Two things AI can’t replace:
1. Taste
2. Real life human experiences
Concerts, festivals, events, standing in a crowd with other people who came for the same reason. The kind of thing you can’t and don’t want to fully digitize or outsource to a screen.
I think demand for this is going to grow more than most people currently price in. You can already feel it when you’re at shows. People soak it up differently now. There’s a hunger for the real thing that got louder after years of screens and remote everything.
LiveNation ($LYV) is the default business for this. They’re the largest concert promoter in the world, they own Ticketmaster & they sit across venues, promotion + ticketing. In Q2 they did $7.7 billion in revenue, up 9%. Fan attendance is still growing & their machine is running.
Main competitor is AEG. They’re good, but they’re not at the same scale.
The obvious risk is the monopoly story. LiveNation has been under constant pressure for years over Ticketmaster and how tightly they control the stack. There was a DOJ case, a settlement & then a jury still found them liable on the monopoly side in the state cases.
The “live” thesis stands outside the usual AI and software narratives. It’s also one of the few areas where field research is actually fun: you just go to events and talk to people.
I’m not a big fan of being contrarian just for the sake of it. Most of the time the “crowded trade” makes more sense and more $$$ if you buy it right. But here the more contrarian angle looks cleaner. The world is getting more digital & the appetite for the real thing is not going away.
Thanks for reading and for being part of the community.
FJ
