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Music Downloads = Expensive Concerts?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the shaft-the-listener dept.

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?"

24 of 698 comments (clear)

  1. If Madonna prices it, they will buy... by byteCoder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... by Paradise+Pete · · Score: 5, Funny
      I wish i could fix my typo and score a 5

      Well, if that 5 is a typo and you meant to type a 1, then congratulations, you've succeeded.

    2. Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... by Mattcelt · · Score: 5, Insightful

      P2P is a bullshit justification. P2P doesn't cause higher ticket prices, market economics does. They'll slap any price on them they can get.

      I remember some people complaining about the ticket prices for the Eagles "Hell Freezes Over" tour - which for golden circle were at least as high as these madonna ones (some went in excess of $750 for some shows, IIRC).

      That was in 1994.

      Concertgoers have been getting fleeced by some (though not all!) big-name acts for a lot longer than P2P has been around.

    3. Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... by Golias · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The very fact that the ticket-scalping market exists is proof that the artists are not "fleecing" anybody. They are simply charging what their fans are willing to pay.

      *I* sure as hell wouldn't pay $250 to sit in a hockey arena and watch a Madonna Concert. For that matter, I wouldn't pay that much to see a music act I really liked.

      But my solution to that is to not go to such concerts. Instead of paying $200+ to see the Rolling Stones when they came to Minnesota last year, I spent about $50 to see The White Stripes instead. (And, from all reports, I saw the better show.)

      There's no such thing as an "unfair" price for entertainment. It's not like the people that can't afford to go to Madonna's concert are being denied health care or something.

      If seeing that elderly skank wiggle her ass while singing through a vocoder is worth $250 to you, then more power to you. Go. Enjoy the show.

      If it's not, and you really like Madonna, then stay home and jerk off to the cover of your old vinyl copy of the "Like a Virgin" LP. You'll probably get just as much out of the experience.

      --

      Information wants to be anthropomorphized.

    4. Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... by ameoba · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's more like "Why would I want to sell out my concert at $100/seat if I can still fill the venue at $250/seat?".

      Either way, the article misses the point. Most artists see a very small percentage of revenues from record sales and rely on concerts to make their money.

      --
      my sig's at the bottom of the page.
    5. Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Calm down man, its only a concert. She doesn't charge high ticket prices because she doesn't care about you. When the prices were low she didn't care about you either.

    6. Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... by Golias · · Score: 5, Insightful

      When U2 decided to spend two or three albums doing techo parody of themselves, somebody asked Bono if what they were doing might be alienating their old fans. He replied by saying maybe it was, "but we don't need them."

      What does an artist owe to the fans? Nothing.

      Yeah, a "big name" got big because a shitload of people were willing to spend money on their records and t-shirts, but those people got records and t-shirts that they were happy with out of the deal. Fair exchange.

      The fact that you bought all of U2's old stuff (even "October") does not buy you the right to dictate the artistic direction they choose to go next.

      Likewise, the fact that you wore fishnet crop-tops in High School and know the words to "Express Yourself" by heart does not endow you in the inalienable right to get in to Madonna's concert for fifty bucks when others are willing to pay five times that for the same seat.

      The fair way to set any price is supply and demand. There's a finite supply of Madonna tickets, and plenty of demand. If she sold the tickets for $50, scalpers would buy them all up and sell them for $250 on eBay. Fans would pay the same to get in, but Madonna's business venture would get less of it.

      Economics 101.

      --

      Information wants to be anthropomorphized.

    7. Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... by QMO · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "But I guess old-school notions of loyalty just don't exist anymore - not when there are dollars in question."

      It depends. Are you loyal enough sell your house pay whatever is asked? Are you loyal enough to quit your job and follow Madonna wherever she goes?Or does loyalty go out the window when enough money gets involved?

