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Music Downloads = Expensive Concerts?
melonman writes "According to an article at BBC News, $250 tickets for the latest Madonna tour are the fault of P2P file sharing. 'Before the advent of illegal downloads, artists had an incentive to underprice their concerts, because bigger audiences translated into higher record sales, Professor Krueger argues. But now, he says, the link between the two products has been severed, meaning that artists and their managers need to make more money from concerts and feel less constrained in setting ticket prices.' And it seems David Bowie agrees. Is 'the fans always get fleeced' the rock industry's equivalent to Moore's Law?"
It's simple supply and demand and the desire to maximize revenues and profits.
If you were Madonna and her management, would you rather sell:
10,000 tickets at $250 each, totalling $2,500,000
or sell:
20,000 tickets at $100 each, totalling $1,000,000 ?
In Madonna's case, she'll likely sell out at the hire price anyway and pocket $5,000,000.
I just wont go to their concerts. Just like the more they jack the prices of CDs up, the less Im going to buy them.
Concerts were always priced at whatever the market would bear. The argument that artists were previously satisfied with their CD sales and therefore generous in their concert pricing, I don't believe for a moment.
Or maybe Madonna et al are money-grubbing who...
Seriously. $250 per ticket? Whatever happened to "making music for the purpose of making music?"
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
When Robert Plummer states that artists need to charge more for their concerts to make up for sagging records sales due to file sharing, he conveniently leaves out the important fact that it is only the most popular artists that actually see a decline. As David Blackburn of Harvard illustrated in his paper, On-Line Piracy and Recorded Music Sales (PDF warning), the record sales of relatively unknown artists benefit from the exposure P2P file sharing gives them.
So, if the big names want to charge outrageous sums for their concerts, let them. As of now, the tatic seems to be working, but as the situation develops, I think they'll wind up pricing themselves right out of the market.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
$250 tickets for the latest Madonna tour are the fault of P2P file sharing.
The prices are due to the public's willingness to pay $250 to see Madonna. The public is either stupid are has more money than sense. None of it has anything to do with P2P. If the public refused to pay $250 by simply not going to any of her shows, you'd see her tickets going for $50 in no time.
The economic (supply and demand) reasoning would actually be this: Concert tickets generally sell at a price where supply ROUGHLY equals demand. Therefore to sell at a higher price, demand must be higher now than it used to be. The reason: peeople have a music "budget". They can now get music for free so allocate their budget to concert tickets instead. Demand goes up and so do ticket prices. Their reasoning is wrong: entertainers can't just charge more to make up for lost sales: they can only charge at a price at which the tickets will sell!
This is the way it's *supposed* to work.
Bits can be copied. DRM will never work. So instead of praying for better DRM, let the music be free and serve as an *advertisement* for your concerts!
I've seen ticket prices as high as $400, $500 and up for seats to shows and that's fine. It's called supply and demand. Fans can't copy a concert seat, so they pay the going price.
Of course, all that being said, I think that the RIAA is wrong when they say that CD sales are down as a result of P2P. CD sales are down because the music sucks.
I was going to post a nice indepth post here, but saw the tag that said bullshit, and well, that sums it up.
Besides, given the predatory nature of the recording industry towards artists, most only made money by touring as it was.
Additionally, high-end acts (supergroups, mega pop stars, etc) have always had insane pricing on their appearances anyhow.
So I don't see how something like this is a humongous surprise to anyone with enough neurons to form a synapse.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
source of revenue... So it's no wonder that if the artist wishes to make more money, they would raise concert ticket prices.
/. to find stories regarding this topic.
There's really no change here.
It's been reported time and time again, that file-sharing has had very little or NO impact on music sales. Do a search withing
I stand by my own opinion that the majority of music file sharers are the same type of folks who used to sit by the radio with cassette-recorder and recorded music off the air. They were NEVER going to buy the premium product, unless they absolutely loved the music.
There seems to be fewer high quality albums - ie, albums with more than one or two tracks actually worth listening to. Is it any wonder that sales have been declining?
