Music expert: 'Reunion shows are overpriced karaoke - and they're harming the industry'

• Have we reached critical mass when it comes to reunion shows?
• Music expert Kev Nixon thinks that despite the appeal of nostalgia, the reunion tours are causing more damage to up-and-coming musicians.
• Benjamin Jackson spoke to the author of the book Brilliant Being Rubbish about how reunion shows are ‘overpriced karaoke’ and labels returning to the well too often.

“I don’t go to gigs for entertainment because, having toured the world nine times as a musician and manager, it doesn’t feel like time off,” explains Kev Nixon, when asked about the recent slew of musical reunions.

“But if I love something enough and my wife is also into it, then we will go occasionally. The last one that really blew me away was Kacey Musgraves at Red Rocks in Denver in 2019. So no, reunions are not my thing.”

Nixon is a big name in the music industry, known for being a producer and manager, but especially for his work in music education. After a successful career as the Director of A&R for Richard Branson's V2 Records and a manager for artists like Kirsty MacColl, he and his wife, Sarah, identified a big gap in contemporary music education.

This led them to found the Brighton Institute of Modern Music (BIMM), creating a practical college that focused on modern genres and industry skills, challenging the traditional academic focus on classical music and jazz. Building on this success, he later co-founded the Detroit Institute of Music Education (DIME) and DIME Online, which went on to be recognised by Billboard as a top music school.

Throughout his career, Nixon has continued to apply his hands-on industry expertise, producing and managing a diverse range of artists. From well-known acts like Kula Shaker and Tom Odell—whom he discovered at BIMM—to emerging talent, while also collaborating with legends such as Robert Plant and Bryan Adams.

So the response regarding whether he’s attended any of the Oasis reunion shows, or the gamut of other reunion performances that have taken place across 2025, is understandable.

However, the reasons aren’t merely a certain fatigue for music -it’s more a fatigue towards reunion shows that the author of the book Brilliant Sounding Rubbish thinks many will experience soon enough.

Or, as Nixon refers to the reunion shows, “overpriced karaoke”

An overreliance on legacy acts at the cost of new music

Nostalgia can be a rose-tinted glasses affair, with the expectation of a reunion from a group sometimes exceeding the actual execution of the shows. Nixon explains the current trend as ‘bandwagon-jumping,’ explaining the thought process that goes along with it.

“If Blur can sell out two Wembley’s then Oasis must do a week [...] for me, the problem is that older acts are never as good as they were, so musically it’s kind of a guaranteed disappointment.”

He recalls a time during his formative music listening years when he discovered jazz violinist Stephane Grapelli and saw him perform in his 60s, “twice as good as his records” when the musician was in his ‘20s during the 1940s and 1950s.

“It is possible to improve with age,” he notes, “but that’s a very tough call for vocalists because, generally, voices wear out after your mid-fifties. That is, unless you are Tom Jones or Ozzy Osbourne.”

While he does contend that a good reunion has a significant amount of time between performances, he also thinks that the overabundance of reunion shows has hit critical mass, that some of the appeal of nostalgia is starting to wear thin, citing the knock-on effect it may have on more recent artists.

When asked if there might come a point where more reunion tours would take place than those undertaken by contemporary musicians, Nixon hopes "that wasn’t the case, but the floodgate opened after COVID, and it keeps going because there’s only one dish on the menu.”

Returning to the legacy well one too many times

So why does Kev think that legacy acts continue to get pushed over contemporary artists in recent years? He suggests that the blame should not be placed on concert promoters, whose “job is to sell-out shows”, but instead on the labels the acts are still tied up with.

“The problem is that labels and streamers make far more money from old catalogue than from new records because today music is a numbers game that sells ad space,” he asserts. “It’s called a ‘Greatest Hits’ mentality; there would be nothing wrong with it if everyone were paid equally, but they are not.

“Inequity suppresses new talent, and that is what is happening today in music.”

He also thinks that many newer acts have started to “[give] up the ghost” due to old traffic on Spotify and other digital streaming platforms, and that is now carrying over into venues.

But perhaps we also, as listeners and fans of nostalgia, are equally to blame: “In leisure time, many people don’t want to risk being challenged by something new”, Kev explains, “and unchallenging as it may be, they know that familiarity will make them feel happy”

“That’s a great reason to go along with it all, but the truth is it’s all about money and getting value from a trusted brand. Streaming is a chaotic mess when it could be a great and profitable experience for everyone involved, so it needs to be brought under control by stringent legislation to divest the monopolies we are stuck with.”

He explains that streaming only exists because “Spotify and the like, license the back catalogues of the three major labels Universal, Sony and Warner.

“Those three labels should be negotiating better terms for the artists rather than themselves, but they never will because the shareholders' dividends come first, and way before the artists’ earnings.”

When asked if he thinks, therefore, that legacy acts being invested in as some kind of long-tail business structure is involved, he explains that was the whole reason he started writing books about the inequity in music.

“Today, new music just gets in the way of making more money, and no one is doing a thing about it. Music has been limited to being a one-dimensional, headphonic, individual pastime, when it used to be the best shared experience next to sex!”

Kev Nixon’s latest book, Brilliant Sounding Rubbish, is available in hardback and audiobook versions and is available to purchase through leading bookshops and audiobook platforms.