Music's money is fleeing streamingPeople Are Rejecting Screens—and Returning to Communal Events

An Australian DJ fills a stadium with 60,000 people while streaming revenue collapses; the music business is turning back toward live shows.

A century ago the historian Oswald Spengler predicted people would eventually grow tired of machines and go back to simpler, communal things. His phrase was escaping 'the pressure of soulless facts' — put plainly, going outside and having fun again.

60,000 people and one DJ

Dom Dolla, an Australian DJ, played Sydney to a crowd of 40,000. The press found that hard to believe. A few months later his audience had grown by half again, and his US tour dates sold out well in advance.

There is one person on stage, barely visible and barely moving. The crowd does not care — they feed off each other, and that is the point. Some will say the audience must be on something. But jazz barely existed without the drinks, and Woodstock had more drugs than a pharmacy. Group rituals have always involved altered states.

The money moved back to the room

Analyst Joey Politano plotted it: income from streaming keeps falling with no sign of a rebound, while concert tickets take a growing share of consumer spending. An industry that embraced digital distribution is now walking backwards.

Which shows how badly the major labels played it. They dismantled the financial structure that paid for recordings. German has a word for that — Nestbeschmutzer, roughly, fouling your own nest.

Loneliness and isolation cannot last. People have to leave their bedrooms, or the body survives and the soul does not. Sixty thousand people in a stadium for one DJ is what that looks like.