NON-ENGLISH ACTS REACH 30% OF LIVE NATION'S TOP-50 TOURS

Non-English-speaking artists now account for 30% of Live Nation's biggest tours, but the small venues that develop new acts are closing.

What Berchtold told investors

Live Nation president and chief financial officer Joe Berchtold told investors on September 9 that non-English-speaking artists now account for 30% of the company's top 50 tours, up from 8% before the pandemic.

He was speaking at Goldman Sachs' Communacopia + Technology Conference, in a session hosted by Goldman analyst Stephen Laszczyk. "Pre-COVID, I think 8% of our top 50 tours were by non-English-speaking artists. Today, it's 30%," Berchtold said, in remarks reported by Digital Music News.

He expects that share to keep climbing. It will not be long, he said, before he is telling analysts that most of the company's artists are "not U.S., U.K. English-speaking artists."

The scale behind the percentage

More than half of Live Nation's fans are now in markets outside the United States. The US accounts for 5% of the world's population and still roughly half of the company's business, Berchtold said.

Live Nation reported a record 159 million attendees in 2025 — the first year in its history with more fans outside the United States than inside it. The company has sold more than 155 million tickets so far this year, up 12% year on year, and is on track for roughly 175 million fans in 2026. At an investor day last November it set a longer-term target of 225 million.

Berchtold credited social platforms and streaming services. "There's not an artist out there who's not using the social media platforms, the TikToks, YouTubes, Instagrams" to develop their brands, he said, adding that artists are "using the DSPs to democratize the distribution so you can have fans everywhere."

He named Bad Bunny as the "No. 1 artist post-COVID," selling out stadiums globally, and pointed to K-pop and Latin music as the clearest examples of the shift. He also noted that the "No. 2 genre in Brazil is country music" — an English-language genre thriving in a Portuguese-speaking market, which cuts against a simple reading of the trend.

Berchtold argued the same mechanics now work at city level inside the United States. An artist in a very specific genre, he said, needs only "0.1% of the population in L.A." to be their community, and social platforms let them reach that fraction far more efficiently than before.

Where the buildings are not

The constraint Berchtold described is not demand. It is buildings.

"We look at the top 75 markets, and 47 of the top 75 markets internationally don't have enough modern arena infrastructure," he said. He named Rome, Istanbul and Frankfurt in Europe; Seoul, Tokyo and Manila in Asia; and São Paulo, Rio and Lima in Latin America. "I'm not kind of trying to cherry pick these 47 cities you haven't heard of," he said. "These are big markets that lack the infrastructure."

Live Nation's answer is capital. The company now operates 25 arenas globally, up from five a decade ago. The number of fans it hosts in its own venues has roughly doubled over ten years to around 75 million, with 70% of that increase coming from international markets.

At the November investor day, Jordan Zachary, co-president of US concerts and president of regions, put 48 large venues in the pipeline at a capital cost of around $5.2 billion, more than half of them — 28 — outside the United States. Since the start of 2026 the company has completed arena acquisitions in Santiago, Bangkok, Milan and Buenos Aires, and in August agreed to take a majority stake in three Prague venues including the 20,000-capacity O2 arena, described as its largest investment in central and eastern Europe to date. It is building a 21,000-capacity arena in São Paulo due to open in 2028, and has submitted plans for the 18,500-capacity Lima Music Arena in Santiago de Surco. Ticketmaster is expected to begin selling tickets in Japan around the end of the year.

Music Business Worldwide noted that of the nine cities Berchtold named, only two — São Paulo and Lima — are already on the announced build list.

Whose numbers these are

Every figure above is Live Nation's own, disclosed by its chief financial officer at an investor conference while making the case for several billion dollars of venue spending. They are not an independently audited measure of global touring.

The company has not published how a "top 50 tour" is defined, or whether the measure counts tours, shows or gross receipts. Coverage of the remarks has used "tours" and "shows" interchangeably. The expectation that non-English-speaking artists will pass half is Berchtold's forecast, not a reported result.

The growth figures carry their own qualifiers. Latin America is up 15 times over ten years, Berchtold said, but "it is still 1/10th the level of activity as the U.S." Japan runs at 40% of US activity per capita. Western Europe, he said, "can grow another 25%." His own summary: "I think we are absolutely still in the early innings."

