As Trent Reznor performed a dramatic piano rendition of Nine Inch Nails’ “Something I Can Never Have,” his voice resounded throughout the arena, crystal clear. Whether Reznor was singing an intimate B-stage number like this or NIN’s heavier dance and rock material, his vocals sounded crisper than ever before.
That’s because on this year’s Peel It Back Tour, the band’s front of house sound engineer, Jamie Pollock, had, for the first time, used L-Acoustics’ Source Intelligence. The pro audio company created the technology to utilize nongenerative machine learning to help identify an artist’s voice in real time — and deliver it to the crowd, free of any other background noises that a microphone might pick up onstage. Pollock kept his experiment “hush-hush” throughout the entire run, but fans noticed the difference.
“Trent’s whispering at times; he’s trying to make it as intimate as possible,” Pollock says. “And then [the next] minute, he’s screaming.”
Related
As in most aspects of life now, AI continues to expand in the live-music space, whether it’s being deployed by long-established companies like L-Acoustics or newer AI power players like Suno. The latter hired Michael Chua, previously a Ticketmaster executive, as vp/GM of its new Suno Live Experiences division upon its launch in October.
Bad actors, too, have taken to using AI in the live sector. Scalpers are unleashing more bots than ever to help purchase tickets. In October, RAYE posted on Instagram that her show at London’s 5,000-capacity Royal Albert Hall had received 1.8 million presale sign-ups. “Hundreds of thousands of fake registrations” had been recorded, she wrote. “It is a new world we are living in now, I have never witnessed bots on this scale.”
But by and large, AI is helping concerts and tours run smoother from end to end — and whether or not fans are aware, it’s integrated into more aspects of the scene than ever.
Marketing
For as long as artists have been touring, marketers have been tasked with getting the word out — and AI is reshaping even this long-established aspect of the business. Companies such as Laylo and HIVE help artist teams send SMS and email campaigns, with Laylo often working directly with artists and HIVE frequently serving venues themselves.
According to Laylo, its clients include Sabrina Carpenter, Ariana Grande and Noah Kahan, who utilize the platform for tour announcements and SMS messages going out to fans who’ve opted in for sign-ups. Laylo also can link directly to Instagram, allowing for easy communication on social media. HIVE, meanwhile, works with clients including the major dance promoter Insomniac and provides similar services for SMS and email.
“We’ve seen a huge shift in how people use our product, and ultimately how they sell tickets,” says Patrick Hannigan, who co-founded HIVE in 2014 and serves as the company’s chief technology officer. “Certain swaths” of HIVE’s clients use their marketing assistants to draft “100% of their emails … 100% of their SMS messages, 100% of their Meta ad campaigns. It’s been fascinating to see that shift happen.”
Companies also use AI to sift through large volumes of user-generated marketing content, commonly known as clipping, which pulls fan-made videos to assist with marketing. Laylo offers a user-generated-content agent, which sorts through every tag and mention on Instagram and messages fans with a link to upload their video — should they want to provide permission to do so.
“It’s thousands of hours of marketing time saved to get great pieces of content [artist teams] can use for clipping campaigns for ads, promo or whatever the artist might want to use it for,” Laylo co-founder and CEO Alec Ellin says.
Ticketing
Ticketers themselves also want to use AI to help with concert discovery. In recent months, Ticketmaster has integrated AI chatbots including ChatGPT and Claude to direct fans to the ticketing platform. Fans can ask about their favorite artist’s touring plans and even look at seats within the AI app before making their purchase on Ticketmaster.
“We’ve done integrations with a variety of AI companies to help fans discover events,” says Saumil Mehta, global president of Ticketmaster. “The vast majority of shows do not sell out. We know that. And [the more] we can do to help fans find great events that they can participate in, the better.”
Meanwhile, SeatGeek is taking AI integration a step further to help artist teams determine how to best price tours. In October, the company launched a new product, TourIQ, to check each market and venue based on data that SeatGeek already collects. The product looks at each tour date for an artist and other shows in a given market, providing a price recommendation for every seat in a venue.
“When tickets are priced wrong, the gap between what a seat is worth and what it sells for tends to get filled elsewhere, including by bad actors using bots,” says ArinMichelle Casey, head of entertainment partnerships at SeatGeek. “Getting prices right before on-sale shrinks that gap, so more of the value stays with the artist, the rights holder and the fans who want to buy at a fair price. That’s the goal with TourIQ: fewer corrections later and a better experience for everyone who wants a ticket.”
Mehta explains that Ticketmaster has AI integrated into every layer of its platform and is also utilizing the technology to combat bots. Ticketing platforms expect situations such as RAYE’s (whose Royal Albert Hall dates were sold on Twickets, not Ticketmaster) to become more common, and they’re preparing themselves accordingly.
“Ticketmaster is one of the most attacked sites on the internet,” Mehta says. “We do what we can to identify bots at every layer. We’re applying AI and machine learning — some of it homegrown, and some of it not — to build models at every layer of ticketing in order to help us get more tickets in the hands of fans.”
Live Performance
At the iconic Hollywood Bowl, “we keep the experience as pure as we can,” says Fred Vogler, the venue’s principal sound designer and front of house mixer. The venue takes pride in how it blends into the natural landscape of the Hollywood Hills. But the team felt its sound system needed improvements, so it installed 26 L-Acoustics speakers around the venue. With Source Intelligence, as well as the L1/CS1 system and 360-degree L-ISA immersive sound technology, the Bowl’s new system provides an enhanced audio experience.
“There are a lot of moving parts and things that are out of your control in a live setting,” Vogler says. “Once something starts, if you are out of sequence in turning things up or down or balancing it, something like that dominoes and makes it difficult to catch up.”
The Los Angeles Philharmonic has performed at the Hollywood Bowl since 1922, and it likely never sounded better than it did on June 20, when the ensemble used the Bowl’s new sound system for the first time. Each instrument in the orchestra was isolated utilizing Source Intelligence, the woodwinds and percussion coming across with better quality than anything the venue had experienced prior.
“Everyone’s mesmerized by this clarity and low distortion,” Vogler says. “You’re taken aback because you’re hearing elements that you maybe hadn’t heard before — and certainly not in the outdoor setting.”
Part of L-Acoustics’ latest offerings includes the L1 series, a more compact sound system designed to be smaller and easier to transport and set up, but that also uses Source Intelligence to make each sound onstage better. While Nine Inch Nails was one of the first acts to test out the new technology, Bruno Mars, Rüfüs Du Sol and Harry Styles have all started using it on the road.
“One of the key issues that performers face onstage is that the stages are very noisy,” L-Acoustics CEO Laurent Vaissié says. “The microphone that the singer is holding onstage is capturing more than the voice. You have the drums, you have the guitar amps, you have the crowd. In a live environment, this makes it very challenging for the engineer that’s actually mixing the show to get a clean signal.”
But thanks to technology like his company’s own, Vaissié says he’s been impressed with how live shows sound these days: “The results are pretty mind-blowing.”
This story appears in the Nov. 7, 2026, issue of Billboard.
