Facing the music
Music Week, 2007 July, By Christopher Barrett
With many of the most influential figures in the music industry brought together to judge a selection of categories for the second Vodafone Live Music Awards this September, Music Week asked key members of the panel to discuss the challenges facing their burgeoning business, with at times controversial results.
There’s never been a better time to be associated with live music, whether it be as a fan enjoying the diversity of the many festivals on offer and marvelling at the impressive facilities available at any one of the country’s new or revamped venues, or as an executive enjoying the remarkable period of profitability.
Around 45% of the music industry’s workforce is now employed by the live industry, but while the fastest growing sector of the music business is booming, a number of testing hurdles loom ahead.
With the sound of Live Earth still ringing in their ears, a number of organisations are taking steps to help address global warming, including Live Nation and Mean Fiddler’s recent appointment of environment specialists. But, while the industry pulls together behind the Julie’s Bicycle initiative, what else can be done?
From grim-looking groups of men lurking around the doors of venues hissing at fans to “buy or sell” tickets to a new highly organised army of internet touts, the World Wide Web’s effect on the live industry has not been an entirely positive one. Is the answer a range of monitored secondary ticket operations, controlled auctioning of premium seats or legislation to counter re-selling tickets?
While the moves being taken by record labels to profit more effectively from the live market by actively investing in the sector would seem a shrewd step, where does that leave existing operators? To discuss these questions and the challenges ahead, Vodafone Live Music established a panel of experts, representing different elements of the industry, for a round table.
Music Week: How green is the live music industry and what effect do you think Live Earth is likely to have?
Rob Hallett, AEG: The whole music industry ignored the green issue until last week with Live Earth and I think that was a debacle; flying people around the world to come and play two songs for worldwide TV. What Live Earth should have done is adopt all the gigs that were happening on July 7, and there was a lot, and put cameras on all of them, turn it into a TV show and broadcast it via satellite. You would have had a multi-artist event, a lot of the biggest acts were playing somewhere in the world, and no-one would have had to get on a plane, no one would have had to drive anywhere that they were not going anyway. Then it would have made a real point.
Steve Strange, X-Ray: The irony is that a lot of bands were flying all over the world. The newspapers were talking about Razorlight, as an example of a band that played early on in the day and was whisked off to somewhere like the North Pole. It’s a shame that that is what the papers picked up on, the sense of irony.
Bob Angus, Metropolis: The most important thing that came out of Live Earth is that at least musicians are making a stand, but it really is going to take the politicians to make inroads to the problem. China is one of the biggest polluters and it’s a matter of making the world more aware.
RH: If I was Chinese I would say “you fuckers have been polluting the planet for the last 100 years, we didn’t have a chance, now because you have fucked it up, why shouldn’t we build a country?”
Paul Morrison, Global Cool: I’m not sure what one day like Live Earth can achieve. Touring is a campaign around the world. If artists have the right messaging in their tour communication, I think that would reach a lot more people when they’re a lot more receptive to messages.
MW: What more can the live industry do to reduce carbon emissions?
RH: There is a lot more we can do, we don’t do enough, but artists want greater and greater production values, so tours are reaching 23 trucks. It’s really hard to deal with the green issues because the nature of touring means bands need to drag their arses around the world so people can see them. That takes trucks and planes.
But there is a lot we can do; we can stop using polystyrene cups and paper, use recyclable plates, make sure that we recycle all the rubbish from the venue at the end of the night. But how much more can we do? Plant a few trees? Is that really going to change the world? I don’t think so.
PM: If you look at live events, about 80% of the emissions come from the audience travelling to and from the event. Bands have to travel, that’s their job. I think the punters themselves can take it on board to carpool, use public transport or to offset their travel. Recycling at the event and incentivising the punters is a such a brilliant and simple idea.
RH: At Coachella that’s been happening since its inception. If you pick things up you get a free bottle of water. It means a really clean site and all the paper cups that are collected are recycled.
MW: Does secondary ticketing have a place in the live music industry?
RH: Yes I do think secondary ticketing has a part to play in the future, I know a lot of my colleagues in the industry don’t necessarily see it like that. What we do need to get rid of is the third-party touts.
Mark Bowen, Wichita: Where do you draw the line between the two?
RH: I think the promoter and the artists should be able to get involved in the secondary ticketing market. I don’t want to end up like the record industry, the internet has revolutionised the whole business. Any business, whether it be the music business, selling cars or clothes pegs on eBay… it’s not going to go away, there is going to be a secondary market.
What we need to do is not be like the record companies – stick our heads in the sand and pretend it’s not happening and complain about people being evil and stealing our stuff and not let the general public have what they essentially want.
There is a market for people that want a front-row seat and will pay the money for it. What I want to do is stop outfits that are not legal at the moment and re-grasp that market for ourselves. If someone wants to pay £500 for a front-row seat, who am I to stop them? I will give them a programme, I’ll give them a bar, I’ll give them a boat trip up and down the Thames; I’ll give them something extra.
Iain Watt, Machine Management: If you give someone a £500 ticket for a front-row seat at a gig, how does that then stop it being sold on for double that by a tout?
RH: There’s always going to be a top end to the market.
IW: There is no top end to the market, if someone wants to pay something for it they will. If it’s an in-demand show, whether it’s Madonna or whoever, there’s bound to be someone who will pay above whatever we set the front-row seat price at. The question is – whatever you set the ticket price at, there is going to be someone willing to pay more for that ticket, so how do we stop that?
RH: That’s the free market and you can’t stop it.
MW: Do you believe mobile ticketing, such as the system used by Vodafone for its TBA events, has a part to play in the battle against touts?
PM: One thing that struck me about the environmental issue is that we are printing millions of tickets, unnecessarily, and these tickets are then able to be sold on. Without the physical ticket, secondary ticketing becomes a non-issue.
BA: I’m totally against the secondary ticketing market. The logical conclusion from the auctioning proposal is that every ticket gets auctioned. The trouble with that is it prevents the whole of the general public from enjoying live music. It takes it out of the price range of many fans. If we go down that route, live music becomes the property of those that can afford it.
RH: If you went down the route of auctioning every ticket in the house, and you had 20,000 tickets, someone is going to get a ticket for 10p.
MB: Why would you do a show for 20,000 if you don’t think every ticket is worth a damn site more than 10p?
RH: It’s supply and demand, like any industry.
BA: I understand you do some auctions and if that’s what your artists want to do then that’s fine, but that’s not the secondary market. The secondary market is people that then buy your ticket and sell it on at profit; the question is where do you draw the line? I think we are in agreement that when it goes beyond the control of what we do that is when we are not happy.
RH: As promoters we are putting up the money and the tickets are our currency, with the artist’s consent we should be able to what the fuck we want with them. We shouldn’t have third parties taking over our business, which is in effect what the secondary ticketing business is doing now.
Also, you are getting all these bands that are trying to beat the secondary ticketing market by having fanclub pre-sales. What they are not realising is probably half of their fanclub are actually touts. At least if we take back control of this and say the front row is never going to go on the market it will go on auction, the punter is guaranteed he will get what he pays for.
There are certain acts that this is meaningful for. Most of the shows that Bob does are standing floors so you don’t have a front row anyway, it’s an indie band and the audience have limited income. It comes in to play only when you are doing Barbra Streisand or Prince.
BA: What I am hoping is that we go toward the Adelaide ruling, where you can re-sell a ticket for no more then 10% of what you bought it for. Then everyone would be happy.
SS: Bring on the technology, because that’s going to stop a hell of a lot of them.
MW: Ian, you manage Mika – how do you think he would feel about his tickets being put up for auction?
IW: I feel pretty uncomfortable about it and I think the artists I look after would feel uncomfortable about it. I think the concept is almost disrespectful to your fans; people who have supported you, bought tickets to your early shows, bought your record, your merch, whatever.
To suddenly say “if you want to go to my gig you are going to have to bid for it”… I think that is pretty rude. I do agree with Rob, for certain artists, when it’s megastars like Barbra Streisand that tour once every 20 years, then maybe that is the only way to do it. But if you are an artist like Mika who eight months ago was unknown, to then suddenly say that fans have to bid for a ticket really puts them on very shaky ground.
RH: It is way too early for an artist like Mika.
IW: Even artists that have had two or three successful albums, I think even they would be on shaky ground. The only model it works for are people who haven’t toured for a long time and it’s their one shot at maximising revenues.
MW: When it comes to maximising income, how is the model changing? Rob, you are doing a very high-profile deal this summer where you buy a ticket for a Prince show and you get a free CD. Would that work for other artists?
RH: Personally I think it is a fantastic model. We live in a city of 8m people and we get excited when we sell 60,000 tickets; that’s bullshit. With Justin Timberlake in Copenhagen we had a 56,000 audience in a city of 1m people, in Amsterdam we had 45,000 people in a city of 1m; that is a per capita exciting market. In London we did 85,000 tickets and we all think it’s exciting; percentage per capita it’s shit, it’s like a club show, 8m people live in this fucking town! What we are doing is pricing ourselves out of the business, because ticket prices are going up. We need to find a way to keep ticket prices level and affordable. Prince at £31.21 with a free CD – we sold 350,000 tickets – now that’s getting more interesting.
SS: We are doing something similar with Snow Patrol in Australia; giving away Final Straw, the band’s previous album which didn’t break in Australia. We wanted the fans to have the benefit of being able to tap into the band’s back catalogue. It means that everyone that buys a ticket will get a copy of that record so that when they go to the gig they will know all the songs.
MB: I’m fairly appalled by the idea. To me, when I can buy the new Prince album for £1.35 it’s devaluing the market.
RH: Shouldn’t artists have the right to distribute their intellectual property any way they like?
MB: An artist that labels have invested million of pounds in can probably do what he wants. But how could you possibly apply that to new artists?
RH: I understand that argument but why shouldn’t an artist, if they want to, not have to go the traditional route that was invented in the 1920s. We are in a new world now, we have something called the internet; we’ve got MySpace, we’ve got Facebook, we have all these ways to distribute music.
SS: Do you see the day coming where labels go on a buying spree and look at taking over promoter businesses to do it that way around?
RH: Yeah, Sony BMG are starting up their own agency from scratch, Universal are buying Sanctuary with Helter Skelter, there’s the EMI deal with Robbie Williams where they control the income and another with Korn where they have done a similar thing, I know Warner is doing a 360° model as well. So maybe we as promoters should do the same. So I’ll start signing bands for records, publishing and touring as well. It’s a brave new world.
MB: But that seems to completely ignore any specific skills that people might have, I wouldn’t presume to be able do what you guys do.
RH: As an indie label it’s different, but Sony and Universal are presuming they can do what we do. It’s slicing up the pie, I can’t presume to be a record label but if labels are going to eat into my business I’m fucking sure I’m going to eat into theirs.