Midway through last night’s Vancouver show, Britney Spears disappeared, refusing to come back onstage until the “smoke” cleared. Her official statement:
We want to apologize to all the fans who attended our Vancouver show tonight for the brief pause in Britney’s set. Crew members above the stage became ill due to a ventilation issue.
According to the Vancouver Sun‘s timeline, this “brief pause” was over 30 minutes long. Maybe in geological time, that’s brief, but in the middle of expensive-ticket-million-selling-superstar-concert time, “brief” is stretching. And that “smoke” that was the problem? That wasn’t the acrid carcinogenic, addictive kind, but other kind of “kind” kind.
Sure, today saw quite a few highly anticipated concerts in the news. But Forbes.com is seeing through those lineup announcements and sellout crowds and forecasting nothing but gloom and doom, thanks to—what else?—recent global economic woes. Layaway plans for pricey festival tickets are just the beginning!
The crumbling state of the American economy hadn’t really connected with me until recently–squatters are largely immune to changes in the home-mortgage industry, after all–but today, it finally hit home: The New York State Fair has announced that it’ll be cutting back on big-name acts in 2009. This year’s run–headliners included Jonas Brothers, Daughtry, Def Leppard, Rascal Flatts and Taylor Swift–was competitive with any shed stuck in the suburbs of a major city. Despite record ticket sales, it turns out the big time rock and roll wasn’t much of a draw for the average fair going consumer.
In the face of tough economic times and not very many big-ticket shows, the concert industry actually did better this summer than it did in 2007! Well, if you only look at one measure of the industry, anyway. Billboard reports that overall concert grosses from May 1 to Labor Day were $1 billion, which is up 5% from $948.5 million in 2007. Hooray! More money! But lurking underneath those higher numbers is a slightly more troubling statistic–overall attendance was actually down 4% year-to-year, from 19.5 million tickets sold in 2007 to 18.7 million sold this year. (And that doesn’t even count the number of people who didn’t go to shows that they’d already bought tickets for because the price of gas was too high.) So basically that difference was made up by higher ticket prices, which will probably only be driven upward as a result of these sorta-happy numbers and ever-weakening consumer confidence. The No. 1 ticket last summer: Kenny Chesney, thanks to his filling the “concert-as-party” void left by the lack of a Jimmy Buffett summer jaunt. The 10 highest-grossing tours are after the jump–how many did you attend?
Los Angeles is about to have a problem on its hands: Too many music venues. Three new concert halls are opening within the next two months, a curious expansion as the city adjusts to an economy that Variety describes as “faltering.” (That’s one way of putting it!) The remodeled Palladium (4,000 capacity) opens Oct. 15 with a Jay-Z concert; it’s located between two Live Nation-owned venues that hold 6,000 and 2,000 people. Club Nokia (2,300 capacity) will open in November; downstairs from that theater will be the Conga Room, which opens in December as part of the downtown LA Live complex that also features the Nokia Theater. Wow. That’s a lot of capacity to be filled at a time when, for me, going to a $20 show once a month seems like a luxury.
The San Diego Union-Tribune is reporting that Live Nation is cutting prices for 40 shows in southern California to $10 during a 14-hour window tomorrow, although anyone who buys those $10 tickets will still be forced to pony up for the various surcharges and “convenience fees” that are always tacked on to ducats purchased online. Trying to put a happy face on the whole thing Live Nation Southern California president Nick Masters told the U-T that the experiment “would be a fun thing to do for our fans”–you know, all the people who are really into everything the pink-and-white concert behemoth does–and not just a way to respond to a sagging economy and a growing wariness about throwing every frivolous expense on a credit card. The U-T-compiled full list of the 11 San Diego-area shows that are involved in this “fun” fire sale after the jump.
Pollstar‘s Top 100 Tours chart for 2008 so far is led by Bon Jovi ($56.3 million for 39 shows; average ticket price $87.98) and Bruce Springsteen ($40.8 million for 29 shows; average ticket price $99.02), and a superficial gloss on the overall numbers would indicate that the music business’ new “let ’em make it back on the road” strategy is at the very least holding steady. North American concert grosses totaled $1.05 billion between January and June, a figure that’s unchanged since last year. But Pollstar editor Gary Bongiovanni thinks these numbers are better than they should be, given the dire economic news greeting the country’s front pages every day, and he went so far as to ask the New York Times, “When is the bottom going to drop?” The answer seems to be “whenever promoters get tired of not selling overpriced tickets, and adjust prices accordingly!”
The New York Post is reporting that while tickets for Madonna’s upcoming shows at New York’s Madison Square Garden and one show at the just-across-the-Hudson Izod Center have sold out, ticket sales at other venues in the States have been soft. The Post‘s Brian Garrity pays particular attention to Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, which holds 43,000 people but has only sold 27,000 tickets to her November date there so far. (Spot checks of Ticketmaster pages for shows in Boston and Houston also showed that tickets were still available in those markets as well.) Sure, one could cite this as more evidence that the lousy economy is resulting in even those artists who can charge $575 for a VIP package not being as able to make the “earn your money on the road” strategy work as well as it has in the past. So with sales of her final Warner album, Hard Candy, stalling in the mid-500k range and ticket sales to her road spectacles faltering in the U.S., what does this mean for Live Nation, which shelled out $120 million to have Madonna in its back pocket a few months back?
In “Maybe The Concert Industry Is Just As Screwed As The Recorded-Music Biz” news, the promoter of next week’s Phoenix shows by Jimmy Eat World and Death Cab For Cutie is offering last-minute discounts on tickets, despite both acts selling out the same venues on their last tour stops here. More »
In “Maybe The Concert Industry Is Just As Screwed As The Recorded-Music Biz” news, the promoter of next week’s Phoenix shows by Jimmy Eat World and Death Cab For Cutie is offering last-minute discounts on tickets, despite both acts selling out the same venues on their last tour stops here. More »
