On Wednesday, Harry Styles begins his 30-night residency at Madison Square Garden, making him the latest in a wave of celebrities who are turning away from conventional touring and changing the experience of live music as a result.

In recent years, Adele, Bad Bunny, and Billy Joel have all had sold-out residencies in Munich, Puerto Rico, and New York, respectively. This means that fans can’t just wait for a visit to their hometown — they have to buy a ticket and book a trip, sometimes a very expensive one.

Residencies have become a high-profile example of how the economics of entertainment are changing how we experience culture, and who can even afford to have that experience. 

There are a number of reasons for the trend: residencies are more cost-effective for musicians and crew, and they’re a lot easier in other ways. Burnout, exhaustion, and substance abuse have long been features of touring musicians’ stories from the road, and residencies alleviate some of that physical and mental toll — at least for the superstars who can book them.

The fans, however, especially the ones coming in from out of town, have to pick up that tab now. Today, Explained host Astead Herndon interviewed Billboard writer Robert Levine about this topic back in February. They discussed why this has happened — and how, for many fans, these costs can actually be worth it. Residencies create increased pressure to create a “sense of event,” and ensure every show offers something special — really delivering for the handful of people who can make the trip, and creating FOMO for those who can’t make it, which is kind of the goal of all of it.

There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

I’m based in New York, so Harry Styles’s tour really perked my interest. He’ll be here for a 30-night residency and he has no other US shows on his tour. Can you explain to me the business of Harry staying put like this? Why has this become a thing for artists? What do we think this tour represents?

What’s interesting is all the writing and all the talk about the concert business focuses on the money that’s going in. Hardly anyone thinks about the money going out. As always, they have crew, they have musicians, they have expenses. The most expensive part is getting it all around. So imagine if you could minimize that expense and make the same amount of money.

So is that why we’re seeing someone like Harry Styles sit for 30 nights at MSG? It’s to lower travel costs?

Well, look, I mean haven’t talked to Harry Styles, so I’m just making an educated guess, but yes, I think so. And there’s the sort of capital-R residency that he’s doing. He’s declaring this a residency, and he’s making an event of it. But if you look at the concert business in general, you are seeing a trend — and sometimes people don’t notice it — toward playing more shows at fewer venues. The same kinds of economic forces are changing the nature of what we might call regular tours. Now you’re seeing more two-night stands, more three-night stands, more four-night stands. 

And there’s also…this isn’t economics, but there’s also lifestyle considerations. All those classic rock songs about the romance of being on the road; “Turn the Page” by Bob Seger where he was talking about how burnt out he is. … There used to be a romance to being miserable and now there’s not. 

Rock stars on tour, the crazy bus, all of that stuff.

We’re coming to your town, we’ll help you party down. Now you have to come to them and help them party down. And I think people realize a lot of the performers are getting older. They might not want to move around so much. But also remember when Elvis was in Vegas? This is not Elvis the teen sensation who wouldn’t be filmed below the waist. This is Elvis the middle-class performer, and in Vegas, he could stay in a really nice hotel rather than be in a van. 

I’m going to ask about the New York piece. When we think about Harry Styles specifically, I think back to the fame, and I don’t have to go all the way back to Elvis for famous residencies in Vegas. Think about Celine Dion, or more recently, folks like Adele or even Usher.

Vegas had an advantage in that a lot of people were there with expense accounts always. That’s probably less the case today, but it’s still a convention in a conference town. If you’re charging people that amount of money, it doesn’t just need to be a great show. It needs to be part of a great weekend. It has to be a city with a lot to do. It has to have great air connections and a lot of hotel rooms. New York scores on all of those. 

It seems as if from what you’re saying, it makes sense for the artist in terms of reducing travel costs. It makes sense because maybe resale markets have made it clear to the entertainment industry that the demand for higher prices is there. But it does, as you mentioned, also raise expectations of what fans expect to experience at the concert. I wonder: in your opinion, are fans getting more for their money at these shows since they’re more expensive now? 

I think that’s so much in the eye of the beholder, right? For Adele in Munich, where she had a residency two summers ago, they built the biggest video screen in the world. Bigger than a football field. It was gigantic. I’m not that interested in a big screen. I don’t care if it’s the biggest screen. I’m not counting. She performed with fantastic musicians, and the staging was really creative. I thought it was an incredible show. I took the train four or five hours to go from Berlin. I thought it was fantastic and well worth it. Was I excited about the Ferris wheel? Honestly, not really.

What limits artists outside of the Adeles or Harry Styleses from adopting this residency model?

