Rich by association

Did the number go up for you, or just near you?

It is the question underneath every music economy story, and almost nobody asks it out loud. The clearest place to see why is a stretch of coastline in Southern California where, for three decades, the answer was hiding in plain sight on a city budget line.

Thirty-three summers

The Twilight Concert Series brought free beachside shows to the Santa Monica Pier for 33 years, drawing crowds reported at 30,000 to 40,000 people a week. It was, by any cultural measure, an enormous success.

Then the arithmetic arrived. Public safety spending went from $50,000 in 2013 to nearly $1 million in 2016 — a 1,900% increase — while attendance over the same period rose around 25%. The 2016 fire and police bill came to $950,000 for the season. The city was staffing for 30,000 attendees per event when actual turnout was typically closer to 10,000. The 2017 season went over budget by nearly $400,000, and the schedule was cut from ten performances to eight.

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel — Snapchat was a presenting sponsor — turned up at the council meeting and offered $1 million out of his own company's pocket to cover the policing. The council still voted to limit attendance to the pier deck, schedule no more than six events starting after Labor Day, and cap public safety costs at $400,000.

The number nobody ever ran

Here is the detail that reframes everything. A local columnist writing in favour of the concerts had to build his economic case from scratch: if 10% of attendees came back and spent an additional $150 in local restaurants and theatres, that would be about $3.6 million a year. Then he admitted he had not been able to find out whether a study had ever been done to track the dollars generated — but he was "pretty sure it's a big number."

Thirty-three years. The costs were measured to the dollar, itemised, and presented to a council. The benefit was never measured once.

This is not an accounting oversight. It is the entire mechanism. When only one side of a ledger is legible, the decision is made before the meeting starts.

"The Pier is iconic now"

The reasoning offered for scaling the series back is the most revealing sentence in this story. A councilmember explained that the Pier itself is now one of the most popular and iconic destinations in Southern California, and that despite affection for the summer concerts, it had come time to consider whether they remained responsibly appropriate.

The Pier is iconic now — therefore the concerts are no longer necessary.

Read it twice. The concerts spent three decades helping make the Pier a destination. The moment that succeeded, the thing that did the work became expendable.

Santa Monica is not a distressed region reaching for culture to save itself. It is some of the most valuable coastal real estate in America. The music was never needed to create economic interest, because the property already had it. Except the music is a substantial part of why it had it.

The Twilight Concert Series was the research and development that built the brand. The real estate captured the return. On the city's books the concerts were a cost line; the Pier's iconic status is an asset. Those two facts sit on different balance sheets, and only one of them keeps paying.

The city got rich by association with its own concert series — then discovered it no longer needed to pay for the association.

This is not a Santa Monica problem

Once you see the structure, it appears at every scale in the music economy.

Bonnaroo turns a rural Tennessee town of roughly 12,000 residents into a temporary city of more than 80,000. A 2023 study estimated it injected $339 million into the Tennessee economy, with over $50 million annually for Coffee County alone. When extreme weather cancelled it in 2025, the loss was immediate and widespread. The Michigan Journal of Economics asked the obvious question: what happens when a local economy is engineered to depend on something that exists for only a few days a year?

And the impact numbers deserve the same scrutiny Santa Monica's costs received. Analysts note a rural festival market might support a multiplier of 1.4, while generic statewide multipliers applied without calibration push the figure to 2.5 or higher — producing estimates that significantly exceed what the regional economy can actually support. Promoters often estimate out-of-region attendance at 60–80%, and that input drives the headline. Firefly's widely reported $68 million impact came from a study commissioned by a partnership between the speedway, the promoter, and the state tourism office.

Note the symmetry with Santa Monica. There, the city staffed for 30,000 when 10,000 showed up, and the inflated number killed the concerts. In a distressed region, an inflated attendance number justifies the subsidy. Same unreliable figure, opposite direction, opposite outcome — and in both cases it decides the fate of the music.

The analysts also identify the variable that actually determines the result: the multiplier works when dollars circulate through locally owned businesses rather than large national vendors who remit revenue out of the region, because the local ownership structure of event-serving businesses consistently shapes the real return on community investment.

Ownership. Written by an economist, in the technical language of impact analysis.

