Few things are more exciting than a live rock show. A ticket is an invitation to a sensory-decimating experience that can linger in the mind for years after the final notes have echoed away and disappeared. The electricity in the crowd, the volume of the music, the vibrancy of the lights; there’s hardly anything better.
The postpandemic demand for live music continued to balloon throughout 2024, with artists and audiences setting new marks for both revenue and attendance. And yet, there’s always room for improvement.
The process of buying a ticket feels like a Rube Goldberg-esque nightmare with incomprehensible presale opportunities, digital waiting rooms and unhelpful customer service bots. Prices for drinks, food and merchandise have exploded in cost with the rise of inflation since 2020 and remained high. Audience etiquette has also left a lot to be desired lately.
There’s also a much more inconsequential tweak that might help enhance the overall concert experience: doing away with the encore, a vestigial remainder from the industry’s past.
Last year, my wife and I caught Kacey Musgraves and Father John Misty performing at Climate Pledge Arena. Both artists are at the top of their game at this juncture of burgeoning careers and their performances were fantastic. (Don’t just take my word for it. Amazon’s cameras were filming that night, and both full sets are streaming on Prime.)
About 80 minutes into her headlining performance, Musgraves weighed in with her stance on encores.
“We do have a couple of songs left for you, but that’s it. No encore,” she said. “I don’t believe in encores anymore. … Can we just cancel them? I think what’s cooler is saying, ‘Hey, we just have two songs left. Let’s just all be as present as possible during those last two songs.’”
My wife and I both arched our eyebrows. That was interesting. Musgraves then played her newer single “Deeper Well” before finishing with the tender ballad “Rainbow.” It was fantastic. We remained present throughout the entire finale. I didn’t reach for my phone to check my messages. My mind didn’t wander to thoughts of beating traffic. I couldn’t help but think: “More people should do this.”
Before you grab your pitchforks, I’m not here pounding the table for the automatic ban of all concert encores. Artists have a duty to live in the moment and express themselves in a way that feels most authentic or rewarding. There are so many unique ways to present live music.
In the right context, a properly placed encore can inject a necessary dose of drama and theatricality into a performance. Jack White is a great example of an artist who deploys an unpredictable encore finale, as many witnesses to his recent October performance at the Showbox could attest.
But how often does that happen? The extra two or three songs often tacked onto the end of a set are an illusion of surplus. They are built into the show, a figment of imaginary spontaneity.
“My husband calls those ‘noncores,’ when a band comes out and the audience wasn’t exactly demanding one,” Eva Walker, singer for The Black Tones and a KEXP DJ, said. “I mean, do you. Go and play more if you’re the headliner. But it’s not always called for!”
The move can be especially eye-roll-inducing when the band leaves its biggest hits to the very end, sapping the finale of any sense of surprise. You know it’s coming, and so do they.
Nearly every artist who takes a stage — especially at corporate-owned venues — immediately starts off a clock in their head. They know exactly how many minutes their set should last and how many songs they should play during that allotted time.
It’s not rocket science. It’s capitalism.
Musicians have curfews — and blowing past them can be costly, no matter how famous you might be. Taylor Swift decided to perform some extra songs during her July 2023 show in San Francisco, including “right where you left me” with The National guitarist Aaron Dessner. The move put her past curfew by 38 minutes, which typically incurs fines between $750 and $2,100. (The city of Santa Clara ultimately waived the charges.)
While these fines can be a drop in the bucket for superstars like Swift, they can be a deterrent for theater- and club-level artists.
But it’s not just the superstars who feel the pain — festivals face these fines too. In 2023, the Coachella music festival picked up a $117,000 fine from the city of Indio for going 22 minutes past its scheduled end times on Friday night and 25 minutes past on Saturday and Sunday nights. If Coachella can catch a fine, no one is safe.
I’m sure for some people, the encore is their favorite part of the night. A necessary lull before one final explosion of pent-up energy, typically soundtracked by the band’s biggest and most recognizable hit. The faux theatricality is the point.
Live music is incredibly important to me. I’ve seen hundreds of shows in my life running the gamut of nearly every genre and in almost every setting imaginable. My favorite live performer in 2024 was Sturgill Simpson. The Kentucky-raised singer-songwriter — who lived in Seattle during the late ’90s after leaving the Navy — put out a spectacular album last year titled “Passage du Desir” under the pseudonym Johnny Blue Skies. Then he hit the road for three months in September, October and November on his “Why Not? Tour.”
Simpson and his band hit the stage at 8 p.m. on the dot each night on the road and played for as long as the local curfew allowed. There were hardly any breaks as they ripped through three-hour-long sets, stretching some of his best songs like “Best Clockmaker on Mars” and “Brace For Impact (Live a Little)” into 12- and 15-minute-long, mind-melting jams. Full recordings of each gig were shared on the live music hosting website Nugs the next day where anyone could purchase and download them, or stream them individually with a paid subscription.
In more than 30 shows, Simpson never played an encore. In fact, he hardly even spoke to the crowds, citing the need to save space for more songs. Despite this, I never felt like I was missing anything. In fact, I was grateful. Given the choice between artifice and tasty tunes, I’ll take the tunes any day.
In an era where so many experiences feel overly manicured and curated, concerts stand out as one space where anything can still happen. Finales included. As Black Tones singer Walker alluded, why sap all the fun and spontaneity out of a show with another expected noncore?
“Encores are those special things when a band you love comes back out and plays just one more great song,” she said. “Maybe it’s acoustic, maybe it’s a deep cut. But it’s supposed to be special. And I love it when it is.”