I think it’s less about the size of the artist and more about the implied specialness of it. It’s about FOMO. These are the biggest concerts, but there’s a lot of great concerts. How do you sell this as a special thing? Well, you play your marquee album, you promise two shows, two nights, no repeats. Metallica did that.  

You really have to create a sense of event. You have to have a claim on people’s souls. In the modern concert business…it’s not so much, why do you want to see them? but, why now and not next year or the year after?

How do you see these residencies having an influence on the way the live event industry operates as a whole? Part of what we’ve been looking at are the changes that have occurred in the industry post-pandemic. Where do you see this piece fitting in?

I have to admit that a lot of people in the business and who write about the business have been very cautious about the boom in the industry. Look at the price spike post-Covid. But what happens when that ends? When will that bubble burst? Look at how high prices get, will people still have the money to go to other concerts? 

And the truth is…the demand to see shows has proven all of this wrong. There’s always this idea that it’s a winner-take-all business: you’re going to travel to see Harry Styles, you’re not going to see other shows…logically, that money ought to be not spent on other concerts. But you don’t see that. And this is at a time when the economy is very, very good for some people and pretty lousy for most people. So that might be another reason why people are so interested in playing New York and LA because you get more people with disposable income. Other people can fly there, but at some point, I don’t know what the limit is. We don’t seem to get there.

People who might buy a cheaper pair of jeans or a cheaper television don’t seem to look at…concerts are not a competitive good. Who’s your second if you can’t go see Harry Styles? Who’s the artist most like Harry Styles, who’s also playing a concert? Who’s most like Beyonce, who’s not Beyonce? The answer is nobody.

Yeah. If Kelly Rowland was doing concerts, I would be moving in the same way. Right? It’s specific to that artist. And I can kind of see your point…that is what has made this shift be more permanent than folks expect now.

By the way, I bet some of those artists that you would say don’t compare to Beyonce, put on great shows.

For sure.

Sophia Bendz, general partner at Cherry Ventures, stopped by Equity to break down the latest in the Swedish tech ecosystem.

X2 ride at Magic Mountain has been closed for a month after one rider experienced brain compression and another remains in coma

An infamous Six Flags Magic Mountain rollercoaster, long favored by intrepid theme park goers, has been closed for more than a month after two people say they experienced brain injuries after riding it, according to a new CNN investigation.

The X2 rollercoaster sends riders plummeting and twisting hundreds of feet, reaching up to 76mph (about 122km/h) as the seats rotate 360 degrees. On the southern California theme park’s website, it’s advertised as a rite of passage for daredevils.

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© Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP

© Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP

© Photograph: Jae C Hong/AP

Health insurance enrollment through the Affordable Care Act is plummeting.

Nearly 3 million fewer Americans now have insurance through the program, popularly known as Obamacare, compared to last year, according to federal data released in June. After congressional Republicans allowed enhanced subsidies for the program to expire in January, many Americans saw their health insurance premiums spike by an average of about 30 percent. 

As a result, many Americans have been forced to drop their coverage entirely.

With affordability among the top concerns on voters’ minds heading into the midterms, healthcare costs have become a central issue for candidates.

“A lot of policy experts say, look, when you raise the price of something, demand goes down. And that’s what’s happening here,” KFF Health News senior correspondent Julie Appleby told Today, Explained. “It’s the prices — people are dropping out.”

Appleby has been reporting on healthcare policy for decades, and she joined Today, Explained co-host Noel King to break down the latest changes to the Affordable Care Act, why enrollment is plummeting, and how the ACA crisis is teeing up healthcare as a central issue in the upcoming midterms. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Sixteen years ago, President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law. Julie, what was the situation at the time that made it feel so necessary? What did the Affordable Care Act aim to do? 

There was a lot going on. We had a lot of people who were uninsured. We had premiums going up. Many times in the past there had been some effort to do some kind of health reform, but nothing ever really passed. We had Medicare and Medicaid in the ’60s, but no major legislation since then.

People had employer coverage, like they do now, but there were a lot of people who were on their own and buying in what’s called the individual market.

The individual market was really tough. They could tell people, “Hey, you’ve got a health condition, we’re not taking you.” They could you could sign up for an individual plan and later, if you did get some kind of health condition, they could go back through your medical records and see, “Hey, did they tell us about every single thing that had happened to them in the past five or ten years?” And if not, they could retroactively cancel your plan.

What did the Affordable Care Act do exactly?

It allowed young people to stay on their parents’ insurance plan up to age 26, and that was a really big deal and also a very popular provision in the Affordable Care Act.

