False Hopes Fuel Keith Urban’s Ticket Frenzy

Wow, Gary Borman isn’t going to be happy about this.

To tell you the truth, I’m stunned that I was the only person who would go on the record re ticket shenanigans.  When I sat down for an interview I figured I’d end up on the cutting room floor, overshadowed by Nashville and ticketing bigwigs.  I didn’t expect to be the featured performer.

Let me tell you how this works.

Somebody I don’t know tracks me down and tells me they’re doing a story.  I pay attention because it’s television.  Not because of the power of TV, but because I know they’re legit.  They’re dedicating dollars and time, so they’re not wasting my time, so I take it seriously.

But I still didn’t think I could fit it into my schedule.

But ultimately, I did.  I sat down in a hotel room for an hour with the newscaster and answered questions about the ticketing business.  I didn’t think the focus of the story would be on Keith Urban.  But I want to be clear, that doesn’t make a difference.  I’M NOT TAKING BACK A SINGLE WORD!  I BELIEVE EVERYTHING I SAID WAS TRUE!

Of course, the station edited the story the way they saw fit.

But what’s it going to take to get to the bottom of this issue?  Where supposed fan heroes deflect rage on to Ticketmaster and scalpers when they’re the greedy bastards?

Ethan Smith did a great story on this in the "Wall Street Journal".

Barely any traction.  Could that have to do with the paper being behind a pay wall?  Is Rupert Murdoch saving newspapers or killing them by making people pay for online content?

"Rolling Stone" eventually picked up on the story, but the magazine’s website is about as up to date and believable and inspires about as much confidence as Jann Wenner’s other music enterprise, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.  Hell, it’s 2010, and "Rolling Stone" keeps most of its content for the physical magazine.  That would be like refusing to license your music for MP3s, making people buy CDs.  Whoops!  There are people who still do that!  Then again, fans just steal what they want willy-nilly online.

But they don’t steal what they don’t want.

And so far, they haven’t wanted to know that the root of all evil in the concert business is the acts, that Ticketmaster is just a front for the acts.

Huh?

Don’t blame Live Nation either.  As the aforementioned "Wall Street Journal" stated, their business is "a river of nickels".  They’ve got to charge you for parking, even if you don’t drive, they’ve got to overcharge you for food, and they’ve got to get a kickback from Ticketmaster (if they went all in, the acts would want to commission the fee) to barely eke out a profit.

Huh?

Worse is the on sale date.

By time there’s the big ad in the newspaper, frequently there are only hundreds of tickets available in arenas that hold 20,000.  Because there’s the fan club pre-sale, the AmEx pre-sale, the platinum sales on Ticketmaster…  In other words, you can’t get a good ticket.

Which is why StubHub is the outlet of choice for so many people.  Shop at your leisure, get exactly the ticket you want.  Sure, you’ve got to pay a lot for it, but you don’t have to buy it!

So which way do the acts want it?  Do they truly want to be men and women of the people, insuring that their real fans get in the building at a cheap price, good seats for face value…  Or, do they want to pay lip service to the foregoing and employ shenanigans to insure that they make a fortune, all the while pointing fingers at everybody else?

Sure, brokers are a problem.  Then again, did you read that story where the major purveyors of talent sat down with the brokers to try and cut a deal?  Ultimately fell through, because how can two untrustworthy entities come to an agreement?

So, the public is the loser.

Assuming the public cares about going to the show.

And so many don’t.  They’d rather sit at home and watch HD content on the big screen.  Or surf the Net.  Do you really need to go to the show to know what’s going on in the world?  Almost never.  The gig is an overstylized, overmanaged, manufactured concoction.  The Emperor’s New Clothes.  And if you’ve already paid a fortune to see the Stones and Aerosmith already, why should you go again?  It’s not like they have any new hits!

So, ultimately, the business has to point the finger at itself.

It wants short term results.  Instantly successful acts.  Which makes about as much sense as forcing people to marry on the first date.

It wants to overcharge for concert tickets to make up for the revenue lost in the recorded music sphere.  Which is kind of like a fired employee showing up at the office of his old company with a gun, imploring the CEO to write him a check.

It wants to believe, like that old Talking Heads song, that it will be the same as it ever was.

But it’s not.

So who we gonna blame?

Oh, that’s right.  It’s the customer.  Stealing the music.

