As Taylor Swift tops $1bn in tour revenue, musicians playing smaller venues are facing pitiful fees and frequent losses. Should the state step in to save our live music scene?

When you see a band playing to thousands of fans in a sun-drenched festival field, signing a record deal with a major label or playing endlessly from the airwaves, it’s easy to conjure an image of success that comes with some serious cash to boot – particularly when Taylor Swift has broken $1bn in revenue for her current Eras tour. But looks can be deceiving. “I don’t blame the public for seeing a band playing to 2,000 people and thinking they’re minted,” says artist manager Dan Potts. “But the reality is quite different.”

Post-Covid there has been significant focus on grassroots music venues as they struggle to stay open. There’s been less focus on the actual ability of artists to tour these venues. David Martin, chief executive officer of the Featured Artists Coalition (FAC), says we’re in a “cost-of-touring crisis”. Pretty much every cost attached to touring – van hire, crew, travel, accommodation, food and drink – has gone up, while fees and audiences often have not. “[Playing] live is becoming financially unsustainable for many artists,” he says. “Artists are seeing [playing] live as a loss leader now. That’s if they can even afford to make it work in the first place.”

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After the disruptions of Covid, director David Pickard has managed to balance innovation with tradition in his final year of programming the festival

David Pickard’s nine years in charge of the BBC Proms , one of the most enviable jobs classical music has to offer, have certainly not always gone as smoothly as he might have hoped. If the consequences of Brexit and the difficulties it has created for musicians wanting to perform and tour in Britain were not enough to work around, then the havoc that Covid restrictions inflicted on the 2020 and 2021 seasons made nonsense of many carefully laid plans.

Pickard’s programming has sometimes seemed shaped more by a concern to ensure that every politically correct box was ticked than by determination to come up with a summer season that was as adventurous and attractive as an organisation with BBC’s resources should have no problems in assembling. But first impressions of the new season, his last in charge, suggest that Pickard might finally have got close to achieving a decent balance between all the elements and the different genres that are now expected in a full Proms season.

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The Tortured Poets Department depicts a spell of post-breakup mania against the perfect backdrop of the Eras tour – a thrillingly immature reality undermined by safe music

As The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD) finally sees its official release, the intention behind the title remains as enigmatic as it was when Taylor Swift announced it two months ago. The title track seems to mock one such tortured poet who carts a typewriter around and likens the budding couple to Patti Smith and Dylan Thomas. “We’re modern idiots,” Swift laughs. The album’s aesthetic wallows in anguish and Swift’s liner notes and social media captions are littered with self-consciously poetic proclamations. And the erratic period captured in the lyrics couldn’t be further from a life of cloistered studiousness.

TTPD depicts a manic phase in Swift’s life last year, the reality behind the perfect stagecraft of the Eras tour. Wild-eyed from what sounds like the slow dissolution of a six-year relationship, she lunged at a once-forbidden paramour with a taste for dissolution, a foul mouth and a well-founded bad reputation. The latter, she makes clear as she sings repeatedly about flouting paternalistic and public censure, was a central part of the attraction: “He was chaos, he was revelry,” Swift sings on But Daddy (evidently about the 1975’s Matty Healy).

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After slogging through poverty, indifference and Hannah Montana impersonations, the US singer is an award-winning sensation and selling out a UK tour. She explains why her genre is going mainstream like never before

You get the sense the country music establishment really had no choice but to embrace Lainey Wilson: that she wasn’t going anywhere until they did. When the singer-songwriter arrived in Nashville in 2011, she parked her 20-foot bumper pull trailer on a studio’s lawn and anchored it with rocks. Then 19, she had lived country music all her life. But Nashville is what they call a “10-year town”, rarely a place of instant hits and TikTok fame. Wilson had to do it the old-fashioned way: a decade of graft, rejection, false starts, handing out CDs in the streets, gigs, tours and playing to the same crowds over and over.

