Digital Music News is reporting that concert attendance is declining. I really wouldn’t be able to tell since every time I have bought some ‘hot’ ticket, the thing sold out in a few seconds, there were even cases when I wasn’t able to buy a ticket even though I was in front of my computer the second the event went on sale,.. you all have experienced this!

But according to them, a breakdown of concert attendance from Live Nation shows ‘a steady decrease in attendance over the years’. They point out the fact that it is very hard to miss a concert these days, with the out-pouring of information coming from the internet; every time one of your favorite band comes in town, you get email alerts, a notification from Songkick, Facebook,…etc but nevertheless Live Nations’ attendance has dropped 10.4 % since 2007. Curiously, according to the graph provided, the international attendance has dropped more dramatically than the North America attendance, so how do you explain all these super crowded summer festivals all over Europe?

Another 2010 study from Edison Research had already found that ‘12-to-24 year-olds are going to just 0.9 concerts per year on average, down from 2.1 in 2000’ , which represented a 57% drop!

So what’s happening? Too many concerts on the market, too many options which actually turn people off? Are people watching more concerts online? Are concert tickets too expensive in these tough economy times? I would boycott these Ticketbastards as much as possible, but what do you do when you want to get a ticket for Fiona Apple for example?

Live shows are bread and butter for bands which are hardly making money from selling music now, so if concert attendance is dropping too, it is very worrisome for the future of music.