Our Top Story: As if we haven't already been gouged enough by the music business, Live Nation and Ticketmaster have said that they consider concert tickets to be underpriced, and see increasing said prices to be a huge source of revenue growth moving forward. As researchers noted, in the last twenty-four years, the average price of a ticket to a concert has increased 250%, and yet these companies think that is still not enough. The reality of the concert industry is eating itself, and considering that is the major source of income for bands, they are bringing on their own demise sooner than it would naturally occur.
There are two different concert industries. There is the one of the huge artists, and the one for everyone else. At the highest level, they might be able to get away with this scheme. The biggest artists only go to the biggest cities, where more people have more money. The average fan of any of these artists likely lives too far away to ever see them, or can't afford the cost of good seats to a show. These concerts are events where people will have to treat those two hours (if they're lucky) as a vacation, and organize their entire life around affording and getting to that one special night. That is not a sustainable model.
The rest of the music world has to pick up the scraps that are left. They go to the smaller towns across the country, playing in bars and clubs where many of the people in the crowd are there to drink, and the music is a nice bonus. When you're driving across the landscape in a decade-old van, playing to crowds where you can count how many people are watching while you play, there's a hard price limit on what you can charge. Bands simply cannot charge exorbitant prices in small-town America when they're struggling to fill even smaller venues. Calling tickets that aren't yet selling underpriced is ignoring the reality on the ground.
Raising prices is one thing, but telling fans they aren't paying enough is a special kind of stupid. Live Nation and Ticketmaster are not only planning to rob you, they're telling you in advance, so you feel even worse when it happens, because you couldn't stop it.
In Other News: Justin Bieber was shamed into deleting a post that was calling on his fans to cheat the system in order to give his latest flop of a single a shot of becoming #1. It was technically a reposting of something put up by a fan, but it in Bieber endorsed the idea of making a playlist of his latest song that could be played throughout the night, while sleeping, to rack up plays he didn't earn. There are two elements to this story I hate. The first is Bieber so blatantly cheating, and being rather shameless about it. I've grown to realize expecting better of nearly anyone is stupid, but it does still amaze me to live in a time without shame. Corruption is as commonplace as ever, but it's done more openly, and somehow we've come to accept it. That doesn't say much for us.
The other angle is that there doesn't seem to be a reliable way to assess what songs are actually popular. Radio play is sometimes bought and paid for by corporate structures, download sales are being phased out, and streaming is able to be gamed through these pathetic means. So how exactly are we to judge which songs are truly popular, and which have had money poured into the right means of inflating their stats? I don't know if there is a way, and that renders the entire idea of the charts possibly meaningless. That might actually be a good thing, though, since it could lead to us listening to what we want, rather than what's popular. Who knows?
And Also: In a recent interview, members of Greta Van Fleet said, "these days, there isn't a lot of rock that gets stuck in your head." While the band gets criticized routinely for their sound, on this account they are absolutely right. If we're talking about the American rock scene, and especially the music being played on rock radio, there is a decided lack of memorable songs. The trend has been going on ever since the end of the grunge era, but in recent years the decline has become even more profound. As post-grunge became influenced by itself, guitars kept dropping their tunings, and singing became less important, what counts as rock music has been devolving.
Turn on a radio now, and when you aren't being played songs from the 90s still, what we get are largely bland songs that barely have riffs or melodies, and use angst and/or screaming as a replacement for memorable songwriting. That's why a band like Ghost is able to stand out. They write memorable songs with catchy choruses, the kind of music that appeals to audiences. Funny how that works, huh? It's actually why Greta Van Fleet is also successful. While they may sound remarkably like Led Zeppelin, they also write songs that have more immediate appeal to them than anything Breaking Benjamin, Godsmack, Five Finger Death Punch, and the like have come up with in a decade. Rock has become so insulated that the crossover elements that once made it big have been selected out of it, leaving us nothing but the most commonplace elements. That's not a recipe for excitement.
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