Why Do So Many Big Artists Hate Touring?

On the relationship between fantasy, reality, and automation.

The first time I was offered a national tour, I accepted even though I fully understood that my band wasn’t ready for that kind of exposure. We were a duo who had played maybe ten shows together, and neither of us had any prior background as gigging musicians. We’d never even played a single hard-ticket headline show, where it was entirely incumbent upon us to make sure an audience showed up in force and left satisfied. We’d always just been added to other events in the frequently vain hope that our ephemeral internet hype would translate into real-world live draw. Sometimes we’d show up with our gear and be asked not to play at all, because our presence on the show poster was all the promoter really wanted from us.

I’m sure I had probably convinced myself that a trial-by-fire run of dates opening for Sleigh Bells in gigantic rooms that could hold over a thousand people would serve as a kind of crucible that would harden us into the entertainers we needed to be in order to do music as a career. That it would be like the Beatles’ time in Hamburg, doing multiple shows a night for tough audiences and studying under Little Richard directly. In reality, though, I probably would have said “yes” even if I knew definitively that we were going to get killed onstage every night. Deep down, I wanted to have the experience of going on tour, and I was justifiably worried I’d never get another chance.

At first, it felt magical. I’ll never forget showing up in San Diego for the first show after having spent three days driving down from Minneapolis. Leaving all of the day-to-day concerns that usually overwhelmed me behind and committing fully to the life of an artist, at least temporarily. Hanging out with the other bands backstage, hearing all their stories about what it was like to make it and imagining myself in that position. Walking the streets of a city I’d never been to with a per diem in hand, looking for a quick bite to eat. At some point, though, the spell was broken when I had to actually get on stage and play a show.

Our problem was that neither of us was really a “musician,” at least not at that point in time. My bandmate was an accomplished DJ and graphic designer par excellence, while I was a prolific message board poster who liked to write lyrics and putz around with Digital Audio Workstations. Together, we could create dazzling artifacts that fit perfectly into the landscape of blogs, MP3 files, and PNG files that proliferated online during the iPod era, but basically none of the skills we employed in order to do that had anything to do with what live musicians do onstage. I didn’t “sing” so much as I used recordings of my voice as raw material for digital soundscapes. I didn’t “play instruments” so much as I sometimes used them to create samples that I then chopped up and time-warped in Ableton Live.

I’m sure some people in the audience enjoyed some of those performances. I remember one particular show at the Diamond Ballroom in Oklahoma City, where we demolished our instruments onstage over the course of our set, that had the audience roaring with something like approval. We apparently sold as much merch that night as we did anywhere else on the continent. Guitar Center had some kind of warranty that ensured we could get instruments replaced or repaired for free no matter what condition they were in, so I started smashing a guitar onstage every night and picking up a new one en route to the next show as a gimmick. It seemed like it was the least I could do for the kids who deigned to show up early enough to catch our set.

Overall, though, the emotional burden of being so thoroughly out of our depth started to drag on our spirits. By the end of the tour, we were barely talking to one another, and the band broke up not long after. I remember going to the emergency room a week or two after we returned home because I thought I was having a heart attack, though after monitoring me overnight, the doctors there had to conclude I was just experiencing very bad anxiety. I had wanted to have an experience, and I certainly got one. I didn’t regret going on the tour in the first place, exactly, but I came away feeling overwhelmed by the gulf between the audience’s expectations and the reality of what I could reasonably offer them.

---

---

When digital distribution permanently changed the record business, there was a lot of uncertainty about what the mainstream was going to look like going forward. Achieving that level of exposure had previously required the navigation of particular, difficult bottlenecks. As an artist, you had to sign with a major label and create something accessible enough to convince radio stations to play your single and record stores to stock your album. Various gatekeepers had to be sure that your record was going to be a smash well before the general public ever got a chance to weigh in. The internet upended this system, and no one could claim to know what the result would be.

In a way, my situation was an example of this dynamic in action. I booked a national tour without having much background in the live arena. I secured a talent agent before anyone outside my local scene had ever seen my band live. I bypassed much of the traditional gatekeeping and dues-paying that would have otherwise prevented a talent like mine from achieving mass exposure. Was that a good thing? My suspicion is that if you polled everyone who saw me opening for Sleigh Bells in the spring of twenty twelve, the majority would probably vote “no.”

