The global coronavirus pandemic, when it arrived in our lives five years ago this week, affected the world of music in basically the same way it did everything else. Musicians froze their lives and retreated into quarantine, like the rest of us. They canceled in-person events. They learned how to use Zoom. Some of them probably baked bread. Too many of them died.
In some ways, the pandemic shrank the distance between those of us who considered ourselves listeners and those who thought of themselves as makers of music. During the first few months, some of us, lacking familiar comforts, took it upon ourselves to learn to play, or sing, or dance, as a way to fill empty rooms or social media feeds. Soon we found that pop stars were doing the same thing, some reimagining their careers.
Next to the unifying moments that music enabled, the pandemic also showed two basic things to be true: First, it made clear just how easy our access to music is now — it is truly a nearly infinite jukebox. And second, it proved that effortless access to the glorious archive of recorded music could not compensate for the absence of people creating music in our lives.
Looking back five years later, it's easy to see how much about the music world has been transformed. Here are five ways the pandemic reordered how we listen.
How touring stopped suddenly, and restarted slowly
by Isabella Gomez Sarmiento
When the COVID lockdown began in March of 2020, touring musicians were among those whose plans, and lives, and livelihoods, were suddenly upended. Performances that had already been booked were cancelled. Venues, artists and labels scrambled to figure out rescheduling, but as lockdowns extended and COVID-19 infections rose, it became clear that the initial chaos of the pandemic was not going to subside before a deeper disruption was inflicted. Album cycles, which are often carefully planned around tours, were delayed. In-person shows vanished from the calendar, so did the merch and physical music sales upon which so many musicians depend financially during tours — especially those who've seen the value of their recorded music decline with streaming. Without a truly remote, quarantine-friendly or and socially distant alternative for live music, many people — from artists to promoters to venue employees — lost a significant portion, if not all of their income, for more than a year.
When transmissions finally lowered, vaccines became available and the world began to adjust to a new normal, artists and fans were eager to reunite in person. But as tours started picking up again in 2021 and 2022, the industry was suddenly thrust into a new reality. COVID testing, masking and social distancing — much of which is directly at odds with the close contact that is at the heart of the live music experience — now factored heavily into the planning and execution of shows. If anybody got sick, artists were often left to bear the physical, emotional and financial consequences of a cancelled concert. In some cases, venue owners were harassed for trying to enforce safety measures. After months of social isolation, the kind of show etiquette that was largely taken for granted in 2019 went out the window, particularly with a new generation of fans experiencing live music for the first time. Artists endured heckling and a barrage of objects thrown on-stage; emerging musicians tried to find their footing in an industry that now seemed largely unrecognizable to anyone who would have previously guided them.
As with so many other aspects of American life, the pandemic laid bare stark inequities within the music industry. Not only was there no safety net; there was no status quo to return to. In a post-pandemic landscape, artists like The Black Keys, Santigold and Animal Collective were forced to cancel tours, with the latter citing "an economic reality that simply does not work and is not sustainable." Festivals like Coachella and Lollapalooza saw much slower sales than usual. But A-listers like Taylor Swift, Coldplay and Beyoncé were able to capitalize on a deep cultural desire for escapism, breaking box-office records with massive blockbuster tours. After Swift played the last date of her 21-month-long Eras Tour in December 2024, Pollstar reported that it was officially the highest grossing tour of all time, with an estimated $2 billion tally.
The market for live music continues to grow, and thanks to advances in technology and changes in regulation, ticket prices are climbing higher and higher. Live Nation, one of the major players of live entertainment, faces an antitrust lawsuit from the Department of Justice and 30 states alleging it has created a monopoly over ticketing. In the U.K., its subsidiary Ticketmaster is being investigated by a government watchdog over its dynamic pricing model and the harm it might cause consumers. But as fans pay larger and larger sums to see their favorite artists perform, less and less of that money is making its way back to the vast majority of musicians. The 2024 Wellness in Music survey conducted by MusiCares found that 69% of respondents cannot cover their living expenses by working in music alone, and 53% say their earnings have not stabilized post-pandemic.
Stephen Parker is Executive Director of the National Independent Venue Association, a member-based trade association advocating on behalf of the live entertainment industry. Parker says that it's not so much that the pandemic overturned how live music is structured, but that it accelerated trends that already posed an existential threat to the industry's future. "People have gotten more comfortable with entertainment within the confines of their home. Alcohol sales are going down. Inflation is up, which means that expenses for everybody — from the artist to the small venue to the promoter that is putting on shows — [are] more expensive," Parker says. "As we grapple with how we all keep our tours going and our doors open, it's just clear that there's not enough money in the live space in order for everybody to be able to sustain themselves."
