This is something that has been on my mind for the past two months or so, but I have been avoiding writing about it. Partially because I didn’t want to freak people out, and partially because I wanted to wait and see if I was actually going loop the loop on the subject or not. But it seems that it’s becoming more of an issue out there as each day goes by, so I thought I’d finally bite the bullet and put it down on virtual paper, so to speak.
2008 has been a tough year on the live music front, period. The summer saw the cancellation of several major European festivals, for several different reasons (loss of sponsors, poor ticket sales, weather conditions etc), and we all thought that it was just a bad coincidence. Festivals and events get cancelled all the time, so most thought nothing major of it when we heard about another one being called off. Of course there is always the initial shock and ensuing speculation amongst music industry insiders, but the summer was so damn busy this year that people’s minds (both industry and audience) moved on to the next event within a millisecond.
When the whole international financial crisis really hit front page news, we all naively thought that the industry would be fine and it wouldn’t effect us. However, it has effected the industry, and this is only the tip of the iceberg. In the last two months I’ve heard nothing but doom and gloom from promoters, venues, agents and people working in brand management about how sponsors are pulling out of up coming events left, right and centre, leaving the future of the festivals and other major events in the balance. However, it’s not just the festivals, it’s also effecting venues right across Europe. Promoter friends of mine (both independent and major) in Ireland, England, France, Austria, Germany, Norway, Sweden and Spain are all complaining about the same thing – people just don’t seem to be buying tickets!
I always like to use Ireland as a sort of litmus paper. The public there are fiercely loyal gig goers and Ireland is among the highest per capita in record buying public in Europe. Perhaps this is a result of music being one of the main national exports, I don’t know. Dublin has always been one of my favourite cities, reason being there is ALWAYS something to go to, and at least 5 great gigs you would love to go and see on any given night. There’s craic to be had, and if you’re Irish, you know that ‘craic’ is a figure of speech we use that means ‘having fun’, and so it’s not to be confused with the type you smoke, which incidentally is spelled rather differently. Any doubts, check it on Wikipedia.
While mainstream acts with a well established fanbase manage to fill major venues, it’s looking fairly bleak for everyone else. Poor ticket pre-sales and miserable attendance at shows seems to be a common complaint amongst the promoters and venues. High ticket prices and saturation is a common complaint amongst gig goers. Booking agents are complaining because local promoters are starting to pull the purse strings on fees, and bands are effected as they can no longer command the fees they usually get.
Meanwhile, Joe Soap across the way in the office, (even if he really is into music in a big way), has to get the album, listen to it, and it might be six months to a year before he’d consider parting with his hard earned cash and going to see the band in concert. The public are really having to think about it this way. Average ticket prices in Dublin range from €20 – €25 if your lucky. Albums average at about €19. Even you consider that Joe might go to only 6 gigs a year, that’s still quite a financial commitment to those 6 acts, when he can get a festival ticket for either the Oxegen or Electric Picnic festivals, see those aforementioned 6 acts along with another 150 other bands for the same price! Not alone that, but with the low cost of flights these days, festivals right across Europe are an option. So, not alone will Joe be at a festival, but will have a foreign holiday too! Think about it. With festivals, there’s always this comfort in knowing that if one of those aforementioned acts are shite on stage, then he can just move to another stage and see another one. You can’t do that in a venue where you’ve paid out to see them headline! In this case, Joe would probably complain about it to his friends on the bus ride home (assuming he can still get a bus as opposed to a taxi home at that hour!).