Now, let's add in those people who are still holding a grudge with the music industry over their CD price fixing and their attempts at forcing price changes on the legitimate online music sales.
Does the term "Shooting one's self in the foot" come to mind? Or would "blowing one's own head off" be more appropriate?
Who is general failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?
Aging rockers have had the gall to charge ridiculous ticket prices long before P2P.
They're just old and don't want to tour as much.
What boggles me is that anyone would pay that much to see fading performers.
One girl I date long ago was a huge Paul Simon fan. So I got her tickets for her birthday. They were at least $100 a piece. She want a shirt? 30 bucks for some sweat shop labored fucking shirt.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
The Grateful Dead did it right - let your fans record your shows, but charge money for the concerts. I wish all artists would release their music as free downloads, but of course pay to see them perform live.
This is how the record industry, wait, music industry should be. The digital music is the advert to get you to go to the live gigs Where they make their money.
People complain endlessly about the lack of things for teenagers to do, and a gigging culture would benefit that endlessly.
This would have the benefit of solving most of our problems with "pop" today. You can't sing live? You can't make any money. On the plus side you can rapidly cut down on the people and skills you need to smooth you recorded sounds waves into something presentable, in your "adverts."
Music will not die. You can kill a record industry, but you cant kill a music industry. It's whether people except that maybe being a successful musician shouldn't mean that you earn more money than a brain surgeon.
The powerhouses try to tell us that if piracy kills them that will be the end of music full stop. And that would be a Bad Thing. But it wouldn't be the end, and a world with free music and constantly gigging artists, could even be better.
http://skeptobot.blogspot.com/ - A site for the Renaissance man and woman
Mabye the $250 concert tickets aren't tied so much to file sharing, but to the elaborate stages, costume changes, etc. It's her image/business to put on big productions that cost a ton of money (which is passed on to the consumer). But that isn't a reflection on file sharing. She could easily do a show without so much of the hoopla and charge $50.
Madonna is also a megastar with longevity of success, a huge back catalog of hits, and possibly won't put on many more concerts. You can make your own supply/demand arguments based on that (and not P2P). It also helps to compare her with a band like U2, who also have past success, lots of hits, and put on a big-production show. They *somehow* charage a hell of a lot less ($60 when I saw them this past fall).
Personal Note: I'm going to see an indie artist tonight for 18 bucks. I assume it's going to be the singer, her band, and a couple of microphones. I istened to a couple songs thanks to P2P, bought two albums and am now going to the show (it's Kathleen Edwards, by the way).
Does this guy really think that Madonna will rape her public LESS if she has more CD profits? That she will consider NOT making maximum profits for giving a concert? Really, she will ask a thousand bucks for a ticket if she can get away with it. There is not really an alternative for a Madonna concert (at least not one that features Madonna), so she can ask what she can get away with. With CD's, of course, this is different: the higher the CD is priced, the more people will download its contents.
We are talking business here. No freaking charity, no loyalty. Money first, faith last.
Why Americans are so unhappy about their two greatest inventions - show business and entertainment industry???
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Ahhh, so you'd rather the prices be lower, but have shortages?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Why do people think executive salaries and not supply and demand are the cause of the high prices?
Increased demand mean high prices from which high salaries can be derived.
And you know what? Supply and demand works. People will use less gas. High prices are the market's way of saying "use less of this", more or less.
There are no shortages because of this mechanism.
That's a long way around the barn to say: look for supply and demand causes first. The other stuff second.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
This is just plain FUD from the record industry and their puppets, like Madonna.
Most musicians make money with concerts, because the share they have in record sales is awfully low. Everytime you buy a CD, you're not paying for the valuable work of the musician, most of the money goes directly inside the gaping throat of the record industry. We feed them loads of money and they create plastic, lab-made stars to fill the airwaves with.
In my dream world, real artists will start to sell or give away their music direcly in the Internet, and make money from shows. They're not making big money selling records, anyway, so what's the problem? This would be a great incentive to make shows more interesting and worthwhile going to. I personally think nothing beats a live show.
Plastic-made pop stars and record companies can just go fuck themselves and maybe we could start giving good artists more opportunities.