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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.
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And the latest gas prices are due completely to the rise in price of a barrel of oil.
Oh, and by price of a barrel of oil, I mean CEO salaries and bonuses.
mmmmm executive greed mmmmmmmm
I usually find the BBS writer less brain dead than this article's.
Let's see: these are artists who have made millions upon millions, so the need to tour is just about zero. So they jack the price up.
Conclusion: illegal file downloaders cost live performance goers piles of cash. Um, yeah. Perhaps a better read is money hungry artists will fleece anyone they can for their new multimillion dollar home. Perhaps royalties *are* down on has been artists because of a combination of lower recording sales and their own stale presence on the market. So all they have is to repackage themselves doing classics live.
That doesn't really support the conclusion very well. Then they go interviewing people who bought scalper tickets to a sporting event to somehow prop up the story? Please.
Sig under construction since 1998.
People stopped wanting to feel, and started wanting to be entertained.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
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.
____
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$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 mean it couldn't have anything to do withh the fact that her latest album isn't selling so good (by her standards) could it?
The artists they name in the article have made a good record in decade.
Bowie has advised his fellow performers: "You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring, because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left."
Seems to me Bowie is saying play more shows not raise the prices so high nobody will show up.
The last time I went and saw David Bowie in concert, it was for his Earthling tour. He was playing a relatively small venue in Atlanta and only charging $30 per ticket. It didn't come close to selling out. While the article does explicity state that Bowie sees the need to make more money off of concerts, his solution is "doing a lot of touring," not charging $200+ per ticket. Madonna has reached the status where she can charge $200+ per ticket. Most musicians will just see less attendance if they raise ticket prices. Looks to me like if this article is implying anything, it's saying that the days of good studio performers who can't play live are numbered.
"making music for the purpose of making music?"
Had to have existed in the first place for something to have happened to it.
$250 for ANY concert ticket (I don't give a damn if it's front row) is ridiculous. I seriously hope no one pays for this. I just don't understand how artists and record labels and agents are getting the idea that raising the prices of their respective products will combat piracy or ease the "negative effects" piracy is having on their sales (for now, let's just ignore all the publicity artists get from P2P). That's just completely counterintuitive in my mind. If they want their loving fans back, they should get their attention with reasonable prices. Nothing says "I appreciate my fans" better than lowering your concert ticket prices, just a smidge, so that everyone once and a while Average Joe can afford to enjoy your music.
I guess this is why I stopped buying record label music years ago. I've bought a few local band CDs, but I bought those in person from the band itself. Not just because I wanted to have their music handy, but because they rock, and they don't charge admission. They appreciate their fans enough that during intermissions, they'll get down off the stage and mingle. Now those are musicians.
In summary: to hell with Madonna.
"You will pay for your lack of vision..." - Emperor Palpatine to Ray Charles
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.
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Personally, I blame high ticket prices on people illegally sneaking into concerts and stealing sound from legal concert-goers. I propose a system of Digital Concert Management, where all sound output is encrypted using a closed-source algorythm (and compressed to save bandwidth costs - 128kbs should be fine). Legal concert goers are then given headsets containing a Trusted Concert-Going Chip which decodes the compressed signal and plays back the audio through a complementary set of approved headphones. Of course, discussion of how to decrypt the signal, or even overhearing the encrypted signal without permission from the content producer, would be a criminal offence. Everybody wins!
Music Downloads = Expensive Concerts?
Well if you put it that way, of course it'll be true. This is a common mistake with the assignment operator. What you meant to say was "Music Downloads == Expensive Concerts?" This will test to see if the statement is true, then return.
She'd have to do way more than sing for $250...
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
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?
"We hate to do it, 'cause the fans really have enjoyed the other key signatures. But we can't afford black keys on our pianos anymore. Sorry. It's 'cause of piracy. So really it's the listeners' fault."
Please use RIAA radar to avoid giving these tools another cent, ever.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
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.
From 1996 to 2003, they rose by 8.9% a year
Seems to me file sharing didn't really start to take off until 1999-2000. I guess they were just trying to stock their coffers early?
He soon found out that rock concerts and American football games were subject to the same market forces.
And why buy tickets to a football game when I can just download it for free? Um.. wait..
Gee I dunno, maybe record companies are taking a bigger cut of everything, driving up CD prices, ticket prices, merch prices as high as they'll go, to the point where illegal downloading is becoming really popular because they're such greedy bastards? I'm used to reading poorly done studies, but seriously did this guy consider any other possibilities, or did the RIAA tell him to go tell the BBC he's a "rockonomics" whiz, give them $1,000 bucks and hand them a story about how downloading is driving up concert prices.