Physical record sales are also in the decline, largely as a result of the digital boom, but also, prices have to be a factor too. Long gone are the days where you could go into a major chain record store and get three great albums for €21. And the public are asking themselves why should they, when they can get the records cheaper online and either have them delivered to their house or upload it to their iPod from the comfort of their armchair? Convenience shopping I tell you, and this is what has gotten the record stores into the panic they’re in right now. And this is also what has gotten the record company marketing execs doing overtime trying to come up with ideas of how to penetrate (and control/manage) the online market. People have so much to do these days that the prospect of spending time going into town, trawling through racks of records only to find the album you’re looking for is either too expensive/only available on Japanese import/not available/or just sold out, seems like a complete waste of time! Not alone that, but ‘mainstream public’ are being (force) fed music at such an astonishing rate, that they just don’t know who to invest into anymore. Bands that were huge in January are yesterday’s news within a matter of months, so it’s down to fads. And where fads are concerned, audience do not invest in the artist on a short term basis, let alone a long term. Instead they chose to stay on the fence, observe, listen to what they can listen to for free and hang onto their hard earned money. The money used to buy music (be it an album or a ticket) is considered to be disposable income, so the question is; has music really ended up being categorized as a luxury item? And if so, how the hell did we let this happen?
An industry friend of mine in Dublin recently told me that people are choosing to go to the off-licence and stay in these days as opposed to going out to a gig, spending a considerable amount of money on a ticket (for a show that is most likely only 45-60 minutes in duration), and coughing up a fiver for each drink! Is that really what is putting people off? I mean, it can’t be the only factor.
A recent article in the Guardian summed up the whole live thing pretty well:
Live music is booming. We’ve heard that many times in the past few years: record sales may be tanking, illegal downloading is voraciously eating away at profits, and even this year’s Christmas edition of Top of the Pops was briefly cancelled (before being reinstated after an industry outcry) – but the live scene is doing a roaring trade, we are often told. More of us are going to gigs than ever before, and bands are cleaning up through ticket and merchandise sales. Oasis, for example, have shifted 180,000 tickets for two Wembley stadium dates next July, and Take That’s four gigs at the same venue, also in July, sold out within minutes.
But ask an industry type what state the live scene is really in right now, and you’ll get a worried look. Record-breaking tours like Take That’s are the exception these days; unless you’re a super A-lister who can charge £100 a seat with impunity, a legend like Leonard Cohen, or a must-see cult artist, your gigs will be affected by a growing downturn in the live music market. Ticket sales are slackening, tours are being downsized – in short, the gig scene is being credit-crunched.
“After 15 years of growth, now we’re seeing it slow down,” says Rob Challice of the Coda agency, which books tours for indie darlings Bon Iver and Alela Diane, among others. “Too many bands are touring, ticket prices have risen too much, and some tours are not performing as you’d expect. We’re also seeing the phenomenon where shows sell very quickly to start with, then the sales dry up till a couple of weeks before the gig, because people are leaving it very late to decide whether to go.”
That’s bad news for a whole swath of people: venue managers, agents, bands, promoters and record company staff. After a summer during which many festivals were cancelled because of poor ticket sales, and Glastonbury tickets were still available almost up until the day, a winter of the same is the last thing the live industry needs. Yet everyone I spoke to is expecting it to happen.
“The way we see things at the moment,” says Matt Wooliscroft of SJM Concerts, one of the UK’s major promoters, “is that we have a lot of top-end stuff – we promote Take That, and that sold a phenomenal amount, and Oasis and Kings of Leon [the latter have joined the big touring leagues since their multiple festival appearances over the summer]. But where we’re finding it harder is the mid-level, City Hall- and Academy-sized tours. It’s getting harder to sell tickets. Bands that tour regularly are finding it harder. People are seeing bands maybe once [during the life of] a record, whereas they used to see them a couple of times and maybe at a festival. Now there’s a lack of repeat business.”
He cites as an example Kaiser Chiefs, who have an arena tour scheduled for March. Their recently released third album, Off With Their Heads, performed disappointingly – it’s currently at No 50 in the chart – and the tour has yet to sell out. “There are numerous bands at the Kaisers’ level – where once they’d do multiple arena nights, now they’re just doing one night per city, and some bands have to scale back to smaller venues,” Wooliscroft says. “And you have to be realistic about what you can charge for tickets. People decide they can’t afford £19.50, but might do it if it was £15.”
