What happened toreal R&B concerts?

Over the past two decades there has been a steady decline in the production, release and live performance of old-school R&B, leaving the genre struggling for airplay and presence. The catalogue did not get worse. The infrastructure around it thinned out.

What is left is a strange situation: true R&B concerts are virtually nonexistent today, surviving only inside bills where the music is mixed with rap and pop. Fans who came up on this music find themselves buying a ticket for a night that is mostly not the thing they came for.

Meanwhile the audience is right there. The 2022 FM R&B festival at The Autry Museum drew more than 40,000 people across three days — 70% women, 70% of them aged 36 to 59, three quarters from Los Angeles County. That is not a nostalgia crowd. That is a market.

There is a second audience too. Millennial and Gen X listeners are discovering this catalogue now, through samples, through streaming, through their parents' record collections. A bill built deep enough serves both at once.

That is the work: assemble a roster that reaches old-school listeners while drawing the newer audience, put it on a real stage with real production, and let the songs do what they have always done.