Jimmy Kimmel Live! is pulling back on its number of musical guests featured each week, and with it, artists are continuing lose more opportunities in what had for decades been a mainstay for how they market their albums and expand their audiences.
Music’s decline on late night has been years in the making. Since Stephen Colbert had taken on the Late Show mantel from David Letterman in 2015, the show went from hosting a musical guest nearly every night in the beginning to around once to twice per week in 2025. And when the show ends this May, the platform will go away entirely. Late Night With Seth Meyers stopped regularly featuring recording artists for performances years ago, and the show lost its house band last year over budget cuts. Artists lost other platforms too, such as The Late Late Show, which was never replaced after James Corden stepped down in 2023.
Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon’s shows were longer holdouts in reducing music programming, leaving The Tonight Show as the last major late night program to feature a musical performance with consistent regularity.
Chloë Walsh, a co-founder of publicity firm The Oriel — whose music clients include a wide range of acts from indie darlings like Wet Leg and Lucy Dacus to superstars like Shaboozey and Weezer — calls the trend “yet another thing contributing to the decimation of the music industry’s “middle class.”
Both she and Big Hassle Co-Founder Jim Merlis, a PR vet whose clients have included acts like the Strokes, the Lumineers and Dave Matthews Band, call the dearth of late night bookings most concerning for developing artists, who will likely have a harder time getting booked as fewer slots means the shows will have to prioritize bigger acts who can help pull in ratings.
“My guess is there will be fewer opportunities for those ‘let’s take a chance’ bookings,” Merlis says. “We’ve really lost the middle class in music, that’s really bad. It’s a lot of feast and famine with projects. It’s better to have a lot of middle ground too. The emerging artists are the ones that may miss out. There’s social media, but it’s not the stamp of goodness that can come from a TV appearance.”
By Walsh’s own quick estimate, the number of late night performance opportunities for recording acts has fallen from about 17-21 per week in 2023 to about eight max now (dropping to around six after Colbert ends.) As Walsh points out, Kimmel has the only late night show in Los Angeles, and with two bookings per week, “those dates are going to be hotly contested by any artist launching an album campaign, and the spots will very naturally go to established artists in the midst of a well funded global PR launch.”
Meanwhile on the other side of the country, The Tonight Show will soon be the only late night show in New York, and even with more booking slots, the show will face similar supply and demand challenges.
Walsh venerates Jimmy Kimmel Live! music producer Jim Pitt and The Tonight Show music producer Julie Gurovitsch as two of the most talented bookers in the business, noting that they’ve helped launch countless careers and have skills for picking bubbling acts. But “with such fewer performance slots,” she says, she worries “there’s just no space for the remaining bookers to curate an eclectic line up anymore.”
Indeed, late night bookings aren’t the needle-movers they may have been in the pre-digital era. A Rolling Stone analysis in 2020 found that late night bookings on Colbert in the six months before the pandemic only boosted artists’ streams by an average of about just 5 percent in the days following the performance, a nominal gain at best.
Still, the value for the bookings, advocates say, go beyond sales and more toward boosting radio play or securing tour dates.
“I work with a lot of international artists. It’s increasingly expensive to come to the States,” Walsh says. “And when the costs are being weighed up, a TV booking and the exposure that brings — not just here but internationally via the YouTube and music site coverage at home — is a deciding factor.”
Merlis argues that the importance of a TV spot was “overstated 20 years ago, and now it’s maybe a bit understated.”
“People don’t understand that a late night booking rarely lead to a spike in sales even then,” he says. “A Letterman appearance in 1995, you’d see a little bit of a bump, but that’s not why we were doing it. Or it wasn’t the only reason. You were presenting the case for other marketing opportunities, showing what they look like, showcasing how they perform live. And that’s still the case.”
Late night performances have their own caveats though. They can be very costly for artists between travel and crew expenses, with several publicists who spoke with THR saying they’ve seen expenses rack up to as much as $100,000. It’s hard to justify such costs if they won’t always have a clear return on investment for music sales, particularly in a digital era where viral marketing can require fewer resources to reach audiences, and a viral TikTok sound can often lead to millions more streams on Spotify.
Still, as late night is shrinking, not all the legacy TV spots have lost their luster. A Saturday Night Live musical guest appearance, for example, is still among the most coveted opportunities in the business, a must-stop for pushing the biggest albums of the year and a major milestone to cement up-and-comers’ superstar status.
Even if late night live performances themselves didn’t take off, they can still often get write-ups online the next day from press outlets after the videos are posted on YouTube. Late night bookings also provided value as a means of giving an air of legitimacy to younger acts getting platformed on marquee brands on the major television networks.
“It’s a good tool outside of pure press, and in the YouTube era, you send out the performance the next day, it helps get coverage, it helps secure interviews with other outlets,” Merlis says.
As the performance opportunities fall and other legacy media outlets like radio and print publications continue to go under as well, those résumé-builders that helped lead to steadily lead to longterm careers for artists are going away. While it’s hard to argue any legacy media format has the clout it did in decades past, those concerned about late night’s pullback say its biggest impact today is difficult to measure.
“There’s a tacit belief that if something’s not a viral sensation then perhaps the impact was negligible,” Walsh says. “But the importance a late night booking plays in an artist’s career, the impact it can have across media, across radio, with touring and even across other territories via YouTube and social media is invaluable.”
This story appeared in the Jan. 15 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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