Courage
“Watch, stand fast in the faith, be brave, be strong” – 1st Cor. 16:13
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. “He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,” is not a piece of of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. …… He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it.” – GK Chesterton.
There are already signs that 2009 will be a tough year for live music promoters.
For the last decade, the music industry has countered declining profits from album sales by raising the prices of concert tickets. The average price of a ticket to the top 100 acts rose a stunning 8.4% last year, according to Gary Bongiovanni, the editor in chief of Pollstar. “That’s not a prescription for a healthy business,” he says, “but that’s what we’ve been doing.”
One month into 2009, the good times may be over.
Coachella, the annual rock festival near Palm Springs, Calif. produced by AEG Worldwide, recently announced it would offer a layaway plan for fans who want to spread out the $269 it will cost for a three-day pass. Like a department store pushing hard to sell furniture, the festival will let fans pay half now and the rest by April 1, or put 10% down with equal installments of $121.05 in March and April.
The business model has worked for StageCoach, the country companion to Coachella. Layaway tickets made up a quarter of all sales, promoters say.
Other festivals that offer layaway plans include the All Points West Festival in New Jersey, the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Tennessee, and the Rothbury Festival in Michigan.
None of it bodes well for the live music industry. Even if customers are able to purchase tickets, they may not be able to purchase high-margin items like beer and T-shirts at the venue. For example, Live Nation, the world’s largest promoter, loses 4% on each ticket sold, but makes 43% of its overall revenue from extra charges like parking and food.
That puts the company in a precarious place, analysts say. “Tickets are a luxury item that people cut back on,” said Alan Gould, an analyst at Natixis Bleichroeder in New York. David Kerstenbaum, an analyst at Morgan Joseph, agreed, saying, “The company is going to have to be very careful about its price points. They won’t be able to raise prices as much as they probably would have liked.”
Artists, meanwhile, may be hit especially hard by any dip in ticket sales or prices. The upper tier of performers make 7.5 times more money from touring than from recorded music sales, according to a study by Marie Connolly and Alan B. Krueger at Princeton University.
Musicians have leeway in setting ticket prices but are often reluctant to cut prices. “They think ‘Well, so and so got that much, so I’m worth at least that,’ ” Bongiovanni says. “Until the public proves them wrong by not buying tickets, you’re not going to see an adjustment.”
Forbes predicts gloom and doom for concert industry
If there’s anything this latest recession has taught us, it’s that predictions from the financial industry need to be taken with a truckload of salt. Back during the glory days of 2005, precious few of the high rollers or money honeys seemed to notice economic disaster on the horizon — even though that’s what they were supposedly paid to be looking out for.
Now the situation has reversed itself. So many financial types got called out for being oblivious that nobody seems to want to miss a negative trend (which is, of course, causing more fear and thereby causing the recession to worsen). Forbes magazine recently pulled out its crystal ball to conjure visions of the concert industry come this summer and wouldn’t you know it, they see all doom and gloom - Jan. 30, 2009 by Tony Sclafani
As a tour manager who makes 100% of his income touring, the future at first glance looks pretty dismal for the next year, but every so often an event lightens up your mood, like the pilot landing the plane in the Hudson and everyone surviving what seemed to be an impossible set of circumstances. Like a lot of other tour managers who have been out there for as long as I have, we have a few stories of where we have had to land the plane on the Hudson.…………