Bowie has advised his fellow performers: "You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring, because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left."
I don't even know what that means. Water and electricity are free? How does that relate to illegal downloading at all. Sounds more to me like, "New records are overproduced generic crap, THAT's why people aren't buying them, THAT's why concerts cost more because you need a LOT of equipment and lightshows to make Madonna sound good!" Utter crap.
...and saw four bands for 2 pounds. Two of the bands were selling promotional EPs, which I bought. The total expenditure for the evening was 8 pounds - this strikes me as being good value for money.
However, since the money I spent clearly won't go anywhere near the pockets of any record industry executives, this presumably this makes me a bad music consumer. After all, if everybody chose to spend their money going to pubs to see local bands and buying their self-produced CDs, people like Madonna wouldn't make any money.
Therefore, I suggest that there should be some kind of licensing scheme whereby small bands must seek the record industry's approval before attempting to play shows in pubs. They would give the industry a cut of the takings to compensate for drawing potential audience members away from official gigs by big-name artists. In return, the industry would promise not to sue these small bands for loss of revenue.
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.
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I'm always astounded how the measure of success in the music industry is not profitability but obscene profitability.
FWIW, the Grateful Dead allowed and facilitated giving away their music for free, and made an estimated $50,000,000 a year doing so. Almost all on concert sales. It was a good model- giving away their music and allowing it to be traded for free eliminated piracy and the bootleg market.
Too bad that the music industry hasn't tumbled onto the truth of why CD sales are slipping: that the music they are selling sucks.
I have never had the good luck to be able to see my very favorite rock band in concert. I have been a huge fan on them for about 20 years. However, I moved to New York a few months ago and next Thursday night I get to go see them play a concert in NYC.
:-)
The ticket cost me $13 online. The parking will probably cost more than that
I am very excited.
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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.
This is an ignorant story by someone who doesn't even have any idea about the concert industry and the REAL problem, which is rampant scalping where %25-%50 of a venue is "pre-allocated" to scalping agencies and other people that have inside connections with Ticketmaster, the venue, or at worst hire a lot of people to stand in ticketmaster lines to get the best seats, only to re-sell them for at least triple face value.
Some creative and potentially smart but misguided tour management team got the idea a few years ago for Rolling Stones concerts, to charge scalper-level prices for all the tickets, in the same patterns that scalpers actually charge. Front row? $700+. 2nd - 5th rows? $500+, everything else that's in a "good" seat, double the crappy seats. Why let the scalpers make all the money (which in some cases could be up to half of the money that the band/tour actually hauls in) when you can just jack up your prices to "market level" and sell the venue accordingly?
It's a good plan from a financial sense, since all of the artists to adopt this plan (springsteen, stones, madonna to name a few) are on the top grossing artists list. They can sell less tickets, make more money, and when they do sell out, make a ton of money over what they would with normal flat-rate section based pricing. The bands with expensive concerts aren't hurting for money, they're only capitalizing on what they can make money on with almost no effort. People are somehow willing to pay outrageous amounts of money for prime seating at concerts, why let that money go to scalpers rather than the band?
Of course, it's unfortunate that this is their solution to scalping problems and other people getting rich off their efforts. Scalping is far too profitable for the venues and ticketmaster to want to stop, since they suck up a good chunk of inventory at a potentially undersold show and make even mediocre shows look more popular than they actually are. Artists need to step up and do something about it in a tangible way that doesn't directly affect the real music fans. Even fanclubs and special internet pre-sales are infested with scalpers, and the only way to get rid of them so far, has been to jack the prices up so high that they can't make a lot of profit off the tickets they can get. It's one thing to spend $1000 on 20 tickets you can flip for $5000 if you do well, and you can eat half the tickets if they don't sell since you're up 1500 if you sell half. It's another thing to spend $1000 on 2 tickets that you may not even be able to flip for $1500 since they're expensive already, and that deters scalpers at least slightly. (not entirely, you can find plenty of Madonna scalpers on your local craigslist I'm sure).
If anyone else has ideas on reducing the amount of scalpers out there, in a way that can get the maximum amount of tickets into the hands of real fans at face value, I'm sure you can make a lot of money.
Here's why I think people stopped buying CDs:
The problem goes all the way back to cassette tape days. People bought cassettes because they were well worth the money. Just about everyone had a dual cassette deck with high speed dubbing, but we still went out and bought an original copy most of the time.