He also notes a problem in the amount of choice available – meaning more gigs than ever are spread around the same number of punters. “Next February, there’s a phenomenal number of tours: the Killers, Bloc Party, Keane, Snow Patrol,” he points out. Not to mention the Wombats, Katy Perry, Tricky and Basement Jaxx, to name another handful at random. But they have no choice but to tour – the reason every group and its mother is hitting the road is to shore up their income against the decrease in album sales. Playing live is now a necessary part of making a living from music. The Pet Shop Boys, for instance, were able to get away with a quirky no-touring policy in the freewheeling 80s, but have since changed their tune to the point where it would be pretty remarkable if there were no live dates to accompany their 10th album when it is released next spring.
And for a younger band such as McFly, who now self-release albums after having left Island Records this year, gigging is crucial. Despite all four of their albums having reached the top 10, including two No 1s, manager Matthew Fletcher admits: “Our album sales have dropped consistently for the last five years. We’re constantly looking for new revenue streams. We’ve never relied on album sales to make money: in terms of revenue generated, it’s predominantly from touring and merchandising.” Indeed, McFly gave the current album, RadioActive, away with the Mail on Sunday in July, which undoubtedly affected sales when a “deluxe” version went on sale in September: it never went higher than a disappointing No 8.
They’ve just completed a UK tour that also failed to sell as well as they’d been accustomed to. At their Sheffield Arena show, despite the enthusiasm of a crowd of around 7,000, the back third of the arena was curtained off, empty. “Sheffield was a couple of thousand short of capacity,” Fletcher agrees. “We put our tickets on sale just as the economy was slowing down, our album came out the week Lehman Bros were going under, and we couldn’t have had an album and tour on sale at a worse time. We’ve done well, but we might have expected to do better. When I talked to our agent about our ticket sales, he said, ‘Fletch, you should see how other tours are doing. Unless it’s Take That or Oasis, people aren’t buying as many tickets.’”
But at least Fletcher’s charges weren’t faced with the ignominy of having to cancel dates, whereas others purportedly were. “I’ve heard about artists who’ve cancelled shows because of illness who aren’t really ill,” he says, though he refuses to name names. For some artists, low sales might be attributable less to the economy than to the public simply deciding they were no longer interested (witness, say, Lenny Kravitz having to downsize a Wembley Arena gig to Brixton Academy a few months ago); but even with these acts, it seems likely that money, or lack of it, played a part.
Ian Binnington, who promotes gigs in Portsmouth and Southampton, has noticed that “mature” gig-goers – those with mortgages and families – “are beginning to believe they should be concerned about the credit crunch, and they’re more cautious about where they’re spending their money. Audiences for younger bands, the NME and Kerrang! bands, always seem to be able to find the money, because it’s coming from their parents in a lot of cases. But even there, where people would chance a fiver on seeing a show by a band they’ve read about, they’re now going to be a lot [less] speculative, because £5 now means a lot more than it did a year ago.”
Something that’s frequently mentioned as a punter deterrent is high ticket prices – and the advent of “secondary ticketing” companies such as Seatwave and ViaGogo, which market themselves as fan-to-fan ticket exchanges, has exacerbated the situation. Secondary agencies make their money by collecting a percentage of each sale, encouraging sellers to charge as high a price as possible, and it has become the norm for some “fans” to fund their night out by buying more tickets than they need with a view to selling them on such sites. Rob Challice says he would love it if the recession hit the secondaries. “If one thing happens next year, the live-music industry will take a long, hard look at the amount of money agencies are charging on top of tickets. The punter and the artist want to see the punter pay an amount as near to the face value of the ticket as possible.”
Even Seatwave CEO Joe Cohen agrees prices on the secondaries have been “artificially inflated”, and says his company has been “working very hard to decrease them. In the last 12 months, they’ve come down 20%.” Presumably, that is akin to estate agents persuading people to charge a more “realistic” price for the homes they’re trying to sell – but it just illustrates what everyone else has been saying: top-of-the-range acts are still thriving, while the mid-range are suffering. “What we’re seeing is a flight to quality, where people want to see really good, top-tier things. The middle-tier acts who might have easily sold out last year are having a tough time of it. The average price of the Kaiser Chiefs at Wembley in the last seven days is £52 [face value £28.50], whereas the Kings of Leon, who are very hot, are trading for £149.50 [face value £30].”
