From symphonic to pop, from small clubs to streaming: we listen to more music than ever. But do we still have any idea how much it costs to make it exist?
by Marialuisa Veneziano
1 September 2026
At nine o'clock in the evening, the audience takes place.
Someone turns off the phone, someone already keeps it up, ready to prove to hundreds of people that he was also present. It is one of the great mysteries of our time: we pay to see something live and, as soon as it begins, we look at it through a glass rectangle.
In a theatre the orchestra accords.
In one stage the lights are switched off.
In a small club a singer controls for the last time the microphone and guitarist leans on the pedalboard with the devotion that an organist of the 17th century would have reserved to the registers.
They change clothes, change decibels, even change the price of beer.
But the same thing is about to happen.
Someone will make music for someone else.
Two hours later the applause will arrive.
And we will have the impression of having witnessed two hours of work.
It's one of the best possible illusions of music.
The work that must seem to disappear
A violinist enters the orchestra and plays.
A pop singer goes on stage and sings.
A pianist sits and begins.
From outside, it's all surprisingly simple.
The great interpreter, however, exercises a paradoxical profession: work for thousands of hours so that, when we finally look at him, work does not see anymore.
If we felt the fatigue behind every step, the interpretation would have failed. If the singer continually showed us the support of the breath, if the pianist exhibited the technical difficulty, if the violinist transformed every change of position into a request for national solidarity, we would listen to gymnastics, not music.
The technique reaches its purpose when it disappears.
And it is perhaps this invisibleness to have deceived us.
Behind a symphonic concert there are years of individual training, auditions, general tests, directors, musical librarians, technicians, administrative, room staff, instrument maintenance, transport.
Behind the concert of a pop artist there is not simply "one who sings".
There are musicians, arrangers, producer, hall and stage phoenix, lights technicians, backliner, tour managers, security staff, drivers, assemblers, programmers, often choreographers, videomakers and dozens — in the great tours hundreds — of people working before the first deal is played.
And before the tour there was a song.
Someone wrote it.
Someone arranged it.
Someone recorded it.
Someone spent three hours choosing the sound of a rocker that the listener will hear for a quarter of a second.
We do not laugh: in music the great tragedies can also be consumed around a charleston.
Music has never been so present
The contemporary paradox is surprising.
We're not witnessing the disappearance of music.
On the contrary: we consume gigantic quantities.
In 2025 the world record music market reached $31.7 billion, growing for the eleventh consecutive year. The streaming now accounts for almost 70% of the total revenues of recorded music and paid accounts reached 837 million. (IFPI)
Even the live runs.
In Italy, according to the SIAE 2025 Report, the concerts have passed for the first time 1,16 billion euros of expenditure at the box office, with an increase of 17.5% compared to the previous year. They became the main economic engine of the Italian show. ()
So the music interests.
I do.
We listen to her while we drive, we run, we study, we cook, we work, we fall in love and, in some cases, we desperately try to disconnect ourselves by choosing playlists that invariably get the opposite effect.
Music is everywhere.
And that's where the problem begins.
When something becomes omnipresent, it may seem cheap.
We used to buy a record. Today we buy access to the universe
There was an anthropological change, even before it was economical.
To listen to a record, you had to own it.
You chose it. He bought it. He was taking him home.
There was therefore a fairly clear relationship between the musical object and its price.
Today we pay a subscription and in front of us a sound library practically boundless.
It is an extraordinary conquest.
A teenager can pass in seconds from Billie Eilish to Miles Davis, from a Mahler symphony to a Korean rapper, from Monteverdi to an independent band recorded on the other side of the planet yesterday.
Never in human history have we had such musical availability.
But abundance changes the perception of value.
When we own everything, every single thing seems to cost less.
Streaming is not simply a new support, as were the CD or vinyl. He has transformed our own idea of possession: we no longer buy the work, we buy the permanent possibility of reaching it.
Spotify, in its data relating to 2025, declares that he has distributed over 11 billion dollars to rights holders and emphasizes that the system does not pay through a fixed tariff "for listening", but through the streaming quota accrued within the royalties mountain. The same platform reports that more than 81,000 artists generated at least $10,000 of Spotify royalties in 2025. They are data of the platform itself and, therefore, they must be read as such; however, they show how complex the economy has become hidden behind a seemingly harmless gesture as to press Play. (loudandclear. byspotify. Community)
The problem is not to regret the record store as if the last moral reserve of the West had been preserved.
The problem is another:
we have increasingly separated the experience of listening from the perception of the work necessary to produce it.
Bach, Beyoncé and the same problem
At this point someone might think that the speech is especially worth for orchestras, opera houses and so-called cultured music.
That would be a mistake.
Mahler's symphony requires a huge organic and cannot be "optimized" by reducing orchestra professors without changing their nature.
But not even a rock group can go on tour by replacing the drummer with half a drummer because the price of the diesel has increased.
And here is an old economic problem that is surprisingly modern.
In the 1960s economists William Baumol and William Bowen described what would become known as "cost disease", the cost of performing arts.
The concept, simplifying, is brilliant.
To build a car today it takes much less hours of work than a century ago, thanks to increased productivity.
But to perform a Beethoven quartet, it still serves four musicians and a big way the same time it served in 1826.
We cannot perform Beethoven at 220% of the speed to increase productivity. Technically, we could. Beethoven would probably come to personally claim us from the afterlife.
Live music resists industrial productivity because his time coincides with our.
And that also applies to a song.
Three minutes of music take three minutes to be heard.
A two-hour concert still needs two hours of artist and audience life.
Technology can multiply distribution.
It cannot multiply human time.