In the world of recorded music, the boundary between “indie” and “mainstream” often seemed porous, back then. DIY experimenters often used the same tools as the songwriters and producers behind triple-A chart hits. There was, theoretically, no ceiling on the amount of buzz that a song could accumulate on digital platforms like YouTube or the Hype Machine. The idea that an experimental, art for art’s sake indie act could take advantage of the new status quo to launch a single directly into the mainstream began to tantalize artists and industry observers in equal measure. The fantasy Paul Westerberg articulated in the Replacements’ “Alex Chilton”—a perennially-overlooked your-favorite-artist’s-favorite-artist type act becoming a cause célèbre for “children by the million”—seemed suddenly, seductively possible.

In the real world, though, the boundary between “indie” and “mainstream” was considerably less flexible. Small venues can’t instantly, magically increase in size if the artist booked to play them blows up online, for example. The casual listeners that patronize triple-A pop hits and the scenester aficionados that patronize DIY spaces are not equivalent, interchangeable demographics. They tend to be very different people, living very different lives, with wildly divergent expectations. On Spotify, these listeners may all just look like numbers, but in real life, the details matter.

A few months after the tour with Sleigh Bells ended, I went on my second national tour, this time as a solo act. I was supporting one of the few artists of my generation that seemed to be navigating the transition from DIY indie act to mainstream celebrity somewhat successfully. Many of the venues we were hitting were much too small to meet the demand that had built up in the months since the shows were initially booked, which created problems. One particular show, in Baltimore, was actually supposed to take place in an actual underground DIY venue. It didn’t have a website or uniformed staff, and several real live artists were actively living in the space. Apparently, the headliner had cancelled a show there a year earlier, when it was a more appropriate venue for her to be playing, and her manager felt like doing a make-up show was important for her credibility.

Logistically, the show was a nightmare. The front-of-house engineer broke her foot carrying equipment up a narrow staircase, and after doors opened, suburbanite Marylanders who had never been to a DIY space in their lives swarmed the venue, packing the room from wall to wall. The volunteers who were on hand to help run the show quickly became exasperated with the workload, and none of us had any idea what to do about the fact that the only way to get to and from the stage was to go directly through the crowd. When people in those days talked whimsically about the idea of the underground crossing over with the mainstream, I think the implication was that the mainstream would become more like the underground. In practical terms, I found that the opposite was true: what I witnessed looked a lot more like the challenges inherent in staging a triple-A pop show being imposed on a space that wasn’t built for it and a group of volunteers who lacked both the incentive and the resources necessary to handle the workload.

In much the same way that being able to make interesting records in no way guarantees that an artist will also be able to put on a great live show, the boutique, prestige-driven touring circuit is effectively a completely separate industry from the celebrity-driven world of triple-A pop success. In some cases, maybe the internet really did help a few isolated figures from the underground bypass barriers that would otherwise have prevented them from entering the mainstream, but in most cases, viral internet fame just launched people directly at functionally impermeable barriers at heretofore unthinkable speeds.

---

---

In June of twenty sixteen, Christina Grimmie was shot dead while greeting fans after a show she’d just played at a venue called the Plaza Live in Orlando, Florida. Though she was technically a fairly small artist, who hadn’t scored any chart hits, she had achieved nationwide media exposure as a contestant on a singing competition show on broadcast television called The Voice. Compared to most other artists who play that venue, she was meaningfully more famous, though that fame had yet to translate into the kind of success that would allow her to play bigger rooms or travel with security.

Celebrity, for an artist in Grimmie’s position, can be a treacherous thing. Smaller concert venues aren’t really built for it—many such rooms can only be entered or exited from the front, for example, which could make it trivial for fans or stalkers to trap an artist in the venue if they were so inclined. Discretion is usually impossible even for artists with more resources—if photographers or autograph hounds think they can make any money at all of you, they have ways of knowing where you’re going to be and when. They will be at the airport waiting for you the second you deplane, and they will be outside your hotel no matter whose name the room is booked under.

Impromptu meet-and-greets like the one Grimmie was conducting outside the Plaza Live when she was murdered used to be de rigeur for artists playing smaller venues. Before she was killed, I can’t count how many times I heard people in the industry shit-talking artists who didn’t want to do them, dismissing concerns about security with righteous scorn. The gap between the audience’s expectations and the artist’s practical reality was invisible to most until it swallowed up an innocent young woman’s life.

