Music
In today’s music industry the real money is in live performance – and many of the biggest pop shows are sites of both auteurish experiment and genuinely inspiring spectacle. By Shaad D’Souza.
The power of modern live shows
In pop music, it used to work this way: an artist released an album and then, in order to promote the album, went on tour. Tickets could be as cheap as $20, about the price of the album itself, and shows might be simple band affairs or gaudy spectacles. That last bit hasn’t changed but the dynamic has been inverted. Now artists release albums as an excuse to tour.
There’s no money in album sales or streams, but there is a lot of money in live performance. In part it’s because the demand to see artists live is the highest it’s ever been – so performers can play more and bigger shows – and in part it’s because ticket prices are the highest they’ve ever been. Want to see Beyoncé at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London? That’ll be $460 for floor tickets, thanks. Kesha and the Scissor Sisters at Madison Square Garden in New York City? A resale ticket will set you back $700. If you want to see Lorde or Lady Gaga in Melbourne, a ticket will cost you about $200 – which, compared with everywhere else on the planet, seems totally reasonable.
It’s lucky that a lot of the big, bombastic pop shows touring currently are not only engaging and exciting but also inspired in their staging and production – implicitly accepting that the concert, not the album, is the “thing” now. In June and July, I saw shows by Lana Del Rey, Chappell Roan, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, Charli XCX, The 1975 and Sabrina Carpenter. All felt radically different from one another and all of them suggested that, at its best, the Big Pop Show is not a consolidation effort, or a clichéd kumbaya intended to bring audiences together, as much as a site for auteurish experimentation.
This is perhaps clearest in Del Rey’s show, which is by most metrics one of the boldest and most uncompromising large-scale shows touring. Playing two nights at London’s 90,000-capacity Wembley Stadium, Del Rey did the opposite of what most stars would do in her position. Instead of shoring up her performance with hits and playing for three hours so fans could “get their money’s worth” – a ridiculous, if understandable, demand – Del Rey, who is expected to release a country record later this year, played a set mostly consisting of covers and new material.
Del Rey is a famously fickle performer. She rarely tours according to album cycles and instead puts on variations of the same show over and over again. For years she was prone to being extraordinarily late to stage. At Glastonbury 2023, she was 40 minutes late and had her set cut short, to the chagrin of a massive audience. At her July 4 concert – an auspicious date for any American poet – she was 10 minutes early and seemed to have unlocked some new-found performance power. New tracks such as “Stars Fell Over Alabama” and “57.5” were magnificent: they felt like perfectly modern versions of mid-century folk songs, combining slang words such as “twin” (to describe her husband) and mentions of Spotify and Morgan Wallen with hearty, old-fashioned songwriting. That tension was mirrored by a gorgeous stage design, which featured a large log cabin illuminated by huge projector screens showing grainy footage of skaters and girls dancing. It’s easy to be sceptical of someone like Del Rey attempting a stadium show, but this was gonzo proof that sometimes gaining a bigger audience doesn’t mean you have to compromise.
Olivia Rodrigo’s Glastonbury headline set made it eminently clear she has been taking similar lessons during her rapid rise to fame. Old heads are constantly begging Glastonbury to book real rock headliners again and Rodrigo more than delivered. Her show was forceful and kinetic, a sometimes silly, sometimes snarling display that felt more like watching a big-ticket indie band than the latest pop starlet du jour. Rodrigo’s show is basically just her and a four-piece band – no unnecessary second drummer, no strings, no dancers – and the freedom of that set-up is deeply felt in the performance. She swaggers around with the crack band, covering new songs every night and interacting with the crowd in a way that feels natural. Rather than go bigger, she chose to make the show minimal and maximised her impact.
For her first set of genuinely massive shows, Rodrigo’s friend and collaborator Chappell Roan went the opposite route. Headlining Barcelona’s Primavera Sound festival, she built an entire castle onstage. It had such a fearsome technical set-up that nobody was scheduled before or after her, in order to accommodate how long it took to build and dismantle. Her first headline tour since blowing up last year, Roan didn’t need all the pomp, given how intensely the audience seemed to love her. The crowd was the largest I’ve seen at Primavera and they knew every word to every song, even for unreleased cuts such as “The Subway”. The sense of maximalism didn’t distract from what are, fundamentally, fantastic songs – durable, emotionally resonant modern classics that Roan sells with intense feeling that is sometimes over the top but never ersatz.
Sometimes that emotion is less necessary than pure energy. Such is the case with the shows by Charli XCX and Billie Eilish. Both artists – Charli in particular – put on performances that downright assault in their intensity. Loud and minimal, Charli’s Brat tour is one of the greatest pop sets in years, a conscious paring down of all pop concert convention that still manages to overwhelm the senses and feel engaging, even though Charli is the only performer onstage for the duration. It feels akin to Kanye at his peak – a single artist daring you to get bored, as they torment and titillate you with blasts of harsh noise and aural smut.
I thought of Kanye again when I was watching Eilish’s show. It is performed in the round and the large rectangular stage lights up from below, which means that every seat in the house is captivated. Her music is known for its minimalism and I’ve found it soporific in the past, but watching her leap across the stage between pillars of fire and cascades of cold sparks I realised that it wasn’t the music that was soporific – just its presentation. A great show can make even mid music seem vital.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 19, 2025 as "Avant pop".
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