What Coachella actually pays

Headliners take $4 million to $10 million for two weekends. Justin Bieber's 2026 fee was $10 million — the highest in the festival's history, negotiated directly with promoter Goldenvoice. Billboard's senior director of live music puts the standard at $5 million per weekend. Beyoncé took $8 million in 2018. At the bottom of the poster, emerging acts on smaller stages make as little as $10,000 to $15,000.

One artist's fee from Goldenvoice was $70,000. She lost money and knew she would before agreeing — telling a reporter she had to spend at least $300,000 of her own money to make the set look good, and wasn't getting paid half of that to perform. Lower-tier artists face a $50,000 marketing minimum and $30,000 in production. An emerging act in the Mojave tent at 2:30 in the afternoon might take home $15,000, then spend ten times that.

Meanwhile Coachella generates an estimated $114 million in annual revenue. Big Sean once observed that he played to the same crowd size as headliner Harry Styles, "except he got paid way, way, way, way more than me."

So the emerging artist is paying $300,000 out of pocket for proximity to a $114 million event. That is the literal purchase of association.

The lift belongs to someone else

Then there is the thing everyone actually plays for. The Coachella effect can increase an artist's Spotify streams by 30% or more, and raise touring booking fees by 50% to 100% in the months afterward.

The artist performs. The streams jump 30%. And that money flows to whoever owns the masters — which, for most of the lineup, means Sony, Universal, or Warner.

The artist generated the lift. The artist does not own the lift.

It is the Pier, at human scale. The performance creates the value; the title holder banks it.

Except once. Beyoncé took her $8 million in 2018 — and she had the show filmed, and the rights then sold to Netflix. Same stage, same weekend, same promoter. Everyone else sold a night. She created an asset. She is the only figure in this entire story who did not get rich by association, and the mechanism was not fame or leverage. It was ownership.

The market grew. Did the region?

IFPI reports global recorded music revenues grew 6.4% in 2025, with paid streaming now 52.4% of the total across 837 million subscription accounts. The regional picture is sharper. In 2024, MENA grew 22.8%, Sub-Saharan Africa grew 22.6% — surpassing $100 million in revenue for the first time — and Latin America grew 22.5% in its fifteenth consecutive year of growth. The United States managed 2.2%.

IFPI's reading: the data demonstrate the importance of investment in local talent to secure continued growth, alongside harmonised global copyright frameworks that support such investment.

Now notice what is being measured. IFPI counts revenue accruing to record companies. It does not count whether a region got richer. For a trade body representing the majors, those are assumed to be the same question. They are not — which is exactly the assumption Santa Monica's budget made in reverse.

Think of a mining town. A company extracts $100 million of ore a year, and you can truthfully report the region produces $100 million annually. But how much richer are the residents? The wage bill. Maybe $15 million. The rest is profit, and profit goes to whoever holds title, headquartered somewhere else. The region hosts the activity. It does not own it.

When Sub-Saharan Africa crosses $100 million, that is real activity really happening there. But it measures money passing through, not wealth accumulating in. If the masters are owned in New York, London and Tokyo, the artists received the wage bill and the remainder left.

The market grew. Whether the region grew is a different number, and nobody publishes it — for the same reason nobody in Santa Monica ever ran the benefit study.

A fee is not an asset

Every level runs the same play.

The emerging artist spends $300,000 for proximity to a $114 million event. The region hosts a $339 million weekend and keeps the wage bill. The streaming lift from a career-defining set flows to a rights holder in another country. And a city subsidises 33 years of free concerts, hands the accumulated brand value to the property owners, and then cuts the concerts on the grounds that the property is now valuable.

None of these people are being cheated. Every one of them was paid, at an agreed price, for a service rendered. What none of them own is the thing that keeps paying afterward.

That is the whole distinction — between a fee and an asset. Beyoncé understood it: same show as everyone else, but she kept the tape.

It is also the entire argument for the royalty bond. A label advance and a bond both put money in your hand today. Only one of them leaves you owning the thing that generated it.

Rich by association is what happens when the number goes up near you.

Coachella's organisers do not make payment paperwork public; figures are as consistently reported by Billboard, Rolling Stone and the trades. Santa Monica figures from city financial reports as analysed by Santa Monica Next and reported by LA Weekly, LAist and the Santa Monica Daily Press. Festival impact figures as published in the studies cited. IFPI data from the Global Music Report 2025 and 2026.