Gradually, things started to click (a publishing deal in 2017), then gather momentum (six No 1s on country radio since 2021), then snowball (a record-breaking nine nominations at the 2023 CMA awards, winning five), culminating in February when her 2022 album, Bell Bottom Country , won this year’s Grammy for country album of the year . Wilson is now one of the hottest properties in country music. An overnight sensation 11 years in the making, as she puts it. “It feels great,” says Wilson, 31, over video call, with her irresistible Louisiana twang, “because it makes me feel like maybe I wasn’t as crazy as a lot of people thought I was. Like, I told ya!”

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James McCartney’s acoustic ballad Primrose Hill, co-written with Sean Ono Lennon, was drawn from childhood vision in Scotland

The most famous songwriting credit in history, Lennon-McCartney, has been resurrected – though for a song written by the Beatles’ sons.

Primrose Hill, a single by Paul McCartney’s son James, has been co-written with Sean Ono Lennon: an acoustic ballad with a shuffling backbeat and ruminative guitar soloing.

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‘In the 70s and 80s, you’d regularly see images of women in bikinis draped over car bonnets. I wanted to flip that – and see how a male photographer would feel if he had to lie over a car in a thong’

We’d released five lo-fi albums that had got us noticed in NME and Sounds, but we were yet to be signed to a record label. You’re Gorgeous was one of around 400 demos I’d recorded on a four-track over five years on the dole in Nottingham. I lived above the Victoria Centre and they decided to replace all the windows, which took a year, so I was trying to record while people were pulling out windows.

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Empire Polo Club, Indio, California

Festival headliner delivered an A-game set, ignoring some of her mainstream hits yet bringing enough energy to power what some have called a middling year

Doja Cat took the Coachella mainstage as the last official act to perform on Sunday’s bill, becoming the first female rapper to headline the festival. (She’s also only the second Black woman to do so, after Beyoncé in 2018) Her closer rounded out a Sunday showcase of powerhouse female performers such as Renée Rapp and Kesha duetting the recession banger TiK ToK – changing the opening line to “wake up in the morning saying fuck P Diddy” – and Victoria Monet grinding through a slick and ultra-sexy set, at one point receiving artfully-simulated oral sex from a background dancer.

It would be diplomatic to say that Doja maintains a distant relationship with her fans, who call themselves kittenz, though their fave does not sanction this moniker. Doja’s told those who engage in parasocial relationships with the idea of her to “get off your phone and get a job” and “rethink everything” about their lives. Such boundary-setting has cost her some Instagram followers – around 300,000, to be exact, after going off on them in a social media tirade – but she could care less. “I feel free,” she wrote in an Instagram story after the snafu last year.

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The rapper would sing Bob Marley going to school and gets the party started with Black Eyed Peas, but which pop classic is he ashamed to admit liking?

The first song I remember hearing
I don’t know if it’s the first song I remember hearing, but the first song I remember singing was No Woman, No Cry by Bob Marley . I grew up in Senegal and I would sing it on my way to and from school.

The song I stream the most
I’m pretty versatile these days but I would probably say Costa Titch by Big Flexa featuring C’buda M, Alfa Kat, Banaba Des, Sdida & Man T.

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(Anti-)
The American multi-instrumentalist combines a wide range of Black musical traditions on her beautifully crafted fifth solo album

Multi-instrumentalist Leyla McCalla was exploring the Black legacies of country music and Americana long before Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter made the idea mainstream. As a member of the group Our Native Daughters, she has highlighted the presence of Black female banjo players, while her work with the Carolina Chocolate Drops explored the Black songbook for strings.

In her solo output, McCalla expands her purview to take in music from the African diaspora. On this, her fifth album, she provides 10 gorgeously crafted songs that veer from Afrobeat to Brazilian tropicalismo, as well as folk and country. Glittering, highlife-inspired guitars are a buoyant touch on celebratory tracks such as Open the Road and Take Me Away, while the plaintive plucking of Tree and the sweeping cello of I Want to Believe showcase McCalla’s storytelling songwriting, presenting hopeful tales of self-exploration.

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