the artist: “You can, so to speak, pick up a guitar on any street corner and make music. This distinguishes it from other performing arts, such as theater or classical music.”
For the Live Music Monitor, Swartjes, a researcher at the Boekman Foundation, and Mulder, a researcher at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, analyzed more than 387,000 concerts by almost 43,000 artists who performed in the Netherlands between 2008 and 2024. The researchers started the study during the corona period, when the need for figures about the size of the live music sector grew. They presented the first edition in 2022, with figures up to and including 2019.
De-festivalization
For the analyses, the researchers use the database of Podiuminfo and Festivalinfo, two sites on which the vast majority of performances by pop artists in the Netherlands have been found for more than twenty years. Or at least the performances announced online. Founder Rob van der Zwaan started the sites as a hobby project. “Such a database is never completely complete,” says Mulder. “But when I speak to colleagues abroad, they are jealous that we have such a large data set in the Netherlands.”
The “de-festivalization” is evident from the fact that the supply of festivals approximately halved between record year 2016 (1,165 festivals) and 2024 (628 festivals). This decline started well before the corona crisis, says Mulder, who speaks of an “oversupply” of festivals around 2016. From that period onwards, large cities also started to look more critically at the licensing of festivals.
What actually increased in recent years was the number of performances by cover and tribute bands. In 2024 there were approximately 1,800 tribute concerts, accounting for almost 7 percent of the total number of concerts. In 2013 this was only 2.5 percent. “The popularity is not surprising, if you consider that today’s elderly are the first generation to grow up with pop music. They like to listen to the music from their youth again,” says Mulder.
The artists who performed the most in the Netherlands between 2008 and 2024 are De Dijk (610 performances) and Ali B (566). Between 2021 and 2024, De Jeugd van Today is at the top with 369 performances, followed by Chef’Special (295) and Douwe Bob (291).
It is no coincidence that these are all men. The vast majority of performing pop artists are men and the share of women has barely increased in recent years. Between 2017 and 2019, the share of women and non-binary people increased from almost 15 percent to almost 20 percent. In the following years, that percentage dropped again to 18 percent in 2024. Two-thirds of the artists in 2024 will be men, the remaining 15 percent of the acts consist of men and women.
The balance is more uneven among the group of artists who perform the most. Men are also generally able to build a longer live career than women, the monitor shows. “The music sector is still a male stronghold,” says Mulder. “While female artists in the charts are very popular.”
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