I wanted to flag an LAT piece from earlier this month pointing out that the average price for rock concerts has more than doubled since 1996.
"The average concert ticket price climbed to $61.58 last year from
$25.81 in 1996. Tickets are generally priced based on the acts — and
the demographics of their fans. The Cheetah Girls, for example, sold
their tickets for an average of $35; Fallout Boy, $27. Seeing Barbra
Streisand cost an average of $298."
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-prince3jul03,1,6478844.story?ctrack=1&cset=true
100% inflation in a decade! As the article suggested, part of this is the emergence of aging superbands like the Stones, Police, and Barbara Streisand (I’d pay $298 just to sit in the parking lot and know that I’m within a square mile of her, dahling!), whose fans are in their 40s and 50s and have a lot of money to burn. And then there’s the continuing marketing creativity of artists like Prince playing an intimate room at the Lindsay Lohan playground Roosevelt Hotel for $3,121 a couple, with $300 getting you standing room. Even at the upcoming Monterey Jazz Festival, the three-day "arena pass" that lets you see the best artists such as Ornette and Sonny Rollins, will set you back $210 plus parking, housing, food, etc. And I’ll bet some of this is due to lost revenue from album sales, of course.
But part of this makes me want to rebel against the bottomless greed of the music industry. And of course that is the only small way to exert pressure on these incredible prices — if people are willing to pay $60 to see Pearl Jam, Pearl Jam is going to charge $60.
Still, I appreciate the occasional willingness of the stars to see the fans as people, not as sheep. In the Tao of Willie, Willie Nelson talks about touring minor league baseball parks of America to avoid big corporate promoters, which kept prices lower and allowed families to attend the shows together. Mind you, when Anna and I went to see Nelson here in L.A. a couple of years back, it was $50 a pop at the Wiltern, but I appreciate that he at times has a sense of himself as a kind of a "community resource" who wants to make his performing available to those with a lot of money as well as those with not so much.
The cool thing about some festivals (such as the Summer at the Hollywood Bowl concerts here in L.A., with tickets ranging from $6 nosebleeds to multiple hundreds of dollars for a box) is that they’re accessible to a lot broader swath of our society, a way for the people to come out and celebrate major artists. An event like Prince at the Roosevelt must have been exciting, yet part of that excitement comes from a commodified elitism that’s pretty anti-democratic. Which of course is the point — hedge funders, CEOs, rock stars, movie stars, and athletes are different than you and me — and they want us to know it.
Accidental Blogger 
3 responses to “Rock and Roll May Be Dying, But It Ain’t Going Broke (Andrew)”
These concert promoters are laughing all the way to the bank as they unload their tickets at $15,000 for a 6 concert series. It does give you quite a perspective on the $200 tickets, doesn’t it?
While I haven’t ever attended rock/pop concerts, free/$10/$20 tickets at the local symphony orchestra, kids’ concert/ballet, S.Indian classical music/dance (usually free, but with big name performers from India) at the local temple, are more to my taste ;)
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Which of course is the point — hedge funders, CEOs, rock stars, movie stars, and athletes are different than you and me — and they want us to know it.
Right. You really can’t blame these folks (and their progeny) for not wishing to rub shoulders with the rest of humanity. But Andrew, what about ticket prices at sporting events? They probably attract a lot more “ordinary” people with families in tow than an average rock concert. At the major league games, on top of tickets, one has to also fork over rather large sums for hot dogs and drinks. There is no doubt that the baby boomers do jack up prices for others. But they do believe that as children of the age of Aquarius, they own rock ‘n’ roll and are still tuned in enough to life’s enjoyments to jostle the younger crowd out of the competition at public events… and nowadays, increasingly it seems also from the housing market in urban areas.
Sujatha, in the Houston area I have paid some pretty steep ticket prices for big name musicians from India.
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And yet some of the genuinely thrilling shows are the cheaper ones we might once upon a time have characterized as underground. Meshuggah at the Pound in SF? Ten or twelve bucks, I think, and worth an order of magnitude more. Then there’s Philip Gelb, a local (Oakland) vegan chef and shakuhachi master, who hosts dinner shows at his diminutive flat. Roughly twenty people attend to enjoy his superb cooking and hear a solo performance by a celebrity from the world of jazz improvisation (for lack of a better epithet). I’ve heard Joelle Leandre and Oliver Lake. Cost? Forty or fifty bucks. Not cheap, but not a run-of-the-mill star-studded hoopla, either. Then there’s 21 Grand, where, for example, Richard Pinhas played just two or three weeks ago for ten bucks. I’ve adored Pinhas’ work, especially in his band Heldon from the ’70s, for thirty years, which is how long it took for him to make it to the West Coast. An unforgettable evening.
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