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Goldman Sachs hails ‘insatiable demand’ for live

The live music market will be worth $67.1bn in net revenue by 2035, according to the investment bank's latest Music in the Air report

By Lisa Henderson on 04 Jun 2025

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The live music industry is continuing to outpace the record business amid an “insatiable consumer demand” for concerts, according to Goldman Sachs’ Music in the Air 2025 report.

In the 91-page research paper, released yesterday (June 3), the investment bank and research firm lowered its global music market forecasts but has tipped live to “remain an attractive market with a solid growth outlook” for the next decade.

For 2025, the bank has actually upped its estimate for the live music market, from $37.7 billion to $38.2bn. Analysts have forecast global music industry revenue growth to “reaccelerate” to +7.7% year-on-year this year (+8.3% prior), mainly driven by an “acceleration in live music” (+10.0% yoy vs. +7.5% prior).

A slight improvement is also expected in recorded music growth, alongside a slowdown in publishing growth.

“The live music industry should benefit from an increasing supply of diverse and popular artists touring over the next decade,” reads the report.

“In our view, the key drivers of increasing artist supply will be: stronger financial incentives to tour as tours make up a higher percentage of artist income, and greater incentive (and investment) from record labels to promote new talent on a global touring stage, which helps build artists’ initial appeal into long-term global brands that will drive consumption of their music for a long time,” it continues.

“Artist supply expansion has been supported by insatiable consumer demand for live music, which we expect to continue to grow over the next decade”

“We believe these financial incentives for touring, which can be explained by the decline in album sales in the 2000s and the less lucrative streaming business model that replaced it, will persist even as earnings from streaming music revenues grow.”

Across recorded music, publishing and live, the report drops the global music market’s 2025-2030 CAGR forecasts to +6.8% (+7.5% prior) and introduces its 2031-2035 CAGR forecast of +4.8%. This still implies that the market will reach nearly $200bn (net revenue $141bn) in 2035 – nearly doubling versus 2024 levels ($105bn).

It is projected the $141bn net revenue will break down as $55bn for recorded music, $18.9bn for publishing and $67.1bn for live music.

“Artist supply expansion has been supported by insatiable consumer demand for live music, which we expect to continue to grow over the next decade, driven by supportive demographic and consumer trends and the increased awareness of (and social value attributable to) live events brought about by streaming and social media.”

It adds: “We expect live music to remain an attractive market with a solid growth outlook, underpinned by the growing structural supply tailwinds that will be met by increased demand for experiences, particularly among Gen Z and Millennials.”

The report predicts that a “strong stadium business” will drive an improvement in overall live music market growth in 2025 to 10%

The report predicts that a “strong stadium business” will drive an improvement in overall live music market growth to 10%, with a “robust momentum” for concerts despite some uncertainty about the future state of the overall economy.

This is a marked improvement on 2024 when the live music industry grew 4% year on year (a deceleration from 25% in 2023) – though the bank rationalises this as a “normalisation of the post-Covid rebound and some reduction in stadium supply in Europe from the Paris Olympics and the Euro football tournament in the summer”.

The year-on-year improvement from 2024 to 2025 leads Goldman Sachs to believe that demand for live events “has structurally increased on a global basis coming out of the pandemic, and is less cyclical compared to other types of consumer discretionary categories”.

It continues: “Despite pressures on consumer wallets from inflation, higher rates and a volatile tariff backdrop in the last 12-24 months, which is when fans would have started saving for/planning to buy tickets for 2025, demand for tickets persists.”

Research for the report was conducted by Lisa Yang, MD, head of European media and internet research, along with fellow Goldman Sachs analysts.

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