What happened to live albums?

“At Fillmore East”, “Live/Dead”, “Happy Trails”, “At Folsom Prison”, “Kick Out The Jams”, “Under A Blood Red Sky”. But also “À l'Olympia” (Alan Stivell), “Live At The Apollo” (James Brown), “Live” (Barclay James Harvest). Where have records like these gone? Live albums capable, at times, of climbing the charts and, in some cases, of standing as the most representative works in their creators' careers?

Sharp-eyed readers will point to the list of milestones on this very site. Another possible answer: on all the major streaming platforms. True. But that wasn't really the question. The point, rather, was this: are these and other live albums, once legendary, still just as legendary today? And are any new, legendary live albums still coming out? Have any been released in, say, the last twenty years?

The widespread perception, among fans and journalists alike, is that they haven't. That the live album format has for some time now been in decline. In recent times, several publications have tried to investigate the reasons behind the death of the live album (a pun too obvious to resist): among others, Graeme Thomson took a stab at it in The Spectator, as did Matt Mills in Whynow and, in recent weeks, Il Post too. The arguments laid out in these pieces are similar, and so, for that matter - and just as scant - is the data the analyses are based on.

The hard facts are essentially these: at least since the turn of the millennium, live albums have all but vanished from the charts of best-selling albums (and, today, most-streamed ones); top-tier pop stars increasingly rarely release and promote their own live records; on the major streaming platforms, even live albums that were once top sellers now lag behind other titles by the same artist. What's more, the algorithms and editorial playlists through which platforms recommend new music to users seem to penalize live recordings, and playlists entirely devoted to live music, even the well-followed ones, get a fraction of the likes that other successful playlists receive (one of the few quantitative examples cited is the comparison between the roughly 100,000 Spotify likes for “Legendary Live Performances” - since replaced by “Rock Live”, with about 90,000 likes - and the over twelve million likes for “Rock Classics”, which reportedly features no live tracks).

The other side of the coin

Getting hold of aggregate data from Spotify and similar platforms is notoriously difficult, so definitively confirming or disproving this reading through further measurements is anything but simple. That the format has lost popularity compared to the “golden age” of the live album, tied to rock's peak dominance in the Seventies, does nonetheless seem quite plausible.

Seen from a different angle, however, the decline narrative becomes far less convincing. If instead of looking at the total number of streams racked up by live albums, we look at the number of live albums released each year, not only is the data easier to come by, but the trend actually reverses. Much to the chagrin of anyone who took the death of the live album for granted, the conclusion turns out to be the opposite: right now, the format is more widespread than ever - both in absolute and in percentage terms.

How is that possible? The data behind this assessment is fairly composite (the count of live albums comes from Rateyourmusic, that of total albums from Discogs) and some form of bias in it is almost certain, but the upward trend is hard to dispute. The explanation is simple: although they belong to a business followed by an ever-smaller mainstream audience, within independent niches live albums remain an increasingly solid and accessible destination. Compared to the Seventies and Eighties, production costs have plummeted and the technical means to achieve good sound quality are far more accessible.

Following the trend that emerges from the data, it's also possible to identify a few chronological turning points: the first, marking the start of the boom phase, dates back to the arrival of the compact disc (between 1988 and 1990, CD sales overtook those of vinyl and cassette tapes). By drastically cutting production costs, the new technology also gave a boost to a market that had until then remained quite marginal: archival live releases - vintage concerts by legacy bands with devoted fanbases. Around the mid-2000s, we instead see a gradual stabilization: the drop in sales, partly driven by peer-to-peer file sharing, limited the profits tied to new releases and slowed further growth, paving the way for the current streaming-platform era (which has cut per-stream earnings to essentially zero for a great many artists). After a dip in the first half of the 2010s, the share of live albums nonetheless seems to have picked up again and - if the data is to be trusted - appears to have hit its all-time peak right around 2023-2024.

