If you’ve ever gone to a huge outdoor festival, only to be surrounded by chattering idiots who are angling for blogarazzi shots of the VIP tent’s dwellers while complaining loudly about the weather, then you probably won’t be surprised by the new survey revealing that the percentage of people who are there for the “scene,” and not the music, is pretty high:
The survey, commissioned in the run-up to Glastonbury this weekend, found that a quarter of festival-goers spend around £500 on each outdoor music event.
But half of the 3,000 people questioned struggle to remember the bands they have seen, with almost a fifth admitting they watch less than five hours of music over a festival weekend.
Al Gore wants next month’s Live Earth concerts to take place around the word, but he’s had some trouble getting bands to play in Antarctica: Not only will the shows occur in the middle of winter, but Emperor Penguins make for really ill-tempered groupies. Luckily, the British Antarctic Survey had a solution:
BAS officials told Gore that a band was already in place on the South Pole. BAS press representative Linda Capper told blogger Tim Slagle, “We have a house band — five of our science team. They are very good indie rock-folk fusion. The remaining 17 will be the audience on location.”
The L.A. Times’ Buzz Blog is reporting that Prince will play a seven-weekend residency at Los Angeles’ Roosevelt Hotel, beginning some time next month. More »
Chester Bennington, Jared Leto and a post-op Cowardly Lion vie for the title of “Least Flattering Photo” at this weekend’s KROQ Weenie Roast 2007. More »
Today’s Wall Street Journal has an item on Social, a five-concert series taking place in the Hamptons this summer. Those who are interested in seeing Prince, Billy Joel, Dave Matthews, Tom Petty or James Taylor may want to drop by the series, although they’d better be fast, have a fair amount of equity, and be willing to get their snob on, as tickets to the series are limited to a run of 1,000, and will cost each attendee a cool $15,000;
The prices of Social, which work out to $3,000 a concert, may not go down easily, some music-industry analysts say. Barbra Streisand’s Las Vegas show was last year’s most expensive regular ticket in the U.S., at $1,000 a pop, concert-tracking company Pollstar says. Tickets for Alabama’s farewell tour also cost $1,000 but included meeting the band and an autographed guitar. “You’re definitely pushing the outer bounds with this,” says Gary Bongiovanni, editor in chief of Pollstar, “even with prime rib and lobster.”
In the Guardian blog today, Dave Simpson has an argument against the ritual of the encore, from the waiting around in the dark for five minutes while musicians freshen their beers to the perfunctory nature of song choices during the after-set portion of the show:
I don’t know about you, but the crushingly predictable encore ritual is the bane of my gig life. Very few of them are spontaneous. If you stand next to the mixing desk you can usually see that the band have their entire set list written out, including the songs they’ll play as an encore. It doesn’t matter whether the audience screams loudly for them to come back. Or even if everybody stands in total silence. They’ll come back on and play those songs, exactly like they planned it. What’s worse is that the audience knows this too.
Spotted in New York City by Amy’s Robot: A flyer for an upcoming solo performance from the Spin Doctors’ Chris Barron; as the post notes, it’s “taped up next to an ad for a man with a van, and a flyer for a craft fair at a middle school.” More »
A fight broke out last night during a Ben Folds Five/Boston Pops concert. According to the Associated Press: …two men [struggled] in the balcony — one with his shirt pulled off — as several people stood around them. More »
Today has some grainy footage of the fight that broke out at last night’s Ben Folds/Boston Pops concert, which was apparently sparked by one fan thinking the other was “too loud,” thus killing the mood for the mosh pit that was going to break out once the setlist reached “Rockin’ The Suburbs… More »
Editor’s note: Aside from a few Clash lyrics, your Idolators know nothing about the law. Which is why we’re proud to present another missive from the IdoLawyer, an anonymous California attorney who will be weighing in on various music-related matters. While her column isn’t intended as legal advice, it is sage advice nonetheless, and today she takes a look at connection between the Supreme Court and supremely overcrowded music festivals:
Summer festival season is upon us, and now is as good a time as any to consider why festivals have to be held in either 108-degree sweatboxes (Coachella Valley) or cowpie-country fields (Glastonbury). In one of its most important non-fetus-related cases ev-er, the Supreme Court addressed that great political tradition: the outdoor putatively-for-a-cause rock concert. The case sounds trivial at first–it involves noise regulations–but is in fact a benchmark of the law that governs how cities can regulate free expression.
Back in 1986, organizers of the Rock Against Racism concert were gearing up for a political punk-rock show, and while they were probably hoping to achieve some do-gooding recognition, establishing a First Amendment standard was likely not on the set list. The promoters had booked the famous Naumberg Bandshell in Central Park, but due to noise complaints in previous years, New York City was now requiring that anyone playing the bandshell had to use the city’s own sound equipment and sound technician. This was censorship, the promoters said, and way, way un-American (incidentally, Rock Against Racism was founded in the UK).
Ergo, lawsuit.