It created these subsidies to help people purchase coverage on the individual market. It pays for part of your premium. After you pay a certain percentage of your household income, the subsidies kick in and it picks up the rest, up to a certain up to a certain income level. 

“They used to be able to charge women more than men. They can’t do that anymore.”

It did some other things, like they can’t tell you, “You have a preexisting condition, so we’re not going to take you.” They’ve got to take you.

It created a benefit package that covers all these essential things like hospitalization and drug costs and maternity care, which might not have been in plans before. They used to be able to charge women more than men. They can’t do that anymore.

What was the conversation around passing the Affordable Care Act? Remind us how and why it got so toxic and pitched.

It was super polarized, kind of like what we have now. There was a lot of discussion around whether this is going to be too much government or if it was just the right amount. A lot of people thought, “No, this is terrible, it’s gonna destroy things.”

And I think polls reflected that for the first four or five years or more of the Affordable Care Act. It was pretty evenly divided, when you looked at opinion polls, between people who thought it was a good thing and people who didn’t think it was a good thing.

In more recent years, that has changed and the favorability ratings have gone up for the Affordable Care Act and now majorities do favor the Affordable Care Act.

If you had told me that 16 years ago, I would not have believed you. Here we are. And how is the Affordable Care Act doing?

To use medical terminology, is it on life support? No, it’s actually doing fairly well. But there are some symptoms that there are problems. 

Remember at the end of last year, there was all the discussion about these things called enhanced premium tax credits and whether they were going to be extended or not. The government shut down over this. Those were not extended. As a result, it costs more this year for most people in the plan, and what we’ve seen is during open enrollment last year we had about a million people fewer sign up and that was about a five percent drop. 

That was 5 percent just in signups at the end of last year. Since then, the first few months of the year, we’ve seen about 3 million people drop off. Some people are finding that they can’t afford it and they are not paying their bills and they are getting dropped. A 3-million-person drop-off is pretty substantial.

There’s also a group of folks, particularly conservatives and Republicans, who say, “You know what, the numbers were inflated.” There was all this improper enrollment. People were getting these zero-premium plans and so there was fraud, there was improper enrollment, the subsidies were too generous or there were other factors that led to some fraudulent activity. And so these drop-offs just represent people who were fraudulently enrolled dropping out for one reason or another. 

There’s this real split right now between what are the reasons for the drop off. But most policy folks, most people who study the situation here say the main reason is people just aren’t able to afford it.

Why is it so expensive? Why are healthcare costs so high? 

That’s the $64,000 question, right? 

And if you get it right, you win. You’re in charge.

That’s been the question since I’ve been covering this debate. Look, it’s not just Affordable Care Act costs going up. Employer plans are going up. Everything’s going up. 

Generally, healthcare costs go up faster than inflation and that’s driven by a lot of things. It’s driven by drug costs, it’s driven by hospital costs, it’s driven by labor costs. So all of those things go into the mix with the Affordable Care Act. But also this year, there’s this additional factor of the subsidies that went away. 

Insurers were looking at that saying, “You know what, the subsidies are going down. We expect to have lower enrollments next year. The people most likely to stay enrolled are the ones who have health problems because they don’t want to take the risk of being uninsured.” So insurers were calculating that in when they set their premium rates for this year: We might have sicker people in our pool that we’re gonna have to cover. 

That’s part of what we’ve seen with costs in the Affordable Care Act. But everybody is seeing health inflation go up right now and that’s affecting premiums.

Here we are 16 years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Has it accomplished what it set out to do?

You have to look at that in a number of ways. It aimed to expand coverage and reduce the uninsured. I think the answer there is yes, the number of uninsured has gone from 13 or 14 percent to as low as just under 8 percent a couple of years ago. It’s ticked up a little bit since then.

Did it control costs? That’s a harder one to answer. And it’s back to that $64,000 question. How do you do that? Costs have continued to go up. Premiums are definitely higher than they were pre-ACA. To be fair, the plans are very different. They cover more, they’re more generous, they’re better coverage, but they are more expensive.

The big question is: What is going to be put forward as an alternative and how palatable will that be to consumers, lawmakers, the healthcare industry? It’s going to be challenging, but I think we’re going to hear a lot more discussion this year. Whether or not we see actual proposals that could pass, I think that’s a little more questionable.

Trump’s replacement of a military war with a heightened economic one is not expected to alter Iran’s strategy, while further impoverishing its people.

© Arash Khamooshi/Polaris for The New York Times

Outrage over making Representative Jared Moskowitz, who is vocally pro-Israel, the top Democrat on a Middle East policy subcommittee reflected the party’s rift over Israel.

© Kenny Holston/The New York Times