2020 was a real showstopper for concerts
Music fans were denied seeing their favourite artists in concert halls and venues for most of the year
Approaching 2021 with a healthy dose of cynicism seems sensible after one of the weirdest years most of us have ever experienced.
Every bit of good news seems balanced out by an equal number of negative reports. Safe to say, there is a lot of grey area to navigate moving forward. And that includes in the arena of entertainment.
Perhaps no artist better encapsulated the win/lose aspects of this pandemic year than The Weeknd, who picked up armfuls of American Music Awards bandaged up like a mummy complete with the black eye and blood look he sports in the Blinding Lights video. The Toronto artist's five wins for his excellent After Hours album marked a career high during a difficult time. For a followup, he was snubbed by the Grammys. You win, you lose. How 2020 is that?
Actually, moving forward might not even be the best way to describe the new year.
Anyone holding tickets for the many major arts and cultural events postponed in 2020 knows that the year that was — or at least a lot of it — is coming in 2021. Now that the dates are being announced for rescheduled tours and such, calendars are filling up fast. All of those new dates are being met by the millions of ticket holders who have been holding on to their receipts with tentative cheers. Everyone has been burned enough by now that they know better than to approach any sort of public gathering with a sense of certainty.
Megastar Celine Dion giving a thumbs-up during a Montreal date in February shortly before her massive Courage World Tour was postponed perfectly captures what fans want to see.
To be in an arena watching your favourite artist onstage and everything going smoothly isn't too much to ask. Yet no one has the slightest idea about how such arena events are going to take place at the moment. Regardless, Dion will be back on the road beginning Aug. 16 when the Courage tour rolls into Winnipeg's Bell MTS Place. The pair of Rogers Arena shows in Vancouver are scheduled for Aug. 28-29. More fingers crossed than thumbs up on that.
Dion was one of many major artists who were returning to global performances in 2020 after being away from touring for some time.
While her time away from touring had nothing to do with retiring from performing, many other legends of long ago were actually talking seriously about hanging up their guitars after one last goaround the globe.
One of those was legendary heavy-metal howler Ozzy Osbourne, who postponed his No More Tours 2 — the Black Sabbath frontman's second farewell tour — due to having to undergo a medical procedure in Switzerland in April. Coming at the same time as the pandemic shutdown did, Sharon Osbourne confirmed that her hubby's tour would resume in 2022.
Since that time, Osbourne's 12th solo release, Ordinary Man, debuted at No. 3 on the U.S. and U.K. charts, yielded a group of hot singles and scored the best reviews of his long career in decades. That still didn't prepare anyone for seeing the British singer gracing the cover of the Jan/Feb 2021 edition of GQ Magazine receiving a lifetime achievement recognition. Past practices being what they are, Ozzy won't retire. On Dec. 15, Sharon Osbourne tested positive for COVID-19 and is recuperating apart from her husband. The 2020 win/ lose strikes again.
To say that the detrimental effect of the pandemic on all live performances was profound is a gross understatement.
Industry titan Live Nation Entertainment saw a 95 per cent drop in revenues in its third quarter. It goes without saying that the smaller, independent promoters took an even harder hit. Everyone from artists to all levels of employees involved in staging live events are in dire straits as the new year begins.
A recent report commissioned on behalf of the Canadian Independent Music Association lists 2,000 full-time equivalent jobs lost in six months, a nearly 50 per cent decline in revenues for indie sound, recording and publishing firms and a devastating drop in live-sector income of almost 80 per cent. Ticketed live streams will never recover those losses.
So where were people spending their hard-earned entertainment dollars, if they had any?
Look no further than the explosion in revenues for streaming services, which had an incredible year that looks likely to continue. Services such as Netflix, Disney+ and others saw ridiculous growth. A Comparitech.com story noted that Netflix added 16 million subscribers from January to March 2020. Amazon Prime was right behind with 150 million members. We all know that Disney+ won't stay behind that pack for long. Heck, the service's show the Mandalorian yielded up Baby Yoda, perhaps the most dominant face of COVID-19. It's so green and cute.
Streaming services' exploding revenues didn't just come from Star Wars spinoffs and manifold tween dramas ranging from the excellent Sex Education to the many tedious supernatural secondary school series clogging up the web, ranging from the Order to the October Faction or even The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina's final season. Massive gains were made by music streaming sites from Spotify to Apple Music and others. Moving your art online — from TikTok ditties to regular jams on your YouTube station — is here to stay, and you can expect a reckoning down the road in terms of who is making what out of all of the above.
While the 2020 lockdown did enormous damage to arts and culture across the planet, it also put artists in the position of having enforced time to create — and many did.
Veteran acts ranging from Bruce Springsteen to the Rolling Stones and Kylie Minogue seemed to draw inspiration from their situations and offered up some of the best work of their careers. It was also the year that female and non-binary artists assumed the ascendancy as making the most exciting and vital music coming out, whether it was Chloe x Halle's Ungodly Hour and Haim's Women in Music Pt. III or Sault's excellent Untitled (Black Is) and Untitled (Rise) or Yves Tumor's wonderful Heaven to a Tortured Mind.
Yet it was Taylor Swift who may have nailed both the prolific and predictive aspects of the past 12 months with her double shot of albums, Folklore and Evermore. Not only did they mark some of the best work of her starred career, the cover for Evermore was a shot of the back of her head looking toward an unfocused stand of trees in the distance. The message it conveyed was straight-up “anything more interesting over there, let's go see.”