Then came CDs. These cost a considerable bit more, but so did the CD players. If you could afford a CD player, the high price of CDs probably didn't phase you much. Not to mention, CDs were cool, well worth the extra money.
Then over time the newness of CDs started to wear off. CD player prices started dropping and everyone began to buy them. The problem is, while the CD player prices were dropping, the CDs started getting more and more expensive. An album that was worth the "cassette price" to someone isn't now worth the "CD price". But CDs have given birth to a higher expectation of sounds quality in our music recordings. There's no way we're going to go back to cassettes. So we download.
So why are prices of CDs so high anyway? The artists barely get any of the profit. Most of it goes to record companies. And why do we still need record companies anyway? There are no more records. Music doesn't even need to be saved onto physical media anymore. It can be transferred over the internet to an iPod, notebook computer, or now even your cell phone for heavens sake. Yes, record companies help promote bands, but the internet is getting better at that everyday too. Just look at MySpace.
The record industry has been living the rock star life too long and has lost touch with reality.
... for the DVD of the concert to come out and P2P that.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Really, what concert is worth $250?!?!?!?! Especially with all the crap you have to put up with to go to it - parking, crowds, rude people. The last concert I went to made me realize how much I hate a concert. The guy next to me (and sort of in line with my view of the stage) was standing up dancing around with his butt in my face and flinging his arms in the air almost hitting me a couple of times. I asked him if he was going to stand up the whole concert. He turned to me and said, "Probably!" Well, I have a whistle that is about 135dB (with my fingers in my mouth, not an actual "device") At the end of the next two songs (with gayguy still dancing around) when everyone was screaming at the top of their lungs, I whistled the very loudest I could. They guy then got up and moved, and I stopped whistling. the rest of the concert was much better. Still, having to resort to that made me regret going to concerts.
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.
I guess thats about right too. But I argued about creating a gig culture, not that one already exists. How many people playing on the radio ever play near you. I'm not saying they should, or could, play gig's everywhere - but I do believe it should be there primary vocation - not going on tv to push themselves.
Most bands will never make it as a profitable venture. I'd like to know exactly how all of this digital music advertising is going to get the bands enough scratch to pay the bills generated by the rental of larger venues.
I think it's well known that most bands currently don't make it as a profitable venture, with a very very small minority being very very successful, and everyone else going bust. I'm arguing there are more good bands than succesful ones this current market can support.
Really, the only way most bands will ever play a stadium or concert hall is by having financial backing from some wealthy third party.
I never suggested that this way of music production would be able to support those venues, though there would still be the very few insanely successful bands that would, but the business model would be more based around "the long tail."
And if all you ever do is play bars, well... the life and scope of your band is limited.
I think this is what reveals your true feelings about the subject - you like it how it currently is. I like the idea of my kids growing up with weekly small intimate gigs, not in bars, but not in big venues. WIth role models they meet, and see and can judge. Not watch on television.
Most bands can't even afford the cost of professional recording. And despite what some guys with a $500 card and Cubase would have you believe, you need really good equipment and a talented recording engineer to make a really good demo. I've got $2500 in microphones in my little home studio. I understand totally - and know the difference it can make. But with a greater number of low to medium level succesful bands I believe a market to hire and use these facilities would be created putting them within the reach of "the bar giggers."
I don't want to see music become free, unless the artists who made it choose it to be.
I couldn't agree more, I want the artists to want it to be free.
http://skeptobot.blogspot.com/ - A site for the Renaissance man and woman
I go to about one or two live music shows per week (mostly local bands) and a $5 cover is about right. Last night I splurged and saw a famous touring band, and even that was only $20. And guess who had more fun: me drunkenly banging my head within arm's reach of Exodus shouting "Last Act! Of Defiance!", or someone peering at Madonna through binoculars.
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Gee, I thought the $250 ticket price was the fault of the artists thinking their presence was worth $20,000 a night, combined with the music being so lame they need 200 support people and 4 million dollars worth of equipment to make the concert be a memorable experience.
They could replace all that money with some talent and still put on shows.
Prince sells tickets at about $50 a pop. Each concert go'er receives a CD as part of the "experience". The result is that Prince has one of the best selling albums of the year (without selling a ton of albums), gets billboard placement, and puts on a hell-of-a good show.
Bowie's a god and all, but his live performances have always been less than stellar.
BBH
In Pascal and Maple, = is a comparison operator and := is an assignment operator. In the BASIC languages, = is a comparison operator in all contexts except LET contexts.
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.