Without a customer, there’s no business.

Thank god the customer is stupid, and doesn’t want to believe that their favorite performers are greedy bastards.  Otherwise, there’d be a lot of soul-searching in the offices of labels, managers and concert promoters.

I just don’t get it.  We bail out bankers and they pay themselves bonuses.  Many of us don’t have health insurance and those that do have to pay for those that don’t, the public picking up hospital fees for the indigent.  But we take it.  I’m surprised there’s not a revolution in this country.  Maybe now that this story has made it to television, there will be.

Oh no there won’t.  In an endless news cycle populated by vacation kidnappings and fake news created by people who want to get a TV show do we really expect anything of substance to gain traction?

There’s a wealth of information on this website.  Because they got hard data, the law requiring its availability.  But you won’t read it.  You’d rather just sit back and blame Ticketmaster.  And Live Nation too.

It’s like that old movie.  What would Jack Nicholson say?  We can’t handle the truth?

Damn straight.

Are you catching the Britney brouhaha Down Under?  Turns out she MIMES!

She’s got to.  In order to deliver on the audience’s expectations.  She’s got to be the Britney from TV.  Perfect in every way.  Dazzling them with her dance moves.  And it’s almost impossible to dance like that and sing.  Have you ever talked to one of those fucks who calls you when he’s on the treadmill?  You wonder if they’re going to have a heart attack during the conversation!

But what does the audience expect?  A show, a tightly choreographed presentation, something you watch and ooh and ahh to?  Or a musical performance, that penetrates your body and mind?

Last time I checked, I didn’t see Widespread Panic on TV.  Look at MediaBase, they’re not in the Top Forty either.  By nineties standards, they don’t exist.  But it’s 2010.

In the MTV-era, you had to look good.  Your video had to be visually interesting.  To the point where in the nineties, they wouldn’t trust so-called "artists" with creative issues, too much money was at stake.  Write with the usual suspects, the pros, to create something we know we can sell.  And we’ll employ one of the usual suspect directors to create a sleek clip.  Hell, if we don’t get it right, we’ll scrap it and redo it!  You only get one chance to make an impression.  If it’s not exactly right, you’re toast.  Kind of like the new album by Mariah Carey and the pushed-back opus by Alicia Keys.  The initial singles stiffed, and the labels wanted to whip up a frenzy in order to sell a hundred thousand albums right away!  Thus, the release delay.  If you’re phenomenally lucky, you can ultimately sell a million.  Still, you might mean nothing on the road.  Is this a game you want to play?

Sure, there are old warhorses like Ms. Carey, but most of the acts are brand new.  Thrown up against the wall and then discarded.  They all have one thing in common.  They want to be FAMOUS!  They’re no different than the idiots on reality TV.  They want to appear on TMZ and Perez.  Then they’ll think they’ve made it.  But that making it is very different from the old paradigm.

In the old days you played music to get out of the mines, to get away from having a boss, so you didn’t have to wear a suit and tie to work.  Shit, you ultimately have more freedom going to college and learning how to code than subjecting yourself to the starmaking machinery today.  Look at Justin Timberlake.  He sacrificed Janet Jackson.  He couldn’t admit he was complicit in Boobiegate and that it was no big deal.  He issued a lame mea culpa the same way a truant student tells a principal what he wants to hear.  Whereas the rock stars of yore had a foolproof reaction to bullshit, to the system…THE MIDDLE FINGER!

Hell, John Lennon said the Beatles were bigger than Jesus and didn’t bother apologizing. He tried to explain, but the media wasn’t listening, because it was too dumb.  Whereas in the sixties, before the Born Again conflagration, there was no doubt the Beatles were bigger than Jesus.  But you can’t speak the truth.  Hell, you still can’t speak the truth!  Just look at our inane political system!

Let me ask you…

If I told you you could wear whatever you wanted, your jeans, your favorite shirt, hit the stage to adoring fans whenever you played and get all the dope and sex you wanted, would you say yes?

This was the equation back in the golden era of classic rock.  And it was all centered on the music.  If you were good enough, you could rape and pillage across the world, for years, in the case of Robert Plant and Mick Jagger, FOREVER!  Just by being yourself, you earned the keys to the kingdom, you lived in an alternative universe, even better than the real one.

