Small on-ground events and big live entertainment properties alike are making a comeback after the COVID-19 pandemic restricted most big activities over the past two years.
The first large property coming to India is singer Justin Bieber's Justice World Tour, scheduled on October 18 at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium (JLN Stadium) in New Delhi. Promoted by online booking and entertainment platform BookMyShow, tickets for Bieber's India show will go on sale from June 4, priced from Rs 4,000 onwards.
The Justice World Tour has more than 125 shows scheduled in over 30 countries from May 2022 through March 2023. It has sold over 1.3 million tickets so far.
Notably, ground events are seeing a revival across the globe and India. However, recovery is slow in terms of large-scale music events and comedy events.
In an earlier interview to Moneycontrol, Ashish Hemrajani, founder and CEO, BookMyShow pointed out that while most of the states have lifted COVID-19 related restrictions on live events, there is a lag effect.
“When we were planning tours, everything was ambiguous (last year). There was no certainty in terms of booking venues, artistes. Globally, a lot of shows were getting cancelled because of the second and third wave and that affects the supply chain in terms of artistes, equipment. But when supply became available, then the United States sucked up all supply and the next will be European tours that will start," he had said.
Another player in the live events space, Woot Factor Brand Architects, an event management company noted that the scale of events is still conservative compared to where the industry was before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Woot Factor's Co-founder Amit Relan in an earlier interview said the live events industry is back to 50 percent of where it was pre-Covid or in 2019.
While revenues of the organised live events segment recovered 20 percent in 2021 versus 2020, the industry's revenue remained lower than 2019. Last year, the sector reported revenues to the tune of Rs 3,200 crore, down from Rs 8,300 crore in 2019, according to a FICCI-EY 2022 report.