A solution many are considering is packaging acts together in the style of the 60s Motown revues, to offer better value for money. Ian Ashbridge, who runs the Surrey-based niche label Wrasse, recently did so with his African Soul Rebels tour, “putting on three big artists [Amadou and Mariam, Souad Massi and Emmanuel Jal] who would normally play on separate bills”.
But, says Gordon Masson of the trade paper Music Week, “there’s a lot of fear about what might happen next year. People will turn up and not spend money on merchandise, or nurse one pint of beer all night, which will impact on smaller venues, because they survive on beer sales. A guy at the Luminaire [a London club with a reputation for breaking new acts] said to me, ‘We don’t make any money on bands – if it wasn’t for beer sales, we’d collapse.’”
The positive thing, though, is that the live industry is now compelled to find creative responses. Michael Rapino, CEO of the huge events-promoters Live Nation – whose share price recently fell 11% – has raised the possibility of offering discounts on tickets. Others predict that booking fees, those annoying little surcharges detested by fans, may drop. Package tours seem likely. And we can take a degree of pleasure from something Fletcher says: “I think this is flushing out bands who don’t deserve to be touring.”
This leads to the whole ‘greed’ factor that the public seem to be up in arms about. For instance, MGMT played Ireland 5 times this year and Foals played 4 times. Can someone somewhere please explain to me what the management/agent/promoters were thinking? Clearly it was a financial thing, but why complain about poor ticket sales for the latter shows when even I (a very loyal gig goer and music consumer) would not go to see a band more than twice in 12 months! Putting that many gigs in, in such a short space of time, will definately lead to audience fatigue, not to mention media fatigue! Is it any wonder that attendance was down? Yet, people scratched their heads trying to figure out why. It’s quite simple really. The media had probably already heralded the first show from the rooftops, the second one may have sold based on reviews from the previous gig, but the third, fourth and fifth outings? I’d say it was a matter of ‘oh no, not them again’ and editors relegating bands to a few short lines in the gig guide, if anything.
Poor press & PR = poor attendance.
Repeat business to a target audience within short space of time = poor attendence.
Continuiously high ticket prices for each subsequent show (even if the first one may have sold out on the public’s perception that it may be an exclusive event) = poor attendance.
Target audience being the same pool of gig goers that 5 better bands are trying to get to their shows on the same night = poor attendence.
Less is more, but this way it’s just flaahing the ass out of it which will effect the act in the long run. There’s only so much shelf life you can get out of one album in one territory, is it possible that promoters and agents may have forgotten that? Also, do alot of the promoters even bother to check out what else might be happening on the same night when they’re scheduling in gigs?
Sure, bands need to tour. It generates great revenue from fees and merchandise. Tours promote albums. Album sales benefit record companies financially (mostly). Sales generate chart positions. Chart positions influence airplay. Airplay motivates audience. Audience buys ticket/album. Record company happy, agent happy, management happy, promoters happy. The record stores have more than one act to consider on their shelves, so I’m not sure it would make much of a difference to them, but the question is, are the public happy? Really? Are they getting value for money?
Getting back to the bands. Any of the acts I know would rather play an intimate medium – large sized show, have a bit of two way communication going on with the audience and take a more modest fee instead of performing on a huge stage at a festival, in front of a sea of 60,000+ grey, faceless, heads. It can only be compared to performing behind a sheet of plexi glass, not just for the band, but for the public also. Sure, it’s good bread and butter for the band, but it has a rather high cost, and conveyor belt performances are not what people expect. From the bands point of view, they walk up the steps, have a tech hand them their instruments, the agent/publicist/manager slap them on the back, clap and shout ‘go on, knock ‘em dead, you rock!’. The band goes through the motions on stage, gets off, gets paid, and gets on a nightliner to the next festival the following day, exhausted. That’s because this is one of several back to back dates that they have in a few different countries! From the public point of view, they’re shelling out a ridiculous amount of money to be one of 60,000+ people standing in a mucky field, in the pissing rain, watching the band on screens on stage left and right, because the band are mere specks in the distance from where they are standing. And that’s if you’re lucky enough not to be in the pit, where you probably end up missing the show anyway as you’re too busy fighting for your patch of ground with the people next to you…or you faint and get carried over the barriers and around the back! Either way, it has to be one of the most impersonal ways to experience music. These days, the majority of festival goers attend just because it’s become the norm to go to the obligatory summer festival (by way of marking the fact that it’s summer), get drunk with friends, wander between stages, get muddy and tell drunken stories in the weeks that follow. What do they get out of it other than a bit of dirt, a few bruises and the need to rehydrate and take an aspirin? It’s the stories, not the music.
This all leads me to the following two points. Music nerds like myself would only relish at the prospect of spending an afternoon, if not a whole day, on our hands and knees smelling vinyl, pawing artwork and reading through the album credits with what can probably only be described as childhood glee. It might not have been planned that way, but once you get in there it become a black hole, where time and all concept of it, vanishes. To me, record stores can only be compared to shrines, and so, making the pilgrimage and paying homage comes naturally. Up until now, we had been a dying breed. At this point, I should also (proudly) declare that I do not own an iPod or any other type of portable MP3 player, and I do not plan on doing so. Ever.
The same can be applied to concerts. There is a growing trend of shows being booked into smaller, more intimate, arty spaces as opposed to the traditional music venues. These sort of venues make the show an overall experience, not just for the band, but also for the audience. It creates an intimacy that most music venues lack, and brings back the whole concept of music being about emotion, as opposed to the sterile ‘thing’ it has developed into in recent years.
One thing I have noticed, is that bands have started spending alot more thought, time, and money on packaging. So why stop there? Why not see the bigger picture? Why spend all that effort producing beautiful album artwork and then go play in a horrible square venue, that stinks of stale beer and your feet stick to the ground while you walk to queue at what will probably a 15 minute wait for a warm, flat, beer at a bar, or a trip to a toilet that was last cleaned about 5 years ago?? If it was in mainland Europe, you could also add the stink of cigarette smoke to that list. I would love to see more acts take it the step further and package their events, and themselves, accordingly! But this isn’t always as easy as that, as it would be difficult to persuade the people getting their percentages to do so.
I know that this may be considered a hard hitting article by many. But being the eternal optimist that I am, I see this as being a very positive turning point in the industry and the way that music will be promoted and marketed in the future. The amount of gigs/new music out there is rather dizzying to be honest, and I don’t blame people for feeling sensory overload and burning out on the topic. Things need to get right back to a grass root level in order to build up again, and give people the securities that they crave. This challenge is something that I hope will be met, but seeing as it involves alot of industry people using a bit of creative thinking for a change instead of a calculator, I’m not so sure how it will all fare. So, all I can do is hope.
A recent Irish Times article touched on this grass roots issue. It brought back memories of working with Damien Rice, right back in the beginning. The memories were of him and the band all packing into a car, driving around Ireland and starting off in tiny venues on a tour in Autumn 2001. They played to whoever would listen, spent time afterwards talking to the people who came, then drove off and did it all over again the next night, and the next night, and the next night. In between, he played instores, did interviews, and knowing Lisa, they probably ate copious amounts of cake. It was a very tough time and alot of work, but it certainly paid off because by the time he released his debut album ‘O’ less than 6 months later, he had sold out a 1500 capacity venue in Dublin, and if I remember correctly, his album went in at #1 in the Irish album charts. Of course he plays much larger shows nowadays, and he’s sold a few more records (millions as opposed to thousands), but he still manages to keep it personal, give the audience an intimate show, and make each person feel like they are the only one in the room. He is proof that investing time into the public does pay off, and his public are willing to invest in him because he makes the effort. David Gray is another shining example.
So, getting back to the Irish Times article, this was published back in October, and it warmed the cockles of my frosty heart to see that the journalist had identified what is potentially one of the most important, yet most neglected, areas of the business. The personal touch. Here’s the article…
What were you doing last Wednesday night? I know, I know, it’s the kind of question they used to pose on Garda Patrol and still do on Law & Order. Anyway, there was football on TV but there was also a couple of gigs happening in Dublin. Sly & Robbie were in Tripod, Pivot were at Whelan’s and White Hinterland played at Crawdaddy. There were a couple of hundred to see Sly & Robbie, a hundred or so at Pivot and 18 paying punters to see White Hinterland. Lets stick with White Hinterland because there is a lesson here about what the future of this business looks like.