Five years out from the onset of COVID-19, box office numbers are hitting historic highs. Pollstar reports that the worldwide gross for the top 100 touring artists grew by 71.7% from 2019 to 2024 and has deemed this a "Golden Age" for live music. But today, it's clearer than ever that post-pandemic gains have not been equal throughout the industry, and many musicians still grapple with whether what they lost during the pandemic will ever be fully recovered.
How quarantine reshaped the album release cycle
by Hazel Cills
It was the weepy Instagram Live heard around the world: Dua Lipa explaining to millions of viewers that she was going to push up the official release of her already leaked, disco-driven sophomore album Future Nostalgia in late March 2020, just weeks after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic.
"I've been a little bit conflicted about putting music out, and whether it's the right thing to do during this time because lots of people are suffering," she said, fingers pressed to her eyes to hold back the tears. "I really don't want to do this."
But she did it. And Future Nostalgia became a Grammy-winning, critical and commercial smash. The arrival of her slick, Moroder-indebted retro-pop made for dancefloors did the exact opposite of what Lipa feared. It didn't stand tasteless in the face of worldwide suffering and uncertainty, but instead became the truly escapist pop album 2020 needed. And Lipa's teary, live-streamed sense of conflict reflected a dilemma many artists faced in the pandemic's dark first year: How should new music exist, exactly, in a time like this?
For some, it simply wasn't the time for new music. Artists including Lady Gaga, The 1975 and Alicia Keys all delayed scheduled releases, waiting for the least politically tone deaf and most commercially viable moment before putting them out into the world. But when albums were released, they entered a world where their sound and meaning was reshaped by the constraints of the pandemic.
Lipa, along with Gaga's return-to-roots Chromatica and Jessie Ware's What's Your Pleasure, ushered in a growing mainstreaming of dance genres like disco and house in pop music, a respite from the claustrophobia of extended isolation for those stuck indoors. But other artist's pre-pandemic seclusion led to releases that uncannily spoke to 2020's fears and malaise, like Phoebe Bridgers' moodily introspective, deeply apocalyptic album Punisher. Or Fiona Apple's opus Fetch the Bolt Cutters, an album of resilience and experimentation recorded over several years largely in Apple's home, with a message, which the singer bluntly summed up as, "fetch the f****** bolt cutters and get yourself out of the situation you're in," that became a rallying cry for listeners who felt paralyzed in the pandemic.
The pandemic's start also collided with the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, leading to hundreds of protests across the country ignited in their names and others murdered by police, and much of 2020's new music, from Noname's "Song 33" to Lil Baby's "The Bigger Picture," spoke to the cause. Run the Jewels' RTJ4, which tackled police brutality and oppression with searing specificity, was released two days early in response to the protests. "The world is infested with b******* so here's something raw to listen to while you deal with it all," the duo explained upon release. On Juneteenth, the U.K. group SAULT put out its expansive Untitled (Black Is) with the preceding message that they were doing so to "mark a moment in time where we as Black People, and of Black Origin are fighting for our lives."
And then there were the albums made in lockdown, as artists hunkered down in scrappier, more independent settings, responding to the moment in real time. From his home, Paul McCartney recorded and released McCartney III, a stripped down record on which he played all of the instruments. Charli XCX conceptualized and recorded her restless album how i'm feeling now over just six weeks from isolation in Los Angeles, bringing fans into the process by crowdsourcing beats and input on lyrics over Instagram Live. Bad Bunny released Las que no iban a salir, a compilation of barely formed tracks that hadn't made it onto his album YHLQMDLG — itself released just weeks before lockdown — that he resurrected in isolation and released in two days. Other artists trekked to more romantic locales to create in isolation: After Big Thief's tour was cut short by the pandemic, Adrienne Lenker recorded two albums out of a one room cabin in Massachusetts, and Robin Pecknold wrote the lyrics to his album Shores, the instrumentals already recorded pre-pandemic, on long, aimless drives out to the Catskills from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y.
But no artist found more freedom in the pandemic's isolation than Taylor Swift, whose minimal, far more mature folklore and evermore albums, with The National's Aaron Dessner serving as key collaborator, were a stark, admirably focused pivot from the technicolor pop excess of 2019's Lover. Three years later, she and her music would be terrifyingly larger-than-life again. But for a brief moment in 2020, it felt like Swift and so many artists were making music suspended in the same wretched headspace — stuck, angry, anxious, uncertain. We were all just trying.
