Bad Weather And Bad Bunny Threaten A Bad Season For Live Music

Heavy rain and extreme heat mixed with ICE raids and a freeze on U.S. tour dates by Bad Bunny and others suggests that the live music biz may be caught in a perfect storm during this all-important summer season.

Michael Stipe’s lyric “Should we talk about the weather? … Should we talk about the government?” resonates more today than when REM’s “Pop Song 89” dropped in 1989, at least when it comes to figuring out the forecast for music fests and live music today.

Should We Talk About the Weather?

July is expected to bring an historic heat wave to the West Coast, after June’s record-setting temperatures rolled across the U.S. from the Midwest to the East Coast and a massive heat wave also hit Western Europe.

Tennessee’s Bonnaroo festival was cancelled for the first time ever in June, while promoters of an EDM festival in St. Louis called Midwest Dreams pulled the plug a week before the opening day in May after a tornado touched down near the site.

If weather cancels a festival or an outdoor show, fans may or may not get a full refund, depending on the policies of the promoter and ticketing company. Bonnaroo issued full refunds even though ticket-holders got to enjoy one full day of the four-day festival before rain and mud swamped it out.

When stormy skies stop the show, cancellation insurance can reimburse promoters for large upfront payments (called “minimum guarantees”), which are paid in-full and in-advance to artists and venues, and may even cover loss of expected food and drink concession profits. But show insurance rates are getting sky high.

“In the 15 years that I have been a concert promoter, the cancelation insurance has gone from just under one percent of my budget to anywhere from four to six percent depending on the loss history in a particular market,” says Danny Hayes, who has been both a top music attorney and festival promoter.

“So Bonnaroo could very likely see a large increase in its its insurance next year as a result of this year’s cancellation,” Hayes says, “and that can cut deeply into a festival’s margin. Maybe you think going from just under one percent to four or five percent of a budget is not that big, but when your margin is 10%-15%, that’s huge.”

Another crapshoot for live music promoters besides the weather is whether politics may untether foreign artists from the U.S. touring circuit.

Should We Talk About The Government?

Bad Bunny (Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio), one of the biggest touring acts today, is side-stepping Stateside stadiums all-together, and has stormed against ICE raids across the US, including on his home island of Puerto Rico.

Coming out of Covid in 2022, Bad Bunny was reportedly the most successful touring act in the world, grossing $393.3 million for the year, easily besting Elton John’s second place finish at $274 million gross that year.

This year the Bunny King will hop onto a 23-date stadium tour with stops in Latin America, Australia, Japan and Europe beginning in November. But first he holds court from July 11 to September 14, 2025 exclusively at the José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum in San Juan, supporting his new album Debí Tirar Más Fotos (I Should Have Taken More Photos), an homage to his beloved Puerto Rico.

He says dates in the States are “unnecessary” for success. But is that right?

“I think quite the opposite,” says Jarred Arfa, head of global music at Independent Artist Group (IAG), which books tours for Billy Joel, Metallica, Neil Young, Elvis Costello, Rod Stewart, 50 Cent and other frontline talent. “The U.S. is still the most lucrative touring market, especially with more acceptance of higher ticket prices than in Europe and other markets.”

The profit margin for artists touring in the U.S. can’t be beat, as venues try harder than their counterparts overseas to attract top acts to their big stages.

“In Europe, for instance, the costs are higher, you have a lot of municipal concert halls and old soccer stadiums that are behind the times in concert economics as far as how they operate, and they just aren’t as flexible or aggressive in seeking talent,” says Arfa. “As an artist you’ll actually make a lot more money touring in the U.S. than you will anywhere else.”

So whether you shout “¡Vive Bad Bunny!” or “¡Maldito Bunny!” you have to admit it’s a brilliant marketing move.

“You can say, ‘Hey, I’m not coming to the U.S. this year.’ But next year, you announce the U.S. tour, and fans are super excited,” says Hayes. “Is the U.S. market necessary in the short run? Maybe not. But you can’t skip the world’s biggest market forever.”

A top troubador can use touring and ticketing tactics as political truncheons if they want to, but it’s tricky.

Some remember when Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam in the mid-1990s refused to work with Ticketmaster in protest of the firm’s fees and domination of the live music market. But the band lost a lawsuit against the ticketing giant and today the promoter of the band’s Dark Matter tour is Live Nation, which merged with Ticketmaster in 2010.

“We had the Ticketmaster thing — didn’t work,” Vedder told the New York Times in 2022. “They made it go away. That was a learning experience. It bruised our muscle of idealism. We were young and naïve and thought you could change things. But just taking on the man and being agitators, it might not be the way.”

Times are different today, with Bad Bunny and other outspoken celebrities livid at Trump’s divisive migrant policy more than Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s live music monopoly.

But the DoJ’s antitrust division is still actively prosecuting Live Nation’s merger, which combines ticketing, tour promotion, artist management, and venue ownership all under one roof. And politicians from both sides of the aisle – led by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D- MN) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) – are seeking to clobber the massive music conglom to capture voters.

Interestingly, Live Nation recently added Richard Grenell, a Trump ally and newly installed president of the Kennedy Center, to its board, which could bode well for Live Nation, and keep ticket prices on the rise.

Goldman Sachs says rising ticket prices are the brightest story of the music business this year. The investment bank’s influential “Music In The Air” report, just released in June, lowered its annual projection for global recorded music revenue by $2.5 billion to $31.4 billion but raised its live music revenue expectation by half a billion dollars over an earlier prediction, from $37.7 billion to $38.2 billion.

The investment bank cites “stronger pricing power,” finding that average ticket prices rose 40% for stadiums and 37% for smaller venues between 2019 and 2024. Live music has “proven to be more recession resilient than other forms of entertainment,” the bank says.

Top artists are riding high on a rising wave of live music revenue, especially in the U.S. While that’s nice work if you can get it, some artists can’t get in, especially if they’re coming from south of the border.

Julión Álvarez’, a Música Mexicana megastar, was unable to fly across the Mexican border the day before a gig at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas on May 24. It was a 50,000 ticket sold out show. His work visa was reportedly cancelled without notice.

While Bad Bunny and other megastars from outside the continental U.S., like Drake and Partynextdoor, have a ticket to ride, they don’t seem to care much.

The Canadian music titans are on tour together in the U.K. and Europe with no confirmed dates in the States for the whole year surprisingly. Some speculate their absence from Stateside stadiums is a political statement. But they haven’t taken a stand publicly, like Bad Bunny who, in a video he posted on Instagram, referred to ICE agents detaining Dominican migrants near San Juan as “m@m@bichos,” a local curse word that Anglo press rather inaccurately translated as “motherf@%kers.”

Colombian superstar Shakira, in a more tranquilo tone than Bunny, expressed dismay about aggressive ICE raids in Los Angeles and canceled concert dates there in June. “Being an immigrant in the U.S. means living in constant fear,” she told the BBC. “And it’s painful to see.”

But even with political storms rolling across the U.S., it’s hard for any world class act to stay away for long. “I bet you dollars to donuts Bad Bunny tours the U.S. next summer,” says Hayes. We can only hope the political weather will be milder then.

Danny Hayes and Jarred Arfa speak with me at more length about the state of live music on my podcast The Music Law Beat.