The live entertainment industry has been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic, which has lead to a global shutdown of festival and concerts and the cancellation or postponement of more than 30,000 events on the Ticketmaster system (owned by Insomniac's parent company Live Nation), with another 25,000 still on the books for the year that will likely be affected. On Friday (May 1) Ticketmaster began offering refunds for some of the postponed shows promoted by Live Nation and AEG.
Insomniac has rescheduled of a number of its marquee events, postponing Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas from May to October 2-4. Some of Insomniac's upcoming events including EDC Korea in Seoul (Aug. 15-16) and EDC Orlando (Nov. 13-15) have not been postponed. Insomniac still has about two dozen active club and venues shows listed on its site, including a May 28 SLANDER show at Las Vegas' Area 51, that have not been cancelled or postponed.
A number of postponed festivals will be presented as live streams starting this Friday at 8 pm with Dream State, followed by the EDC Las Vegas Virtual Rave-A-Thon beginning May 15. Insomniac's livestreams can be found at insomniac.com/livestream.
The concert industry has seen more than 24,000 full and part time employees laid off or furloughed since March 14, according to numbers compiled by Billboard. Last week Ticketmaster furloughed 25 percent of its staff and yesterday Pollstar reported that agencies UTA and Endeavor, parent company to WME, have started furloughing large numbers employees. Paradigm, APA, Cirque du Soleil, Stubhub, Eventbrite, Feld Entertainment, ShowClix, AudienceView, TKTS and Levy Restaurants have all laid off or furloughed employees.