Today, there’s really no telling what other concerns that are currently being characterized as stuck-up and out-of-touch will end up being validated by another horrific act of violence at some point in the future. The sudden, volatile nature of viral internet fame ensures that more and more people will continue to fact the risks of mass media exposure without the material security required to safely endure it for the foreseeable future.

My own experiences with touring and celebrity have left me surprised this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often. The other day, I involuntarily shivered when seeing a Pantera T-shirt reminded me of what happened when a member of the audience jumped onstage at a Damageplan show and killed Dimebag Darrell. It unsettles me a bit whenever I recall that a band operating under the name “Pantera” is currently on tour playing all the old hits for fans all over the world, as if nothing bad had ever happened to them. The audience is so used to having their expectations met, no matter the cost.

For working people and struggling artists, it seems to be relatively easy to resist the temptation to extend too much sympathy to the celebrities who face these risks. On paper, I get that. If you’re selling enough tickets to tour for a living in any capacity, you’re probably making decent money. The life of an entertainer is usually something you have to actively opt into, so crying about the details after you’ve already made it just makes you look selfish and ungrateful to the audience. Personally, though, I can’t just gloss over the complaints so easily. I know too much. I’ve seen what the sneering faces of the petulant masses look like from the artist’s perspective. The whole thing bugs me.

---

---

In the years since my brief career as a touring artist took place, touring has become the engine that drives the entire music industry. Post-streaming, listeners now spend considerably less on recordings and considerably more on concerts. Ticket prices have gone up, elaborate stage production has become the norm, and ancillary revenues from concessions, parking, and merch have exploded. The tour used to be a promotional expense to get more people to buy the album, but now, a new album is just an excuse to tour, and many successful tours now omit that step altogether by choosing to focus entirely on old material. While the economics of touring smaller rooms continue to be precarious, making it difficult for acts on the album-driven prestige indie ecosystem to turn a profit, triple-A pop artists now stand to make outrageous amounts of cash if they can sell out arenas and stadiums. Even relatively small acts who have no business trying to book themselves into such large venues are constantly trying to make the leap to the arena level in order to take advantage of the opportunities it affords.

Still, despite the earning potential of these huge tours, many triple-A pop acts seem to hate doing them. Cancellations due to mental health struggles are commonplace, and Justin Bieber reportedly lost so much money cancelling a tour in support of his album Justice that he had to sell off his publishing catalog in order to pay his debts. Unlike Christina Grimmie or Dimebag Darrell, these artists aren’t stuck in rooms too small to properly accommodate the size of their celebrity, but they still find the demands of the lifestyle to be suffocating. You don’t get to that level without deliberately choosing to pursue a career as an entertainer, but many of these artists made that commitment as children who didn’t fully understand what they were getting into, often during a bygone paradigm when it would have seemed like success was going to involve more time being creative in recording studios and less time being shuffled from one nondescript beige room to another in between performances.

As I write this, Chappell Roan is currently the subject of a torrent of derision on social media, stemming from reports that a security guard at a hotel she was staying at recently in Brazil was rude to a young fan of hers whose celebrity parents were famous enough to successfully raise a stink about the incident online. This latest eruption of discourse follows a spate of other examples of Roan eliciting backlash online by doing things like calling out photographers who are rude to her in public. When she expresses discomfort with the level of dehumanization that popular artists like her are expected to endure as a consequence of their vocation, she often finds herself facing a firestorm of criticism from fans and observers who believe she is obligated to suck it up and play her role.

In context, Roan’s discomfort with the level of scrutiny and dehumanization that accompanies such celebrity makes sense. Not all that long ago, she still had the privilege of anonymity when she was off the clock, and the artists she grew up wanting to emulate didn’t exist in the context of a twenty-four-seven social media surveillance panopticon. Controversies used to be stoked deliberately by music videos with elaborate art direction that came out on schedule with a full compliment of publicists working the angles. So much has changed, and so quickly, but to the passive consumer of media, these changes aren’t necessarily obvious.

It often does not seem to matter to them whether they’re reacting to a deliberately controversial music video or a shaky-cam iPhone recording of an exchange with a paparazzo. It’s all just content now. If a celebrity’s face passes in front of the audience’s eyes, they expect to be entertained, and the celebrity no longer has any control over when and where that happens. The audience is always watching. We talk a lot about what the phones are doing to the billions of consumers who stare at their screens for hours every day, but the proliferation of these devices has also had an impact on the much smaller group of individuals who often find themselves looking at the other side. What does it feel like to have billions of cameras pointed directly at you all of the time?

