The Edison Research Story
I heard about this first from Rapino.
But no one’s listening to him, they’re just hating on Live Nation.
For years Rapino’s been telling everybody that LN’s average customer goes to slightly more than one show a year. Absolutely frightening unless you’re someone who lives in the present and believes the future’s gonna look just like the past.
Unless you missed it, and this was the hottest story online today, the target demo, the 12-24 year olds, are going to concerts less. 2.1 times per year in 2000 and .9 in 2010.
I don’t want to hear a fucking thing about the economy. If you blame this reduction on the economy you’re someone who refuses to take blame and passes the buck, to someone like Ticketmaster.
Sure, everybody hates the TM fees. But TM is paid to be hated. The acts LOVE the TM fee. It allows them to make more money while painting TM as evil.
Yes, the economy affects ticket-buying, just like it affects the consumption of so many other consumer goods. But this recession has revealed the fact that we’ve got too few desirable acts charging too much for tickets. Concerts are not like movies, something you go to on a whim, but vacations, which you plan for and experience once a year.
First and foremost you must have desirable talent. There’s a business in staging classic rock shows, just like there’s a business in catalog movies and music. But the lion’s share of the revenue comes from new acts. And new acts are overhyped and overpriced.
We no longer live in the twentieth century, when MTV anointed an act and everybody bought it (but isn’t it fascinating they all had such a brief shelf-life.) Now no specific medium has a hold on audience mindshare and the public is used to things being here today and gone tomorrow. Like the Keith Richards hype. A tsunami last week, nonexistent this week. And that’s fine if you’re selling a finite consumable that everybody needs on one day, like Gatorade in hundred degree heat, but if you want people to pay again the hype has to sustain. And it isn’t exactly hype, you have to continue to be in people’s minds. And you can only do this by creating music that people need. This is not a momentary hit. You’ve got to speak from the gut, you’ve got to touch souls.
Ubiquity is not coming back. Of course, there will be rare examples when it does, but now it’s endless developing acts which will take years to have the ability to sell 5,000 tickets, never mind arenas. How are we going to get people to see these acts?
On some level, it works already. We’ve got Sufjan Stevens who charges $30 to see a show the mainstream is clueless about. But it’s hard to get rich on $30 a ticket.
Everybody still wants to get rich from a business that’s being reinvented. By overcharging for tickets, by going on the road endlessly to make up for shortfall in recorded music revenue, artists and their handlers are burning out the market. The audience is saying NO MAS, certainly not at these prices, maybe not at any prices.
You’ve got to leave money on the table.
That’s what Taylor Swift does. She doesn’t charge what the traffic will bear, she gives a deal! If you’re ripping people off, they don’t come back. Even GaGa, she toured once cheaply, then expensively. How many people are gonna go in the future for over $100 if she has no hits?
And if you’re dependent on hits, you’re fucked. Then you’ve got the modern record company world, where you’ve got a million hands involved massaging material that radio will play but no one wants to hear when its cycle is done.
Can acts ask for less?
They’re gonna have to, if they want to survive. Look at the Dave Matthews Band for example.
Is Ticketmaster a problem? Of course, that’s why we’ve got to go all in. And don’t start talking about whether the charges are commissionable, no one outside the business understands this archaic construct, they just want to know the final price.
And the price is so high, and so many big shows are extravaganzas on hard drive, that too many people think that’s what music is. They expect to overpay to see explosions. Whereas when done right, music explodes in your brain at the local club, at the local theatre. But how can people know this if they never go?
You can’t take full production to small halls, you lose too much money. Which is maybe why you need to lose the production, which has almost nothing to do with music.
We need a giant reset. Before the concert industry completely implodes.
I’m not saying it’s going away. I’m just saying that when people think about what to do on a Saturday night, they don’t think of going to the gig. They might buy tickets nine months in advance to see the one act they want to and look forward to it, but almost no one’s sitting at home, thinking about going to live music on a whim that evening. And that’s a problem.
Music doesn’t drive the culture. It’s a sideshow. Facebook is hotter.
And that’s a shame.
Because there’s no medium innately hotter than music.
But that requires its purveyors to respect it. To realize they’re in it for the long haul. To entice customers with reasonable prices for great product so they’ll come back again.