How 'pandemic' became an emotion
by Ann Powers
Musicians are known for finding useful material in whatever circumstances hit them. An old bottleneck became a means for sliding into a new way to play the guitar; an instrument laid up against an amp fuzzed and sputtered, and rock and roll feedback was born. The pandemic instantly afflicted musicians with setbacks that were difficult to face: canceled tours, botched release plans, the further convolutions of a music industry that never really supported them that enthusiastically, anyway. By the plague's second year, however, many made it into something like an incubator. The word "pandemic" came to signify an artistic and personal mandate — a description of musical motivations landing somewhere between the search for emotional balance and the desire to experiment in a newly indeterminate creative space.
"Pandemic" never became a genre, exactly, but it has come to describe a music-making approach that values introspection over trend-spotting and self-determination over the necessary concessions of the pop game. I noticed this shift being recorded in press releases, where artists describe their process by proxy, as early as autumn 2020. The guitarist Kaki King, promoting a new album, described having a revelation that "we are all trees" — old and new at the same time — and responding by recasting her album as a set of reflections on "what we all miss." A year later, the rapper OGeesy linked his new music to the process of "getting healthy," something the pandemic prompted him to do. A year after that, the multi-hyphenate Sampa the Great released As Above, So Below, an album rich with the insights she'd gained after relocating to her native Zambia from London and revitalizing "the younger artistry that was nourished growing up in Africa." By 2024 artists had fully emerged from isolation, but brought the agonized thoughtfulness of pandemic times with them. The metal band Protomartyr, for example, "regrouped with a sense of uncertainty, questioning if and how to continue after the turbulence of the pandemic years." The questions they asked changed their dynamic and, so they said, made them a better band.
The pandemic-minded music that emerged after people began absorbing the initial shock of the catastrophe honored a set of values more redolent of mindfulness and other mental-health or spiritual techniques than of the often impulsive, showy, disruptive paradigms of earlier musical eras. Louche Matty Healy was out; glaive, who began his artistic career after a hermit-like "month indoors, in his bedroom with blackout curtains," was in. The albums that topped critics' polls in these years fed a perception of "best" music as highly self-determined, even sometimes made in secret, and often experimental in attitude if not sound. An early favorite, the collaboration between the electronic artist Floating Points and the (now deceased) avant-jazz elder Pharoah Sanders, "stirs feelings that are hard to name," Mark Richardson wrote in a 9.0 Pitchfork review — it was the job of the listener to take the time to comprehend and identify those feelings.
In 2022 Sault's Earth played further on the sense that music could offer mysteries worth fans' time by offering a smoky fusion sound played by semi-anonymous band members. Favorites with well-defined personae showed new sides of themselves and expected critics and fans to follow, resulting in bold statements by veterans like Corinne Bailey Rae and new configurations, like Boygenius, the singer-songwriter troika of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus, that reinforced artists' appeal by changing their trajectories. In the world beyond music, people fought about individual rights versus the communal good. Music's pandemic principles hopefully promoted self-reliance and gentle refusals (of packaged fame, of other's career plans) as an engine of the greater artistic good.
By 2024, though, music fans and some artists were getting restless. Showy pop artists who were disruptive in familiar ways roared back; Charlie XCX and Chappell Roan ruled the zeitgeist. Yet the idea of self-care as political, and of independence as the ground of self-care, remained powerful as these post-pandemic breakthrough artists spoke against the depersonalizing fame-mongering of the entertainment biz even as they participated in it, to some degree. Traces of lockdown linger like antibodies in a system that still feels unhealthy but which now, at least, has a language for discussing what healthy approaches to making and loving music might be.
How DJs, producers and rappers turned the couch into the club
by Sidney Madden
Half-stepping on sticky, scuffed floors. Pushing past hot bodies in motion at the house party, the homecoming, the concert or the club. Braving the reality of being perceived to find your own personal inch of the dancefloor. For a flash of time, COVID-19 claimed the release of experiencing live music as one of its social casualties. But, almost immediately after the physical world shut down and sweating alongside strangers to a beat became forbidden, social media actually became social again to provide the remix.
Itching to perform, to share space and bass, DJs brought parties of one to life. "I started going through withdrawals. I miss being in front of a crowd," DJ D-Nice told Variety a few weeks after lockdown began. As an outlet for the feeling, the Harlem-born artist hopped on Instagram Live and spun hip-hop hits for hours on end, dubbing his series Homeschool. A captive audience of hundreds of thousands, including politicians, pop stars and pedestrians all popped into the Live to join the party nightly. Fans in the comment section shared praise for D-Nice, exchanged throwback stories about the tracks, flirted and even took drink orders for the fake bar.
