Over the weekend, Grizzly Bear kicked off a tour in New Zealand and Australia, and the band’s frontman Ed Droste took to his Instagram story to lament the state of the live performance economy. In the series of posts, which were captured by BrooklynVegan but have now been deleted, Droste says that the “music industry is fucked” and that he “just found out despite huge crowds down under we are basically losing money.” He continued:

People always ask: Why aren’t you coming to “Perth,” “Singapore,” “Quito” ….and I’m trying to explain there is no value put on live music anymore. We feel it’s important to bring with us the fullest show we can with all live instruments and a good light show. But now, when you cut out record sales and we haven’t had a car commercial in ages, we literally lose money. So yeah the evolution of the music industry is in my opinion destroying bands that play music that are mid tier or lower. Nobody cherishes or puts any value into the craft that goes into songwriting, or studying music! Yes pop stars write hits. Yay! They also get branding deals, and corp gigs… but when you are dealing with a dying industry and you actually care about a real live show and you aren’t a stare, there’s not much you can do. I could go on forever but I won’t. Enjoy it while it lasts. I think we are about to enter a live music drought … TBD.

Prior to Droste’s Instagrams, the official Grizzly Bear Twitter account also expressed some frustration with their New Zealand and Australia shows:

HUUUUUGE tbd on when we’ll be back to NZ or OZ , but we are coming in just a few days! Nab ur tickets! Can’t wait to come back! https://t.co/QAfHQpu7Mk — Grizzly Bear (@grizzlybear) February 22, 2018

New Zealand! We are all at the airport coming to you for @nzfestival in Wellington! Not sure we’ll ever be back so come out ! ❤️❤️❤️❤️ — Grizzly Bear (@grizzlybear) March 1, 2018

Grizzly Bear just announced a co-headlining tour with Spoon.

The band released a new album, Painted Ruins, last year. Revisit our essay about the state of ’00s indie.

UPDATE: Droste has expanded on his previous comments with further posts on his Instagram story: