By Ken Abdo

The average age of the top touring performers is 52.6 years old, Tim Ingham revealed in a Rolling Stone column recently. His data is based on Pollstar’s midyear tally of the 100 highest grossing acts in the world. Led by 72-year-old Elton John, who grossed $82.6 million between Nov 22, 2018 and May 22, 2019, the top 10 also includes Metallica, with an average age of 55, Fleetwood Mac (72), Kiss (64), TransSiberian Orchestra (56) and Bob Seger (74), among younger turks like Pink (39), Justin Timberlake (38), Ed Sheeran (28) and Travis Scott (28).

The reality of our aging rock stars bring into question the very future of concerts, a topic attorney Ken Abdo has thought about quite a bit, as he lays out in an op-ed written for Variety.

“Rock n’ roll is here to stay/ It will never die”. – Danny & the Juniors, 1958

I was born in the 1950s, along with much of the Baby Boom generation. That decade also birthed rock ‘n’ roll, a then-new music genre that powered electrifying live concerts. In 2019, as some of the earliest rock ‘n’ roll artists are observing 60th career anniversaries, you don’t need a stethoscope to see that the genre is not only long past its prime as the dominant economic force in the music industry, it’s in decline.

Supported by fuzzy math, I believe rock ‘n’ roll will die around 2060.

In the early 2000s, digital recording technologies and channels of distribution (i.e. downloads and then streaming) reshaped the music industry. Before then, rock ‘n’ roll was created by instrument-playing musicians and vocalists whose performances were not enhanced by computer programs and were sold as physical record albums.

Sheeran