Widespread Panic lives in an alternative universe.  One where everything the dying media says is important is irrelevant.  They hold the record for sell-outs at Red Rocks (with 32). They’ve been at it for twenty plus years, and they’re bigger than ever.

Twenty plus years…  Many of the Top Forty idiots aren’t even that old.  Do we really think they know how to play?  That they’ve got something to say?

Now I won’t say the Panic show was without visuals.  There was a giant disc behind the band that featured geometric shapes, turning and twisting like at the Fillmore.  And there was a plethora of animated spotlights.  But the attraction was the music, plain and simple.

Nobody dressed up for the gig.  The audience looked just like me.  Wearing jeans.  Getting psyched up for the gig had nothing to do with makeup, nothing to do with outfits, it was about head space.  Were you willing to show up, relax your mind and float downstream?

Aided by substances both legal and illegal?

Sure, everybody seemed high, whether each and every one of them was or not.  You see, they wanted to be set free.  That’s what the music used to do, that’s what you’re missing at the Britney show.  Britney’s delivering a movie, Widespread Panic is delivering a dream.

There was a drummer and a percussionist.  A keyboardist dropping in delicious fills.  Dave Schools held down the bottom like he had a monopoly on mud in the delta.  But what was most fascinating was the guitar interplay between John Bell and Jimmy Herring.

Jimmy’s amps said "Fuchs" and "Tone Tubby".  This was not generic, the equipment had been hand-selected, to deliver this exact tone.

There was no click track, nothing was prerecorded.  But the band instantly found a groove and laid down in it, pulling the entire audience along.  And the electricity was palpable.  It was like every attendee was plugged into a socket, causing them to twist and turn, jump and groove to the music.

Music.  That’s what’s been sacrificed.  You didn’t used to go to the show to hear the expected, but the unexpected.  The band was good enough to pull you along whether you knew the material or not.  It was an ADVENTURE!

That started at 8:15 and ended at midnight.  You couldn’t complain you didn’t get your money’s worth.

So here’s the part where you tell me what Widespread Panic is missing, how it can be changed into a Goliath, a household word.  But the band DOESN’T GIVE A FUCK!  Don’t you get it?  THEY’RE DOING IT THEIR WAY!

And their way is pretty good, better than yours, because almost a quarter of a century in, they can still work, they can still live the lifestyle, they can still feel the rush of the audience’s applause.

You can play the old game.  But it doesn’t pay the dividends it used to.  Rihanna may be big in the mainstream, but more people want to see Widespread Panic.  If not today, definitely tomorrow.

We’re rebuilding.  And we’re starting with music.

It’s a much slower build.  Flash, explosions, sexuality get instant attention.  But do you really care who won the third season of "Survivor"?  "Big Brother"?  The endless string of one hit wonders run together.  Those who make music first and foremost, who follow their instincts, their creativity, are the ones who stand for ages.

You may get screams at a Britney show, but you don’t get the passion you experience at a Widespread Panic gig.  At a Panic show fans feel the music.  They want to get closer.  They don’t want to watch, they want to be a part of it!

And listeners are key.  Great performers feed off the energy of their audience.  How can you do that when your entire act is on hard drive?

READ THIS:

Alert, Connect, Sell: Releasing Get Busy Committee

You’re looking for answers?

Here’s some.

Not every band can have a manager like Ian Rogers of Topspin.

Not every band is good enough to make it.

I was thrown off a bit by the act having radio play, however minimal it is, but there’s a PLETHORA of good information in this blog post.

The skills and relationships music biz pros need today are completely different from those of the old model.

Sure, radio and CDs still mean something.  But for how long?

We’re too old.

That’s what Herbie Hancock said at Quincy Jones’ Music Consortium.

He told a story.  Of being in Japan and getting one of the original PlayStations.

Now Herbie considers himself to be technologically adept.  When he got back to the States, he hooked the PlayStation up, even though the instructions were in Japanese.  But he couldn’t get past the first level of the one and only included video game, involving samurai warriors.  After three or four hours, he gave up.

But a few weeks later, his buddy came over with his nine year old son, Ryan.  When Herbie told Ryan he had a PlayStation, the kid started bouncing off the walls, he was doing cartwheels.  Herbie led him to the living room, told him he’d had trouble figuring it out and to give it a go.