It's far from certain that the data for the very latest years is fully reliable (differing upload speeds for new releases on RYM and Discogs could produce distorting effects), but it is nonetheless possible to put forward some plausible hypotheses for the renewed growth the chart suggests from 2017 onward. These concern, as one would expect, mainly the circuits furthest removed from the mainstream, for which - in most countries - live album production does indeed appear to be less intense than it once was. The fact that streaming revenue is meager holds true, proportionally speaking, for big fish and small fish alike: what changes, though, are the alternative sources artists and labels rely on for their income. While in the mainstream 360 deals - contracts aimed at monetizing every aspect of an artist's brand, including advertising sponsorships, clothing lines and the like - have by now become the norm, in less visible sectors live dates play a far more dominant role in shaping artists' (meager) earnings. Given the need to devote as much time as possible to touring, the option of spacing out new studio releases with live recordings offers a double advantage: it optimizes time and costs, while also showcasing the quality of one's live shows. All while adding just enough novelty to keep the attention of fans and music writers online alive.

A decade of live albums?

Other counter-trends also suggest it's too early to sound the de profundis for live-recorded music.

First of all, compared to the past, a wider variety of live album types are now in circulation (partly because live shows themselves have become more diverse); moreover, live records are noticeably "more live" than before, in the sense that studio reworking — always present, especially in albums from the "golden age" of live rock — now has a far less conspicuous impact than it did a few decades ago.

Trying to compile a list of significant live albums released over the past ten years is a personal exercise, but a useful one for taking stock of just how rich the current landscape is: among the possible candidates are the countless full-performance releases from King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard; live album-compilations that work as career-spanning best ofs for the artists involved (examples include "L-1ve" by Haken, "Live" by Odezenne, and, to some extent, the reinterpretations carried out by Kate Bush on "Before The Dawn", released under the name KT Fellowship); or, on the flip side, live versions of albums beloved by fans, such as "Carrie & Lowell" by Sufjan Stevens, "Illmatic" by NAS, "Music For People In Trouble" by Susanne Sundfør, "Seventeen Going Under" by Sam Fender, "3-D: The Catalogue" by Kraftwerk, or "Lamomali Airlines", an expanded rendition of the music from the French-Malian project by -M-, Toumani Diabaté, Sidiki Diabaté and Fatoumata Diawara.

Then there are live recordings of one-off events, such as the two "Family Dinner" records by Snarky Puppy (featuring guests Knower, Laura Mvula, Jacob Collier, David Crosby and others), or the sessions recorded for the New York label Audiotree (by Foxing and Crying, by Mitski, by Caspian, by Covet, by Kneebody…), or again, documents of projects that only exist in live form: take "Jalitah" by Paolo Angeli and IOSONOUNCANE, "Live At Bush Hall" by Black Country, New Road, or "Metropolis" by math/prog rockers Physics House Band.

Among the various formats that have taken hold over the years, one that has carved out a special place for itself is the acoustic (and, in some cases, orchestral) transposition of electric or electronic repertoires. Much of this format's prestige undoubtedly stems from the "Mtv Unplugged" series, launched in the late 1980s and turned into legend by Nirvana's famous "Unplugged In New York" (), released posthumously in 1994 and — naturally — documented on video as well. Over time the practice has become firmly established, even earning its own entry on Urban Dictionary: acousticize. Among the artists who have tried their hand at it in recent years, to considerable acclaim from fans, are bands with metal roots such as Katatonia ("Sanctitude", 2015) and Anathema ("A Sort Of Homecoming", 2015), but also stomp-rockers Bastille (fittingly, with an "Mtv Unplugged" of their own in 2017) and even nu-gazers DIIV ("Live At The Murmrr Theatre", 2022).

"Moratorium (Broadcasts From the Interruption)" by electro-metalcore act Enter Shikari presents the band's songs in an effective semi-acoustic rendition, and marks out yet another subcategory: that of the live at home recordings made during the lockdown period, which also include releases by All Them Witches, Deafheaven and Fleet Foxes. Indirectly linked to this same group is also one of the most-streamed live albums of recent times, "Live From Joshua Tree" by Australia's Rüfüs Du Sol, whose popularity grew enormously thanks precisely to the solo house performance recorded in the middle of the Californian desert in late 2019 and uploaded to YouTube in early 2020 — right as the pandemic was starting to hit the Western world.