What the arena numbers do not measure

The 47-market gap is a shortage of arenas. It is not a measure of the venues where artists are actually developed, and the evidence from those rooms points the other way.

In the United Kingdom, the Music Venue Trust's Annual Report 2025, published on January 21, recorded 30 grassroots music venues permanently closed during 2025, leaving a sector of 801 venues contributing more than £500 million a year to the economy. Average profit margins across those venues stood at 2.5%, and 53% showed no profit at all in 2025. Changes to national insurance and business rates cost the sector around 6,000 jobs, a 19% contraction in its workforce.

The routing picture is starker than the closure count. MVT reported that 175 UK towns and cities, home to an estimated 25 million people, no longer receive regular touring shows by professional artists — places that still have venues, but no longer have tours. Grassroots venues serve 253 towns and cities; major national promoters use Music Venues Alliance venues in just 32 of them. Fifty-nine per cent of grassroots venues — 475 of them — now operate with no major promoter activity at all. The touring circuit, the report said, contracted during 2025 into a small number of major cities, largely London, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool and Sheffield.

"We have reached the limits of what venues can absorb on margins of 2.5%," said Mark Davyd, MVT's chief executive and founder, at the report's launch. The organisation warned that the retreat is "starving emerging artists of essential development opportunities."

Germany's live sector has reached a similar diagnosis from a different direction. The Live Music Fund, an industry-led solidarity fund backed by the Bundesstiftung LiveKultur, launched on January 1 this year with funding lines for clubs and small-to-mid-sized promoters, independent festivals, and first tours by emerging artists. A fixed €1 contribution on tickets priced at €35 or above is expected to be introduced in the third quarter of 2026, and the first funding calls are expected in 2027. Felix Grädler, a board member of the foundation and the fund's project manager, told Live DMA that live music once worked as a cycle in which success flowed back into the small structures that built careers. "Today, that cycle is broken," he said. "Costs are rising, risks remain local, while economic success is increasingly concentrated at the top."

A LiveKomm survey of German clubs conducted in 2024 found that 43% expected their economic situation to worsen over the following year, and 16% were considering ceasing operations within twelve months.

These are national pictures from two countries, not a global measure, and neither describes Live Nation's own business. But they cover the layer of the industry the arena figures do not.

What happens next

Berchtold said he expects international markets to lead Live Nation's growth in 2027, while adding that the distinction will "start to be an irrelevant statement" as the business becomes global.

In the UK, MVT has said that if voluntary industry action on the £1 arena and stadium ticket levy does not deliver by June 2026, the government should legislate; 8.8% of tickets on sale at that level carried a version of the levy in 2025. In Germany, the Live Music Fund's guidelines and first calls are expected to follow this year and next. All of these are stated expectations, not settled outcomes.

SEVAD'S TAKEAWAY

Language is not the ceiling it used to be. That part is real, and it matters to me — I'm a Jamaican artist building out of Frankfurt.

But read the two stories together, because they landed in the same week. One company is putting $5.2 billion into large venues. In the UK, 175 towns still have venues and no longer get tours.

The arena is not your room. It was never going to be your room.

The rooms that build a career hold two or three hundred people. Those are the ones under pressure.

So don't plan a tour off a map of where the music is popular. Plan it off evidence you can check yourself.

Here is what that looks like this week, and it costs nothing but an evening.

Open your streaming dashboard and write down your top ten cities. Not countries. Cities.

Next to each one, write the name of an actual human being you know there — a promoter, a DJ, a friend with a room, someone who has emailed you back.

Most of those lines will be empty. That is the answer. The city where both columns have something in them is the only city you have evidence for.

One city. One small show. Not a route.

And if no city has both, you have not failed. You have just found out that the next six months are about building contacts in one place, instead of shipping music everywhere and hoping.

Berchtold named Frankfurt on that list of cities without the infrastructure. He meant it as a gap in his business. I live here, and I read it differently — the room I need was never the arena he is talking about.

Your language can travel. Your routing still has to earn it.

Which city outside your home market can you name one real person in?