And it is precisely this inefficiency, economically speaking, to constitute a part of the beauty of musical experience.
The full stadium and the local
Then there is another contradiction of our time.
We see exhausted stages and conclude that live music enjoys everywhere of excellent health.
But observing only the summit means to confuse the health of some great trees with that of the entire forest.
United Kingdom — one of the most important musical markets in the world — the Music Venue Trust found that in 2025 the 53% of small live music venues produced no profit. The average margin of the sector was just 2.5%; thirty premises closed permanently and the sector lost thousands of jobs. (Music Venue Trust)
It is not an Italian data and should not be imported mechanically in our reality.
But it is a precious warning.
Because before the stadium there is a hundred-seat place.
Before the world tour there is often a concert in front of forty people, three of whom are friends of the bassist and one entered only because it rained outside.
That night may sound irrelevant.
It's not.
The small places are workshops where artists learn the craft in front of a real audience.
You can learn harmony in a school.
You can study technique in a room.
But no platform can teach what happens when a room does not react, when a piece does not work, when you have to conquer the attention of someone who has no obligation to give it to us.
The audience is part of the formation of the musician.
Even the distracted one.
Sometimes especially the distracted one.
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The company loves the result and removes the process
Here music becomes a mirror of something much larger.
Our society is in love with the results.
Let's see the footballer when he scores, not training.
Let's see the novel published, not the pages thrown.
We see the singer in the spotlight, not the years in which he sang without anyone calling him an artist.
Contemporary success is almost always represented as an appearance.
Suddenly someone "explodes".
"He became famous. "
"He's here. "
As if until the previous week had been kept empty.
Digital culture has accentuated this perception because it continually shows the outcome, very rarely the duration that produced it.
And music suffers particularly from this distortion.
Because it looks easy when it's done well.
The singer who perfectly controls the voice seems simply to open the mouth.
The pianist who really owns a passage almost doesn't move his hands.
The orchestra perfectly together makes you forget that one hundred individuals are making one hundred simultaneous decisions.
Quality erases its tracks.
It's his great elegance.
And economically, sometimes, his condemnation.
But then should culture be subsidized forever?
We come to the question that generally appears when talking about orchestras, theatres, festivals, contemporary music:
If the public is not enough to keep them, why should the community intervene?
Legitimate question.
The answer cannot be: "because it is culture", pronounced with the same solemnity with which a cardinal would show a relic.
Culture should not become the alibi behind which to hide bad administration, lazy programming or institutions unable to speak at their own time.
Public funding is responsible.
Transparency.
Accessibility.
Education.
Ability to build public.
But there is at the same time a misunderstanding to be dismantled: not all that produces social value is able to transform it entirely into a commercial embroidery.
A library is not useless because it lends books for free.
A school is not failing because the annual student profit does not appear in its budget.
A public park should not sell enough trees to justify its existence.
The market measures some forms of value.
Not all of them.
Music produces education, identity, aggregation, memory, tourism, work, cultural reputation, urban well-being, belonging.
And it produces something even harder to put in Excel:
occasions when strangers experience something together.
It's not very short.
In the most individualized society in history, it could even be a necessity.
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From Taylor Swift concert to the gang of the country
This is where we must finally abandon the old hierarchy between "high" music and "low" music.
The social value of music lies not only in the complexity of the score.
A stage that sings together a pop song, a small jazz band in a club, an amateur choir, a band during a procession, a symphonic orchestra that faces Bruckner are doing very musically diverse things.
But they share a fundamental gesture.
They're building common time.
And maybe that's what we keep buying when we buy a ticket.
Not just sound.
Presence.
The disk is repeatable.
The concert is not.
We can listen to a hundred recordings of the same track, but that evening, in that room, with those people, that precise execution will exist only once.
It's a strange commodity.
At the same time when it is produced, it begins to disappear.
How much should a song cost?
There is no simple answer.
And I'd be wary of who owns one.
Tickets must remain accessible.
Artists must be paid.
Technicians have to live.
Institutions must be sustainable.
The premises must be open.
Authors must receive the rights.
The public cannot be considered an emotional ATM, to which continually increase the price because "so he loves the artist".
It's a very delicate balance.
But at least we can start by changing a question.
When we say:
"Why is it so expensive? "
we should also learn to ask:
"How many people and how long are there behind what I'm paying? "
It doesn't mean accepting any price.
It means recovering the relationship between price and work.
A relationship that the digital economy has made less and less visible.
The last note
At the end of the concert the conductor lowers his arms.
Or the singer drops the microphone along the side.
The lights remain firm.
Something curious happens for an instant.
The music is over, but the audience does not applaud.
There is a very short space between the last vibration and the noise of the hands.
Maybe it's the most valuable time of the whole night.
Hundred musicians may have worked for weeks.
A band may have crossed half of Europe.
A singer may have taken years to get to that stage.
Technicians and teachers may have worked since morning.
And all that work has produced something we can save.
Tomorrow the stage will be empty.
The room will be clean.
The instruments will return to the enclosures.
The orchestra will have to start again.
The band will have to reassemble everything elsewhere.
Because music has a wonderful cruelty:
to continue to live must always die.
Perhaps we have a wrong question.
We continue to wonder how much music costs.
Very.
In money, discipline, study, renunce, infrastructure, failed attempts, kilometers, evidence, nights.
But there is a much more serious question.
How much would a society in which no one had more time, means or courage to do all this?
A company full of headphones, platforms and speakers, but without new musicians to listen.
A society capable of consuming music twenty-four hours a day and unable to allow those who create it to live.
It would be the perfect paradox of our time:
to have all the music in the world and to have forgotten that somewhere someone still has to do it.
MINI BOX IRONIC
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