WE MAY be in a recession but nobody seems to have told the select band of pop stars and rock icons currently filling the world’s stadiums and concert halls. Perhaps that’s to be expected. What’s less understandable is why their many millions of fans are also ignoring the economic facts and paying three- four- or even five-figure sums for tickets to see their idols.
Whether it’s Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Prince, Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits, it seems our appetite for experiencing the legends of popular music in a live setting is undiminished. There’s fiscal common sense on one hand – and on the other there’s front row seats for a cult singer who hasn’t toured for 20 years and might die soon. In a fight between the two it seems there’s only going to be one winner.
If anything, our appetite for big live music events has actually increased. You don’t have to scratch around too much for proof, just cast your mind back a few days. To Monday, for instance, when U2 announced the dates for U2 360, a continent-crossing two-year concert series. Or to the week before, when Michael Jackson announced his This Is It “tour”, actually a series of dates for London in July.
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Jackson will perform at the 20,000 capacity O2 arena in London. Tickets went on sale worldwide on Friday and within minutes two million internet users had crashed the Ticketmaster and O2 websites selling the briefs.
Londoner Ayesha Obi bought the first ticket on public sale after queuing for 37 hours. At 19, she wasn’t even born when Jackson released his classic album Thriller. Organisers are already saying This Is It is the fastest-selling concert series in history, with tickets being sold at a rate of 33 per second.
At the time of writing, Jackson was expected to perform 50 concerts, giving a total capacity of one million people. With ticket prices running from £50 to £75 – and already being offered for a hundred times that on the internet – the shows will gross more than £50 million. Factor in merchandising and sponsorship deals and you can probably double those figures. Jackson will only get a percentage, but even that would be more than enough to buy back his Neverland Ranch if he wanted to.
The haul from U2′s last world jaunt in 2005 was £281m, a stupefying enough figure. But this time the Irish quartet seems certain to best the Rolling Stones’ £403m take from the same year and make U2 360 the biggest-grossing rock event ever.
The tour starts in Barcelona’s massive Nou Camp stadium on June 30 and hits the UK in August for four dates, including Hampden Park in Glasgow. The tour’s title refers to the fact that U2 will perform in the round, a fact which allows them to sell 15% more tickets. Clever little devils aren’t they?
Still in Scotland, this year’s T In The Park will also be the biggest ever, featuring three iconic acts that many rock fans thought they would never see on a stage again: Squeeze, Blur and The Specials. Blur are also appearing at the Glastonbury Festival but there they are eclipsed by two even bigger names: Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young. Springsteen also plays Hampden Park in July with the E Street Band.
| You know U2 are fantastic live … so while it’s a high ticket price, it’s low risk |
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Ticket demand for all these events has been massive. Why?
“It’s because they are life-enhancing experiences rather than just gigs,” says Geoff Ellis, the chief executive of DF Concerts, the promoter of T In The Park. “A festival is a rite of passage. Springsteen hasn’t played with the E Street Band in Scotland since 1982, so that’s a big event. Take That doing three nights at Hampden is something that will appeal to lots of women who want to re-live their youth. People will go knowing it’s going to be a great show.”
It isn’t all about nostalgia, though. Artists like Bruce Springsteen are still active and still relevant, their lack of youth almost a positive because it allows them to transcend musical fashion and coast along on a mix of gravitas and experience. Springsteen, Cohen, Waits – they are elder statesmen who command authority and respect. U2 and REM aren’t very far behind them. Coming up in a third tier are bands like Radiohead and Metallica, who play Glasgow’s SECC this month. Coldplay, Oasis and even The Killers could soon be joining them at rock’s top table.
So, as with stock market investors who turn to gold in times of crisis, rock fans are choosing to spend £100 on tickets to see these groups rather than blow the same amount on half-a-dozen landfill indie bands.
“If you go to see a bad band where you only know a couple of tracks you’re taking a risk,” says Ellis. “Something like a U2 gig, you know they’re fantastic live So while it’s a high ticket price, you know it’s low risk.”
Ah yes, the new U2 album. It’s called No Line On The Horizon and it was released earlier this month. Interestingly, guitarist The Edge has stated that it was very much written with the live tour in mind, and he refers to the whole entity as a “production”.
BEHIND his comments is the tacit admission that over the last few years an entirely new business model has emerged where touring and recording are concerned. In effect the dynamic between the two has changed, so that instead of touring to promote a new album, many bands are effectively recording an album to promote a tour.
Evidence of this shift in the balance of power came in October 2007 when Madonna, whose contract with record label Warner Music was finished, inked a ten-year, £86m deal with Los Angeles-based events promoter Live Nation. Madonna will continue to record, of course, but it will be for Live Nation. Everything else, including sponsorship and merchandising, will come under their roof – a roof housing a company focused primarily on live performance.
In March 2008, U2 followed suit, signing a 12-year deal with Live Nation worth £72m. They will honour their current record deals – with Interscope in the US and Mercury in the UK – but Live Nation will handle the tours, sponsorship, merchandising and the official website.
The deal also included £18m in Live Nation shares. In December, after the shares had slumped to a quarter of their original value, the company bought them back from the band under the terms of a contractual agreement, taking a £13m hit into the bargain. Madonna has a similar buy-back clause in her contract and is expected to make good her loss in April. Such beneficence shows the value of these acts to the company.
Last month, meanwhile, Live Nation announced plans to buy ticket sales group Ticketmaster in a £289m deal. If it goes ahead it will give the new company, Live Nation Entertainment, God-like power over concert-goers – around 140 concert venues selling 140 million tickets and hosting some 22,000 concerts a year would be controlled by a single entity. A good thing? Anti-trust regulators in the Obama administration in the US don’t think so and may yet scupper the deal.
Interscope chairman Jimmy Iovine has said of No Line On The Horizon that he thinks it will be remembered as “one of the last great albums in this form”. Hyperbole? Maybe not. No Line On The Horizon entered the US album charts at number one, just as its 2004 predecessor, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, did. But it made the top spot selling significantly fewer copies – 484,000 in the US against 840,000. In this age of iTunes and downloads, it seems it’s now the live show that’s king.
It wasn’t always like this. In 1993, Geoff Ellis attended Manchester’s In The City conference, a music industry showcase event set up a year earlier by the late Factory Records boss Tony Wilson. Ellis had been asked to chair a panel on live music: its past, its present, its future.
“I asked how many people from the record industry were there,” Ellis recalls. “The room was full but not one hand went up because that’s what record companies thought about the value of live music. Now the room would be full of record company people desperately trying to climb on the coat-tails of the live industry.”
You can speculate all you like on the reasons for this. One is that pop culture is woven into the fabric of our lives today in way it wasn’t 20 years ago. That’s why a reformed Take That can still fill arenas. Another is that the internet has killed the album and made the live show into the artefact that replaces it. You go to the show, shoot the good bits on your cameraphone and relive the experience by sticking the pictures on Flickr and buying the concert DVD.
You can also say you were there: you can say that you saw Tom Waits play his barrel organ; you experienced the U2 360 tour in all its whizz-bang digital splendour; you heard Leonard Cohen sing Suzanne one last time. And you did it with your wife or girlfriend or – as is increasingly common – with your kids. To many people, these sorts of memories are worth any amount of money. So, to paraphrase an old political saying – and a Supertramp album title – we have to ask: Recession? What recession?
be in a recession but nobody seems to have told the select band of pop stars and rock icons currently filling the world’s stadiums and concert halls. Perhaps that’s to be expected. What’s less understandable is why their many millions of fans are also ignoring the economic facts and paying three- four- or even five-figure sums for tickets to see their idols.
