I heard about this first from Rapino.<\/p>\n
But no one’s listening to him, they’re just hating on Live Nation.<\/p>\n
For years Rapino’s been telling everybody that LN’s average customer goes to slightly more than one show a year.\u00c2\u00a0 Absolutely frightening unless you’re someone who lives in the present and believes the future’s gonna look just like the past.<\/p>\n
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.\u00c2\u00a0 2.1 times per year in 2000 and .9 in 2010.<\/p>\n
I don’t want to hear a fucking thing about the economy.\u00c2\u00a0 If you blame this reduction on the economy you’re someone who refuses to take blame and passes the buck, to someone like Ticketmaster.<\/p>\n
Sure, everybody hates the TM fees.\u00c2\u00a0 But TM is paid to be hated.\u00c2\u00a0 The acts LOVE the TM fee.\u00c2\u00a0 It allows them to make more money while painting TM as evil.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
First and foremost you must have desirable talent.\u00c2\u00a0 There’s a business in staging classic rock shows, just like there’s a business in catalog movies and music.\u00c2\u00a0 But the lion’s share of the revenue comes from new acts. And new acts are overhyped and overpriced.<\/p>\n
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.)\u00c2\u00a0 Now no specific medium has a hold on audience mindshare and the public is used to things being here today and gone tomorrow.\u00c2\u00a0 Like the Keith Richards hype.\u00c2\u00a0 A tsunami last week, nonexistent this week.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 And it isn’t exactly hype, you have to continue to be in people’s minds.\u00c2\u00a0 And you can only do this by creating music that people need.\u00c2\u00a0 This is not a momentary hit.\u00c2\u00a0 You’ve got to speak from the gut, you’ve got to touch souls.<\/p>\n
Ubiquity is not coming back.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 How are we going to get people to see these acts?<\/p>\n
On some level, it works already.\u00c2\u00a0 We’ve got Sufjan Stevens who charges $30 to see a show the mainstream is clueless about.\u00c2\u00a0 But it’s hard to get rich on $30 a ticket.<\/p>\n
Everybody still wants to get rich from a business that’s being reinvented.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 The audience is saying NO MAS, certainly not at these prices, maybe not at any prices.<\/p>\n
You’ve got to leave money on the table.<\/p>\n
That’s what Taylor Swift does.\u00c2\u00a0 She doesn’t charge what the traffic will bear, she gives a deal!\u00c2\u00a0 If you’re ripping people off, they don’t come back.\u00c2\u00a0 Even GaGa, she toured once cheaply, then expensively.\u00c2\u00a0 How many people are gonna go in the future for over $100 if she has no hits?<\/p>\n
And if you’re dependent on hits, you’re fucked.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Can acts ask for less?<\/p>\n
They’re gonna have to, if they want to survive.\u00c2\u00a0 Look at the Dave Matthews Band for example.<\/p>\n
Is Ticketmaster a problem?\u00c2\u00a0 Of course, that’s why we’ve got to go all in.\u00c2\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00c2\u00a0 They expect to overpay to see explosions.\u00c2\u00a0 Whereas when done right, music explodes in your brain at the local club, at the local theatre.\u00c2\u00a0 But how can people know this if they never go?<\/p>\n
You can’t take full production to small halls, you lose too much money.\u00c2\u00a0 Which is maybe why you need to lose the production, which has almost nothing to do with music.<\/p>\n
We need a giant reset.\u00c2\u00a0 Before the concert industry completely implodes.<\/p>\n
I’m not saying it’s going away.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 And that’s a problem.<\/p>\n
Music doesn’t drive the culture.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s a sideshow.\u00c2\u00a0 Facebook is hotter.<\/p>\n
And that’s a shame.<\/p>\n
Because there’s no medium innately hotter than music.<\/p>\n
But that requires its purveyors to respect it.\u00c2\u00a0 To realize they’re in it for the long haul.\u00c2\u00a0 To entice customers with reasonable prices for great product so they’ll come back again.<\/p>\n
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