Unlike many celebrated historic live albums, a good number of these new releases feature no significant overdubs: the sound is not identical (thankfully) to what comes out of the mixing desk during the actual performance, but the studio editing process now involves far subtler intervention than it once did. The legendary aura surrounding the sound of "Live At Leeds" by The Who, "Stop Making Sense" by Talking Heads, "It's Alive" by Ramones, "Frampton Comes Alive!", and "Unleashed In The East" by Judas Priest also owes a lot to the massive amount of overdubbing and manipulation applied to the source material, aimed at masking performance mistakes and technical glitches in the recording and, more generally, giving the sound extra polish. An extreme, but in its own way emblematic, case is "Alive!" by Kiss, which at the time became the band's first album to reach the US top ten: after long denying any tampering, in 2003 the band members admitted that most of the tracks had been extensively re-recorded in the studio (according to sound engineer Eddie Kramer, only the drums required no fixing).

Even today, releasing live albums requires corrections, but these are generally carried out in a more "surgical" way: if a note sounds off, engineers look for a similar one elsewhere in the performance and swap it in using audio editing software. Thanks to multitracking, a slightly off-pitch vocal line can be fixed in post-production without having to re-record it from scratch, and the availability of effective audio filters makes it possible to clean up the sound or emphasize its spatiality in a targeted way, without heavily altering the tone or dynamics.

New horizons, new life

As shown by the cases of Rüfüs Du Sol and the well-known Mtv Unplugged, the interest of a broad segment of the audience in live recordings is also evidenced by the remarkable success that concert footage enjoys on video streaming platforms: Taylor Swift's most-streamed live track on Spotify has 60 million plays (a huge number, but several orders of magnitude below her most-streamed songs overall), yet her 2019 American Music Awards performance has been viewed 109 million times on YouTube, and her Tiny Desk Concert has 22 million views — more than the combined streams, across every platform that hosts them, of most of her individual live tracks.

Similar situations can be found not only with other chart-toppers such as Ed Sheeran, Ariana Grande and Coldplay, but also with commercially less prominent artists: the Tiny Desk Concerts by Tash Sultana, GoGo Penguin, Chromeo, Khruangbin, IDLES and alt-J have considerably more views than the plays their respective live albums get on Spotify, while for others (for instance, War On Drugs, Tame Impala, King Krule) the numbers are roughly on a par.

While these facts partly back up those who see the live album format as inevitably in decline (after all, anyone today can watch beautifully recorded performances of their favorite artists for free — so why should they settle for a live album?), the same observations — and indeed the very existence of initiatives like Tiny Desk Concert and Live on KEXP — also confirm just how attentive fans remain to live music recordings, with demand simply adapting to the available tools and spreading across different channels. Assessing the fate of live music purely through the lens of the live album format is therefore reductive.

Be that as it may, even within the sprawling landscape of videos, live streams, tour documentaries and the like, live albums retain a role of their own, despite (or perhaps precisely because of) the less immersive nature of the experience they offer, which fits easily alongside other activities. In Brazil, the market shows a strong appetite for live music recordings: one of the most successful bands of recent years, Os Barões da Pisadinha, gets its best streaming numbers precisely from its many ao vivo records, and a similar pattern is common for other artists too. Also very recent is the agreement between the BBC and Glastonbury festival to release digital live albums of the June 2024 streamed performances by artists such as Dua Lipa, Little Simz, The Streets, James Blake, Fontaines D.C., The National, Justice, Idles, Jessie Ware and many others.

All told, live albums certainly no longer represent the megabusiness that characterized the Seventies (whose "long tail" partly carried over into subsequent decades as well), but the reinvention of the format is a process that is especially active right now, and it's producing a multiplicity of outcomes, not all pointing in the same direction. We may never again see a live album reach the top of the charts (as happened in the United States with Johnny Cash and Donna Summer, Bruce Springsteen and Alicia Keys), but who knows: country singer-songwriter Kenny Chesney hit exactly that milestone in 2017.

By contrast, the amount of excellent-quality live recordings is greater than it's ever been, and it's growing faster than ever. Most releases of this kind will only reach those who closely follow the artists involved or are devoted fans of the specific scene they operate in, but it's still worth resisting misleading oversimplifications: the situation is interesting precisely because it's fluid and complex, and judging the vitality of the format solely by chart positions is a trivialization that conceals far more than it reveals. Down with algorithmic laziness and the "things just aren't what they used to be" mindset: long live the live album!

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