How is the health of the touring concert market in Europe right now?

Especially in the UK and Europe, it's a good year to be a fan of music. I mean, you can't remove from it the amount of stadium shows, the amount of arena shows, and obviously all the festivals. But when there's that much going on, there is definitely some potential issues there, when we're talking about the level of scheduling issues, for example. We're in a world right now where stadium shows and arena shows are just getting bigger and bigger. At an arena show now, it used to be maybe a bit of a special one-off if the stage was in the centre of the room. Now within a live tour that's almost become the norm in some respects: you'll have the stage at one end, but you'll also have a B stage. And with a bigger production, it means it's a bigger build time and therefore you need more people to build this show, and it's less likely that you're gonna be able to do a very quick turnaround show after show.

One topic that we talked about at ISE last year at the Live Events Stage was how do does the festival market deal when you've got all these A-listers doing their own shows rather than necessarily headlining festivals?

Sustainability is a big topic everywhere. How involved is the touring sector in addressing those concerns?

Sustainability in the touring sector is one of the dominant conversations we have when we speak to production managers. I don't think there's a single tour that isn't considering it, mainly because the artists are pushing for this as well. And that's really how this kind of change happens. You've got companies out there, Reverb is a good example that is on a lot of tours, that are really pushing for it. And this isn't just for the production, it also goes to the audience and how venues deal with things such as waste.

There's been some great headlines as well. The work that Massive Attack and the whole Act 1.5 initiative has done is very interesting in terms of pushing the boundaries of how battery power can be used. The conversation up until that point had been dominated by Coldplay, but now there's someone else. A rising tide raises all ships, right? So these big productions are putting a lot of money into sustainability and are hopefully helping every kind of production make changes here and there.

Various departments in a tour are finding ways to be more sustainable. And often that comes in the form of 'We selected this particular PA, this particular group of lights, because they're lighter, because they take up less space and less space means less trucks.' And that is a consideration that's going into most tours these days, despite the fact everything is getting bigger and bigger, you are finding that they're like, 'No, we went for this solution because it is more sustainable' and it doesn't feel like it's just lip service. People are very invested in this overall mission to make this whole industry more sustainable.

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ISE is the world-renowned annual tech show for the AV and systems integration industry, taking place in Barcelona, 3-6 February 2026. For updates on technologies for live events, including audio, lighting and staging, and to discover more about ISE 2026 as details are released, sign up for updates. 

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