Like Homeschool, Toronto's Club Quarantine adapted its groove theory. The nightly zoom party united queer club heads in the thousands — but instead of watching one DJ, partygoers watched each other. Dancing in their boxes, each square was a window into a different, strobing, fleeting world. Rules for Club Quarantine were to keep the space safe, spam-free and "softcore only." Some attendees were putting kids to bed while others were sparking up and lubricating in their latex. Like in the club scene it mimicked, people watching was encouraged.
People watching spun into a full-on spectacle with Verzuz Battles. The web series created by hip-hop super producers Timbaland and Swizz Beatz became such undeniable appointment viewing that it broke the internet more than once. A friendly contest, Verzuz invited two legendary musicians to run their catalogues against each other in a 10-song battle and receive their flowers in the process. Heavy hitters from across genres -- Babyface and Teddy Riley, Jeezy and Gucci Mane, Jill Scott and Ekryah Badu -- swapped stories as they played their hits, giving their personal renditions of a hallowed, exclusive studio session to millions of viewers. What made these moments so magic was their intimacy, their rawness and their accessibility. As long as you paid your Internet bill, you had your invitation to the party and the best spot on the floor.
The series morphed formats many times, moving from Instagram to Apple Music to Triller. As social distancing restrictions lifted, Verzuz Battles went IRL, but the alchemy of the quarantine-era battles couldn't be matched. While winners and losers were debated in live chats, the overall series was dubbed a win for the culture when it needed it most.
How we mourned when we could not gather
by Lars Gotrich
There was no party in the streets to celebrate the bounce music that DJ Black N Mild brought to New Orleans radio. Manu Dibango's "Soul Makossa," famously interpolated by Michael Jackson and sampled in tracks featuring Jay Z and Busta Rhymes, didn't blast from club speakers. No honkey tonks were filled with country singer Joe Diffie's "Pickup Man," one of the greatest songs ever written about pickup trucks in a genre full of them. In the first weeks of the pandemic, these three were among the musicians to die from complications of the coronavirus, and the masses could not gather to mourn them.
Musicians create life in their songs; our own reflected within them. Our tendency in the moments after we lose an inspiration is to pull out old records, trade stories and clink drinks with friends, sing along — however out-of-tune — to songs that magnify meaning, restore souls and mend hearts. March and April of 2020, for those of us who keep a close watch on the arrivals and departures of musicians worthy of collective tribute, were months into which tragedy after tragedy echoed.
Adam Schlesinger, a one-man Brill Building whose songs spanned several bands, that perfect single from That Thing You Do and much of the soundtrack to the TV musical Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, would eventually get a tribute full of famous friends, but it would be a delayed and distanced grief, performed on couches, split-screens and back alleys — not a rock and roll spectacle. Hal Willner, a similarly prolific presence known for his lavish live events and extensive production credits — which included work on SNL — was later remembered in a private party at a midsize Brooklyn venue.
The jazz community witnessed severe losses: Trumpeter Wallace Roney died on the last day of March, then New Orleans patriarch Ellis Marsalis on the first day of April (bitterly, ironically, Jazz Appreciation Month), bassist Henry Grimes and alto saxophonist Lee Konitz on the same day two weeks later and free jazz multireedest Giuseppi Logan two days after that. These were elders and mentors in a scene that thrives on wisdom passed down, worthy of eulogies written in squawked saxophones and hammered keys, brushed drums and bowed basses, but jazz clubs had to be silent.
In the months and weeks that followed, the deaths kept mounting and we had few spaces to expel our grief. At the end of the year, NPR Music changed its In Memoriam project: It had previously been a modest, curated list, but we realized a year like this one demanded that we honor as many names as possible.
Throughout, we found ways to celebrate the lives of those who made our own richer: picking up the phone to share music and memories, busting out covers on the streets and in parks.
When John Prine, who had survived cancer twice, died of complications caused by COVID on April 7, there was a collective gasp in Nashville, but also for anyone with a heart and ears. "John Prine captured people in those moments of supposing when life gets really small and almost impossible, but then another thought occurs," Ann Powers wrote in tribute at the time. "A laugh, or a dignified response, or even a sense of blessing."
These five years later, I still think often about the opening of our Tiny Desk tribute to Prine: Margo Price and Jeremy Ivey in a bathtub, singing "That's the Way That the World Goes Round," making the most out of Prine's metaphor for drowning in a "half an inch of water." They look exhausted and delirious, as we all did, but then their kid comes toddling into the frame; a smiling Price picks up little Ramona, not even a year old, and dances with her. A laugh, a dignified response, a sense of blessing.
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