      --
      Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
    8. Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... by Ken+Hall · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Or, look at it this way:

      Concert seats are a fixed supply, so traditional economics apply. The point where the demand drops off is the proper price point. If that's $100, $200, $300, it doesn't matter. Basic economics.

      But these rules don't apply to music downloads, where the supply is infinite. THERE, the idea is to sell for as little as possible to cover your costs, and profit based on quantity.

      This DOES tie back to the concert sales, but not like they're claiming. The more copies of your song there are floating around, the more people are going to hear it, and maybe want to see you perform live. That translates into HIGHER demand for those scarce concert tickets, which drives the price up.

      Subsidising the concert ticket prices with CD sales just skews the model. Let 'em charge what they can get, and the market will sort it all out.

    9. Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... by carlislematthew · · Score: 4, Interesting
      I had the misfortune of going to see David Bowie a couple of years ago. I was, as you say, willing to pay to see his old hits. What actually happened was that he played 75-80% of his new stuff, and the rest was the good old stuff. At regular intervals in the show, the audience would chant "Major Tom! Major Tom!" (yes, I know that's not the name of the song) and he just ignored them. At one point, he even started the intro to tease the audience, and then moved on to something else! What an asshole!

      The argument I hear when I complain about this is that "he must get fed up of playing his old stuff". My response is: I don't give a fuck what he's "fed up of". I paid $60 to hear the stuff I like - his old stuff. David Bowie *knows* this and decided to play his new shit that's just awful.

      I also went to see Bjork one time... It was in Seattle, at "the pier". She wasn't allowed to run her fireworks because we were standing on wood over water, so she got all sulky and did a short show without an encore. Who doesn't do an encore?! So the whole audience stood there like idiots chanting "encore encore". 10 minutes passed... We all looked at each other and slowly walked out, annoyed.

      In short, fuck concerts, especially those of the old artists who don't enjoy them, don't care what the audience (the fucking CUSTOMER!) want, and are only doing it to finance their latest castle/porsche combo. Fuck 'em.

  2. thats fine... by tont0r · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Huh? by timeOday · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Huh? by Kombat · · Score: 4, Insightful

      very little of the actual CD sales price ever makes it to the artists.

      And the problem with that is .... ?

      Why should the artist get the lion's share of the money? What about the people that wrote the music, wrote the lyrics, recorded and mixed the tracks, corrected the artist's singing flaws during editing, the people who created the cover art, the people who advertise and market the album, etc. etc. etc.? Why should the self-absorbed drug addict who shows up 2 hours late and puts in a couple days' worth of work singing the songs that were written for him/her be awarded a disproportionate amount of the money? Just because its their picture on the cover?

      Haven't you learned anything from INXS? American Idol? Talented singers are a dime a dozen, and totally interchangeable. Why should the people who actually STUDIED a craft (sound engineers, marketing agents, talent scouts, cover artists, songwriters, etc.) get shafted out of a fair salary, so that the egomaniacal "artist" can bling themselves out like some sort of movie star?

      They're not curing cancer. They're just singing some songs. Since when does that entitle them to millions and millions of dollars?

      --
      Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
    2. Re:Huh? by richlv · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What about the people that wrote the music, wrote the lyrics, recorded and mixed the tracks, corrected the artist's singing flaws during editing, the people who created the cover art, the people who advertise and market the album\

      ugh. i just love more and more punk, indie and whatnot scene...
      you know, the one where band members THEMSELVES (gasp !) write music & lyrics (that, suprisingly actually mean something besides "baby, oh yeah, lalala") ?
      the one where recordings are made in small studios and artist flaws are not digitally eliminated for months ?
      the one where band members themselves draw/create album art ?
      the one where most advertising is by word of mouth, concerting and such ?