Half an hour later, after catching up with his bud, Herbie returned to the living room to find Ryan on level four of the samurai game.  Ryan started explaining what was going on.  This warrior was a force for good, this one a force for bad, this one could be both, depending on how you played.

Point being kids today are born into technology, they’ve got a natural facility.  We oldsters, as adept as we may become, will always be a step behind.  With children it’s instinct.  The children are literally the future.

Oh, don’t blast me for using the cliche.  Too many people use children as an excuse for their lame behavior today.  My point, Herbie’s point, is that the kids will have the solutions.  We can start the ball moving on music education, but the kids own the court.

Kind of like Shelly Berg, who runs the music education department at the University of Miami.  He’s now using YouTube for instruction, having students play along with some of the greats.  You don’t deny technology, you embrace it!

Great wisdom for the baby boomers now controlling media.

But more important is to note that solutions will come from this younger generation. Whilst oldsters go to lunch, play golf at the club, kids are coming up with solutions. Oldsters want a band that will be ubiquitous, that will rain down coin.  It’s necessary to support the purveyors’ lifestyles.  But kids are excited about music and the process first.  The end result comes second.  Or the end result doesn’t have to be today, it can be tomorrow, or the day after that.  Kids are still dreamers, they haven’t had the optimism beaten out of them.

Today’s kids are the anti-baby boomers.  Rather than striving for individual achievement, what’s most important is cohesion, being a member of the group.  And it’s groups that will birth the future.  You can’t have a successful act without an audience.  And kids know how to grow said audience, and aren’t worried if at first it’s just thousands, and not millions.  And kids today know how to use the new technology, how to stimulate and stay connected with these groups, that’s the social networking revolution.  Instead of putting up barriers, preventing the free flow of both information and copyrighted material, they see easy conduits.  They don’t believe information must be free, but they do believe everybody must have access to it.

So new methods of payment must be constructed.  And the oldsters are penalized by their thinking, that starts with too many zeros.  Kids today are interested in traction.  And will jump to where the traction is on a whim, instantly, if their friends are there, if it’s appealing.

In other words, it’s about the audience, not marketing.  Once a kid feels he’s being sold to…  You’d better have an incredible product, like an iPhone.  Otherwise, not only are they skeptical, they bad mouth you.

So, when you construct an album of tunes written by old hacks, putting a pretty face atop it all, like a cherry, kids may consume the one hit track, but don’t believe in the act and don’t want any more.  They’re on to our game.  The key is to find something they believe in, and will continue to believe in.

There are so many tools.  And so many being invented every day.  Usually, by these kids who learned how to code in school, or by themselves at home, out of pure desire.  You might say the younger generation is too self-focused, too myopic, but I think you’re missing the point.  They’ve got incredible dedication to what they believe in.  They don’t have short attention spans, just an unusual ability to graze and pull out exactly what they’re looking for.  They’ll spend hours, days with what truly interests them.  Just watch kids playing Halo and tell me they’ve got short attention spans.

They get all this, we oldsters do not.  Our role is not to put up barriers, but to enable kids.  Give them tools, support and money so they can grow the future.  Which is coming upon us ever faster.  More rewarding for the individual as we go.

Just think about it.  We used to hunt rare record shops for discontinued product. Kids today have the history of recorded music at their fingertips.  Should they pay for it?  Absolutely!  But not at CD prices.  And I dare you to say this is bad.  To be able to tell someone about Frank Zappa’s "Absolutely Free" and let them hear it, miles away, oceans away, in short order.  I hunted for years for "Lump Gravy".  Now everybody can have "Lumpy Gravy".  You can say I wasted years, but times change, and we need to change with them.

Great acts will be born.  They’ll generate a ton of revenue.  And they’ll be a lot better, with greater longevity than the crap foisted upon the public in the MTV era.  We sold lowest common denominator.  Kids are interested in crap with train-wreck value, but they’re dedicated to that with substance.

There’s a generation gap miles deep.  You might think your kid is your best friend, that you’re aware of everything he does, what he’s thinking, but you’re clueless. Even if you steal his phone, check his texts and IM’s, you don’t know what’s going on in his mind, the way he processes information, the opportunities he sees.

What’s the cliche?  Lead or get out of the way?

Make no mistake, the kids are the leaders.  Either help them, or step aside.