Now, you can look at the fact that White Hinterland pulled 18 punters to a midweek show in Dublin in two ways.
One: well, what do you expect? She’s an unknown. Her records don’t get played on Irish radio shows and there was no big buzz about the show. There’s a recession on. People ain’t going to small shows because they’re spending all their cash on tickets for AC/DC and Oasis and Kings Of Leon. Hell, there was football on the TV.
Two: an unknown act pulled 18 paying punters to a Dublin show on a slow, cold, dreary October night. Why did those 18 punters go to the show?
I’m more interested in the second reason because it tells a great story about the future of this business. We could look at this from the point of view of the promoter and how Recession 2.0 and banks putting on the credit crunch is going to mean a few Irish promoters going out of business, but lets concentrate on the artist for this one. As I keep banging on here, every single new music business model which comes to market is aimed at acts with established audiences. These acts are the ones who have built considerable fan-bases on the back of releasing records on major labels and touring to support these releases. They have been able to do both these things thanks to the largesse and patience of major labels. The majority of established acts owe their financial well-being, pulling power and ability to keep on trucking to a major label who took a punt on them.
New business model pimps are not prepared to put in the spadework or heavy lifting to build an audience from the ground up because it costs too much, takes too long and the audience remains hugely cynical and suspicious about brands, hence why brands go after established acts. They have large chequebooks and that is why established acts tend to respond well to what they have to say. Established acts know that the record label jig is up and they’re looking around for the next big pay-day because band members have college fees to pay or new houses to decorate or plastic surgery to get done.
This concentration on acts who’ve already grabbed their audience leaves White Hinterland outside the tent. Because the major label jig is up, she is probably not going to be able to count on the financial muscle of a major label to back her art. Sure, she has a label who will put out her record, but Dead Oceans do not have the wherewithall to push and plug and kick the ass off that record and turn her into the new, I don’t know, Feist. Such an approach wouldn’t suit the music, of course, but the label isn’t in that position so lets discard that one. Like every other act, Dienel has to tour and tour and tour to spread the word and make some dough, which is why she’s playing to 18 people in Dublin on a Wednesday night.
So far, so depressing, right? Well, not really. At the end of the show, Dienel went to the back of the venue and clocked in for her second shift of the day at the merchandise stand. About 9 or 10 people in all bought a CD or record or t-shirt after the show. Each of them had a chat with her and she signed their purchases. Her merch take for the night was probably around €200, not a bad haul for the night (I’m assuming the venue didn’t take a commission).
But far more valuable than all those euros was the knowledge which Dienel was probably squirreling away as she chatted to the fans. She was learning how those people found out about her music and what they liked about it. She was turning fans into friends and ambassadors. She was sowing the seeds for her next trip to Ireland. She was starting to turn those 18 punters into 100 punters. It’s something she’s going to have to do at every single damn gig she plays until she’s at a stage where she is playing rooms where some nosey fellow from a daily newspaper can’t do a head-count from where he’s standing.
That’s the future of this business for every act in it who does not yet have an established audience capable of keeping him/her/them in the style to which they think should be accustomed. They’re going to have to do – and are hopefully already doing – what Dienel is doing. It’s about making those connections, doing the informal data-mining after every show to find out what DJ is playing your record or what blogger is typing about you or who is best at spreading the word about you in that town. That’s the media info dope Dienel has to take from every show. It’s also about making sure those fans who’ve trucked out to see you go home happy. It’s not quite peer to peer – though many fans would like to think it is – but it’s certainly a lot more than business to consumer. That’s the business info dope Dienel has to get from every show. On top of all that, she has to keep writing the songs and making those records. Any act who is not prepared to do all that might as well apply for that job in Spar right now.
There’s hope out there yet, as long as we don’t take the small things for granted. And for pete’s sake, keep it simple – give everyone a fair chance!
Rant over.