      yes, such a mechanism does not earn billions for big studios and everybody around them, but isn't that something most people are happy with ?
      yes, artists don't get millions (or an _impression_ that they are getting them...), but it's funny that in that case people go to concerts for a very low fee ($2) and get recordings from artists directly or with very little resellers. even if they already have full doscography in their computers and then some more.
      they don't pay for these albums because they are unable to get to the music other way - they do so because they really like the music, the atmosphere in concerts and attitude by the band/artist.
      now, i need to see one band in latvia again, as previous time i was not clear enough to buy all their cds ;) (yes, paprika korps, that means you ;) ).

      no, really, ignore music stores. if you are interested in local artists, most of them sell their recordings themselves. if they are from another country, usually you can order throufh internet or wait for a gig nearby. and that will result in a good music, happy artists - and happy you. yeah, and world peace, of course.

      --
      Rich
    3. Re:Huh? by Steve525 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Actually no, (and maybe yes). Back when I used to go to concerts (15 years ago) all the big concerts sold out easily, often within the first minutes of going on sale. The tickets prices, if you could buy one at face value, were quite reasonable: maybe $40 tops. Even adjusted for inflation, that's nowhere near the face value of tickets today. However, unless you were one of the lucky few (or a crazy fan who camped out), it was challenging to get a ticket to a hot concert. (And as I said even the moderately hot concerts sold out fairly rapidly).

      The rapid selling out of concerts is evidence that the tickets were actually priced far below what the market would bear. In further evidence of this, scalpers generally could sell tickets for costs 2x or greater the face value. Hence, why I said "maybe yes". The scalpers were actually the ones selling the tickets at whatever the market would bear.

      As the article points out, the goal of touring used to be as much (or perhaps more) about promotion as money making. You needed to tour to support an album. I can remember many concert t-shirts with a "sold-out" logo accross them. I think it used to be important to the promoters that a concert sold-out, even if it meant a loss of ticket revenue.

      I think that the concert promoters have since realized that they are better served by raising ticket prices to whatever the market will bear. Essentially they are grabbing for themselves that extra money that used to go to scalpers.

    4. Re:Huh? by gr8_phk · · Score: 5, Insightful
      "Why should the artist get the lion's share of the money? What about the people that wrote the music, wrote the lyrics, recorded and mixed the tracks, corrected the artist's singing flaws during editing, the people who created the cover art, the people who advertise and market the album, etc. etc. etc.? Why should the self-absorbed drug addict who shows up 2 hours late and puts in a couple days' worth of work singing the songs that were written for him/her be awarded a disproportionate amount of the money? Just because its their picture on the cover?"

      Gosh, in the good old days, the popular bands all wrote their own music and performed it live. You're either trolling, or one of these young whipper-snappers that doesn't know what real music is. Why should some jackass writer get revenue for life+70 years for spending 20 minutes writing some lyrics? I agree with you too - why should someone who does 20 takes in a studio followed by a lot of editing be given that same benefit for their "talent"? Same goes for studio musicians.

      If someone claims to have talent, let them make a living performing. Oh right, that's what the article says is happening...

  4. Brain dead BBS writer? by Godeke · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  5. Article is incomplete: by TripMaster+Monkey · · Score: 4, Insightful


    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

  6. BULLSHIT!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    $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.

  7. Logic Error by richdun · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  8. Re:or... by Whiney+Mac+Fanboy · · Score: 5, Interesting
    In Madonna's words:
    Hey Mr. DJ put a record on I wanna dance with my baby
    And when the music starts
    I never wanna stop, it's gonna drive me crazy

    Music, music
    Music makes the people come together
    Music mix the bourgeoisie and the rebel
    As long as the rebel has $250...
    --
    There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
  9. In other news... by Mateo_LeFou · · Score: 5, Funny
    Record industry execs announce that all music will be in C major or A minor from now on.

    "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
  10. Grateful Dead by waxcrash · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  11. This is exactly what should happen. by Lave · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Music in the digital age can be copied and will be copied. That doesn't have to be a bad thing, In a way it acts like radio. How much stuff do you "aquire" only to never get "into" or appreciate.

    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