Over a decade ago now, Lana Del Rey was one of the first major new stars to experience the pitfalls of post-internet celebrity. Her ascent happened so quickly that she went from playing Glasslands Gallery to Saturday Night Live within the space of a few months. The gulf between the mass audience’s expectations and her ability to navigate the precise bottlenecks she suddenly found herself being hurled at turned out to be vast, and the backlash was ferocious. Being mocked and used as a punchline by media commentators didn’t stop her from packing arenas and outdoor auditoriums with her faithful in subsequent cycles, but it’s kind of remarkable in retrospect how long it took for the intelligentsia to stop treating her like a Macklemore-esque cautionary tale. It was years before critics displayed any willingness to take her seriously, and almost a decade before they finally got comfortable with the prospect of celebrating her.

In material terms, of course, her albums sold very well and her tours were massive. Born To Die, the album she went on SNL to promote, basically never left the Billboard Two Hundred albums chart after it entered. When we’re talking about success and cultural impact, paying too much attention to critics is a waste of time, and the specific case of Lana Del Rey is one of the clearest examples of that I can imagine. If we’re talking about what it feels like to be under the microscope in the social media era, though, that exact disconnect between critical sentiment and material indicators is incredibly instructive. What does it feel like to turn on the TV and see supposedly credible journalists talking in a mid-Atlantic accent about how horrible you are? What does it feel like to turn on NPR and hear anchors gossiping about your personal life in between updates about school shootings and foreign wars? What does it feel like to constantly be facing down narratives that run totally counter to what you recognize as reality? How many people could handle that? How many journalists who’ve spent years firing off takes about public figures have gone on to melt down in situations where they became the story? What should we make of the fact that even people who chase attention for a living are often shocked when they learn what it feels like to receive it at scale?

---

---

Last year, the biggest new thing in popular music was the K-Pop Demon Hunters soundtrack. The stakeholders behind the film had no idea it was going to do so well, selling it to Netflix out of concern that it wouldn’t perform well theatrically. Had Sony been more confident in the material, I wonder what the rollout would have looked like. Would there have been a tour, where visual representations of the film’s characters performed the songs live? Would it have even needed to be a “tour” in the traditional sense? If the groups that the audience is paying to see are fictional, you don’t need to bus them from venue to venue. You could have multiple iterations of the same show playing in different cities on the same night.

Unlike Chappell Roan, members of the fictional girl group Huntr/x would never need to worry about being videotaped as they arrive at an airport. Autograph hounds wouldn’t be able to catch them outside a hotel, and paparazzi would have no way of heckling them or violating their privacy. They would have no need for paid security, or for dressing rooms and tour buses. Whether they utilized chatbot functionality or paid surrogate “chatters” like the ones that OnlyFans creators use to engage with fans, members of fictional groups like Huntr/x could theoretically have an endless appetite for direct fan engagement, responding to DMs instantly and becoming a constant presence in fans’ lives. They would never complain that the label is forcing them to make too many social media posts at the expense of their art. They would never complain about anything.

In a lot of ways, a shift towards fictional artists would be a positive development. K-Pop performers are often recruited as children, and success as an idol often entails a life of dehumanizing scrutiny for surprisingly low pay. The expectations that idols in particular face are notably extreme. It sometimes isn’t possible to maintain the right look without developing an eating disorder. Doing normal things like dating might elicit intense backlash from fans who don’t approve. Maybe no human being should be doing that job. Maybe the parasocial expectations it requires are fundamentally incompatible with human wants and needs. Maybe the inhumanity of the whole arrangement is crying out for non-human performers who are capable of giving the audience the endless pandering it seems to crave.

The tech that would be necessarily to make this possible seems to be on the horizon. The debate around video diffusion models usually centers around the question of whether or not they can generate output on the level of an auteur filmmaker directing an experienced crew, but there are other uses for them. The faster and cheaper it is to generate new performances by a fictional idol group, the more dynamic those performances can become. Every new concert can include unique banter and variant setlists, making each performance no less pre-determined than any other big, choreography-driven arena show is. Idols could reference current events from the last twenty-four hours, or give shout-outs from the stage to specific audience members.

