Read amongst our reviews and you'll see no signs of concerts feeling the pinch of the economy. You might even go as far as to say that concerts are "recession proof" since music and entertainment are great ways to escape from world issues. With old festivals like The Lilith Fair and Lollapalozza revamping and the usual summer mega tours like the Vans/Warp Tour and OzzFest still active among all these years, who could even think of such a dilemma as low attendance would be present. Well, many have reported that this year, along with the past few years, has been burdened by low ticket sales and low attendance. As recent as the Lilith Fair Tour stop at the Susquehanna Bank Center in Camden, one could spot a sea of empty seats. Just another sign for some concertgoers and concert promoters that Summer 2010 was proving to be a season of lowly figures and disappointing attendance.
The estrogen driven Lilith Fair, in particularly, has had its battle with attendance and finances as most huge festival concerts in this industry have had. Ten of the 36 originally scheduled shows for the tour were canceled due to lack of sales. Some of the more elaborate and expensive acts like Kelly Clarkson or Queen Latifah who were excited to originally be on as participants, have now dropped out of the rotating lineups. Up and coming, nu-soul sensation Janelle Monae also bid farewell right before the start of the tour.
Jonathan Takiff, writer for the Philadelphia Daily News, writes in a column that "by my nose count, fewer than 5,000 people were floating around the 25,000-capacity, riverside venue July 28. Most were planted, initially, in the really cheap lawn seats costing just $10, if you timed your purchase right." He also states that this years show lineups were even more weakened by the rash of cancellations of tours from big draws like Christina Aguilera, Limp Bizkit, Simon & Garfunkel and select date cancellations from the Jonas Brothers, Rihanna and the American Idol crew. Even the ever growing sensation and popularity of country music couldn't stop cancellations from country-rock crossover bill of the Eagles, Dixie Chicks and Keith Urban. Even the popular Barenaked Ladies did even worse than Lilith and Kings of Leon still had a lot of seats to fill during the day of. Thats not to say that there were no great turnouts. The center's season opened to a packed house withthe WXTU Country Show. As well as the Phish and the Dave Matthews tours each doing their part to fill the huge venue. Jimmy Buffett's two shows looked promising - one already a full sellout, the other a few hundred seats shy of going clean.
Yeah, we know.
To ad to the dismay of the once powerful industry, reports of downturn in sales by Live Nation, the world's most dominant concert promoter and order processor through its recently acquired Ticketmaster division, are popping up in financial news medias. Being a publicly traded company doesn't help Live Nation much as they are required to reveal their financial results every quarter.
The live show giant revealed a net loss for the concert division of $34.6 million for the last quarter while ticket sales are down 12.6 percent. Their projected adjusted operating income for the entire year looks to be down about 10 percent from 2009.
Even with the continued weakness of the economy, there are still many concert venues, regions and cities that are still performing above the economic turmoil. For the city of Philadelphia, this fact could not be any more evident.
The city just underwent a revitalizing of two major concert event venue in the Mann Center for the Performing Arts and the Dell Music Center. Both have scored some successful shows this summer. Working in a new partnership with AEG Concerts, the Mann lured 20,000 Dead fans to their West Fairmount Park for a two day 4th of July show. This even caused most of the concert goers to stay overnight in the City of Brotherly Love. Idina Menzel, whose fan base rose thanks in part to Fox's TV show, "Glee." Along with those successes, underground sensation Arcade Fire were able to raise their ticket sales in this region, for this venue, to about 8,000 ticket sales. The Grammy winning band never got airplay on commercial radio, but still had success in this area.
The municipally-owned Dell, formerly Robin Hood Dell East, reported its first sellout of the season by getting 7,000 concert goers to check out the double bill of Teena Marie and Keith Sweat. The refurbished (see sidebar) East Fairmount Park summer concert facility has booked top-billing from acts like George Clinton, War, the Urban Guerilla Orchestra and the Latin Jazz Ensemble which should garner even more success. The newly crowned Wells Fargo Center (formerly Wachovia Center) recently notched a 12,000-plus figure for Maxwell and Jill Scott on June 19 along with two full houses for the James Taylor and Carole King "Troubadour" reunion tour. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' two shows recorded one complete sellout and the other close to it. The South Philly event arena is still going strong with fast sellouts already notched for Paul McCartney (two nights,) Roger Waters (three nights doing "The Wall") and teen sensation Justin Bieber.
During his interview with Jonathan Takiff for the Daily News, Chief Operating Officer for Global Spectrum, John Page stated "Philadelphia's such a great music market. It goes back to the infancy of the touring business. So as tough as the economics are, if it's priced right, people will still come out to see the show." Global Spectrum is the Comcast-Spectacor entity that operates the Wells Fargo Center. "So as tough as the economics are, if it's priced right, people will still come out to see the show."
Yet, one can't ponder upon this topic without taking a look at the high cost of tickets and ticket processing fees, not to mention the wacky ancillary fees. As most artists might argue, concerts are their only REAL means of income from their music since the advent of downloading mp3's.
As most in the industry know, in order to keep all its concert facilities buzzing, Live Nation makes exclusive deals with artists by agreeing to huge guarantees. The promoting company promised a reported $400,000 a night for this year's "American Idols" production and $700,000 a night to Tom Petty.
But these deals, essentially giving the artist all the ticket revenue, only work if there's a full house, and Live Nation can make decent money on the food, drink and parking fees. If attendance drops even just 10 percent, the deal goes down with it.
For this concert season, Live Nation offered tickets free of service charges to early buyers, and bargain $10 lawn seats for a limited spell a few weeks before the show, just to put fill in the empty seats in the house. Meanwhile, the mega promoters offered a buyer's remorse offer, giving you three days to change your mind and get your money back after making a purchase. In the future, there are talks about standardizing a now-experimental "all-in" ticket that wraps the Ticketmaster processing charge into the advertised price of a seat, rather than socking it to you separately at, say $20 a pop.
As good as most of the offers may do the concert business, industry experts say those discounted tickets cause as much harm as good because they allow concert goers to wait for a bargain deal instead and go to outside companies who resell tickets.This leaves everyone involve to count on last minute ticket buyers or "door" sales. Do they really need another reason to bite their nails? The Mann Center sold 1,000 tickets for the Arcade Fire show.
There can be a surmountable amount of issues that factor into why ticket sales in many areas are up. Many can go the financial statistic routes and say that global economic issues are the bigger cause or some may go the operational route and state that with increase of processing fees and the percentages of the ticket sales being divided into too many components may be causing the dismay. Others may go to even point at the social trends of people just hooking themselves up to their computers and hearing their favorite down loadable artists or watch them from their friend's Youtube posting of their cell phone recording of a great show.
I'd like to go the simpler route in stating that if music these days weren't the digitally enhanced, auto-tuned, sample ridden, layer after layer of crud production that it is now and artists were left to be "artists" where as they sang their lungs out, played instruments, danced and engaged themselves with loyal fans, then perhaps many will flock in to be "dazzled." Should it be the economy that we're looking at or should we put some eyes and ears onto the quality of shows, acts and stage performances? A wise music lover once said - "if the music was worth hearing and the artist was worth seeing , then people will come at ANY price."
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