Virtual idols might be able to go above and beyond what their flesh-and-blood predecessors ever could or would do, satisfying audience expectations to an extent that never before would have been possible. We may yet discover all of the ways in which humanity was an obstacle that prevented people like Chappell Roan from reaching their full potential as consumer products. What would it be like to compete as a human being in that kind of marketplace? We hear so much speculation these days about how automated cultural production will make us all value human flaws and analog limitations more, but what if the opposite is true? What if Chappell Roan’s humanity—her need for boundaries, for privacy, her foibles and idiosyncrasies—makes the masses value her less? What if virtual celebrities who never feel compelled to keep the audience at arm’s length for any reason start to become the baseline? What if they simply outcompete the alternatives?

---

---

A smart guy I knew in the industry once told me that his favorite beer is Budweiser because every Bud is exactly as good as the last one. No matter where you are on Earth, you can’t have a bad Budweiser. Every single one is exactly the same level of quality. It’s easy to underrate what a massive accomplishment that is. Fully appreciating the implications can be unintuitive. The idea that the most successful possible artist might be one that doesn’t have flaws and never has a bad moment, for example, is off-putting to me because the whole reason I personally wanted to be an artist is because I thought it would make my flaws more palatable to other people. I saw depressed, angsty loners commanding the adoration of millions and thought to myself “well, if I can make a good enough record, people might like me, too!” If the expectation had always been for me to emulate Budweiser, I probably would have tried something else.

Ultimately, that’s probably why I failed as a live act and career recording artist. I was too hung up on the concept of sincerity. I wanted to be understood as a human being, so I kept putting my flaws front and center. I insisted on trying to sing live instead of playing DJ sets or lip-synching along to pre-recorded tracks. I tried to allow for spontaneity and variation in my technical setup instead of optimizing for consistency and trying to prevent as many technical mishaps as possible. I drank too much before going onstage and asked to hear as little of my vocals in the monitors as possible, thinking that the secret to unlocking a good performance was to get lost in the music, when in reality, the audience would have found calculated, one-dimensional fakery more convincing than whatever I was actually feeling in the moment. I was so caught up in my fantasies about what being an “artist” entailed that I didn’t understand how any of the systems I was interacting with actually worked. Not a problem for a member of the audience, but fatally consequential for whoever’s onstage.

The feel-good explanation for my struggles, of course, is that I just didn’t pay my dues and put in the time necessary to become an accomplished performer, but I’m not sure that’s actually true. Local scenes all over the country were and are packed to the gills with contenders who prioritized those things and never got half as far as I did. I think my problem was that I was more committed to the concept of a recording artist than I was to success. The industry was changing, and I was so hung up on my dream of participating in a bygone incarnation of it that I couldn’t adapt.

At this point in time, even the youngest new artists on the scene generally still grew up in an era where records had value and the people who make them were seen as “artists” rather than entertainers. Chappell Roan talks openly about how it might take her years to make a proper follow-up to her last album, and Addison Rae measures her own output against Madonna’s Ray of Light. The shift in consumer spending from recordings to experiences is still novel enough to feel uncomfortable. What the audience wants today is different from what they expected when they first got into the game. Trying to meet that demand is, by definition, trying to adapt to shifts they couldn’t have foreseen. The artists who struggle with the reality of today’s experience-driven industry came up thinking their life was going to be about selling songs, not elite platinum VIP meet-and-greet packages or luxury-priced branded socks.

The “recording artist,” as this publication has often found occasion to insist, is a relatively recent invention. Music functioned in an entirely different way for the hundreds of thousands of years that human beings existed on Earth prior to the invention of record players and microphones. New technology is what initially made that paradigm possible, and now, new technology is prompting a shift towards something else. A recording was special if it was unique, and so the music industry of the record era valorized eccentricity. The world that’s coming values different things. Consistency. Professionalism. Accessibility. Faces that don’t visibly age or outwardly betray emotion. Nervous systems that can’t be hijacked by the inconvenient complexity of desire. Eyes that don’t close, even to sleep. Lips that don’t ever say “no” for any reason.

Some artists will find ways to adapt and thread the needle—Taylor Swift seems consistently, almost supernaturally able to sprint forward even as the Earth’s tectonic plates break apart and rearrange themselves under her feet—but in the end, the new world is going to eat the old one. Anyone who can headline a tour or sell out an arena probably doesn’t need the rest of us worrying too much about whether or not they’re enjoying themselves, but as Bruce Sterling often says, “whatever happens to musicians happens to everybody.” These artists are confronting a system that punishes human complexity in order to reward inhuman consistency, and that’s a problem we’re all going to be dealing with soon.