I say it because I’ve experienced it. When I bought tickets to a show in NYC, I checked the prices for the same show at other tour stops and they were much lower. Even though it was the same act with the same performance, just in a different place on a different day.
But anecdote is not data, so I googled and found a nice map. Not sure where their data comes from, though.
That map’s nice, although again it’s only measuring “top tier” acts (I’d love to know what qualifies as “top tier”) so I question how much it indicates about the majority of the live music industry. I’m not really interested in the price gauging that the top 1% does, I’m interested in the way that Ticketmaster-Live Nation’s monopoly screws over the majority of people working in this industry at smaller venues.
If it’s not a sold-out show with ultra high demand, then Ticketmaster is just fucking them with all the usual rackets. Charging more fees than the competition. Making sure popular acts don’t book in that venue because they’re in cahoots with promoters and brokers. Getting popular acts performing at the same nights in nearby competing venues, and spending to promote them big time. Basically doing anything they can to make the venue suffer for daring to go against the grain.
Ticketmaster is an evil monopoly doing evil monopoly biz. Getting rid of them will do much good.
My only point is that the problems that people complain about most often, like high prices and fighting for tickets in queues, will be completely unaffected even if Ticketmaster disappeared tomorrow.
Went to see TWICE at Giants (Metlife) Stadium. While I’ve been to several concerts in arenas, and several concerts outdoors, this is my first time at a large outdoor stadium.
For reference, Madison Square Garden for ice hockey seats 18k. UBS arena where we saw both TWICE and MAMAMOO is similar. Citi Field where the Mets play seats about 40k. Metlife stadium seats 80k, but for a concert, a lot of seats are obviously closed off. Of course that is made up for with the floor seating.
So yeah, everything I already don’t like about big arena concerts held true. Unless you pay the hideously expensive prices, almost every attendee is too far away to really see the performers. You end up just experiencing the concert by watching the large video screen. You could just watch a video of the concert later.
Another thing that is not great, the food situation. You can bring in outside food in a clear plastic bag. But that means either cold food that’s not in a cooler, or hot food that’s gone cold. I guess car people can try to tailgate, but this isn’t a football game. You could stuff yourself silly at home, and hope it lasts you the rest of the night.
Or you can do the most convenient thing and just buy overpriced concessions. The problem is, this isn’t a football game. There’s no half-time. Every attendee is trying to get food before the concert starts, and once it starts, nobody leaves their seats. The lines at every concession stand were horrendous. The food service employees were working very slowly and lazily. And who can blame them? What incentive do they have to try hard and make the line move fast? None!
Also, wow the food choices at Metlife are not just overpriced, but they are really bad. I guess that’s the difference when you have a bigger stadium. The economy of scale means you can’t really be offering lots of different food options that may be complex to prepare. No special pastrami sandwich shop on the third base line. Very few sad choices, and the same choices everywhere.
Anyway, so this concert despite having all the failings of a big stadium concert, did actually have a lot of positive aspects. First, they performed a LOT of songs. The set list is on Wikipedia. 29 performances, plus their spinny wheel random encore thing to tack on a few more.
The group has 9 members, and for the first time on tour they each got a solo stage. That’s basically a requirement for me at this point for a live show of any size in any genre. Give some sort of performance that is exclusive to your concert. And other than Nayeon who performed her solo song POP!, we got 8 performances not seen elsewhere.
After the first set of solo stages, they brought out a live band. Drum, guitar, bass, and keys. That band stayed the entire rest of the show! That means all the performances after that point were special live band versions. This was an A+ move. Not only did it mean you got to hear these modified live renditions of the songs, but the live band gave a lot more energy.
Because they performed so many songs, the talking parts were actually significantly, and thankfully, reduced! So many KPop shows kill time chatting with fans. They minimized that to about as much as you could. Just enough talking to let them catch their breath so they could dance again.
The production value for the big concert was way high. Special sets, check. Lasers, check. Different types of confetti, check. Pyrotechnics, including straight up fireworks, check. None of it overused, and all used appropriately for excitement.
One big thing, which I did not expect, was just the energy. The concert started before 8PM and sunset was 8:30PM. It ended around 10:30. They started performing with the sun out, and it was OK. But once it got dark, wow, the energy totally changed. Even though indoor concerts are also dark, outside dark just hits different. And when all the fans have the light sticks that are centrally controlled. The mood got pretty hype. The live band part started around the sunset time, and I wonder if that was intentional.
Lastly, it was just kind of weird. I’m not a huge fan of TWICE, but I do like the members and quite a few of their songs. But I was there watching them at the beginning. They were formed by a reality show named SIXTEEN, and I watched the episodes as they came out. To see them 8-9 years later, as a girl group from Korea, almost fill a stadium in NJ, it was kind of surreal. The power of Internet!
I don’t know if I should post this in KPop, Concerts, or the movie thread.
IU is basically the biggest deal in South Korean music. She has the Taylor Swift/BTS level of popularity, but only domestically. Outside of South Korea, not as much. Because of that, I am not confident that she will ever tour here, even though I’m in NYC. And even if a miracle happens, and she comes, the production will not be anything like what she does for her concerts in Korea.
Anyway, during the dark times, IU didn’t have a concert for three years straight. So in 2022 she did it up big time with The Golden Hour. She put on the same show two nights in a row at the Olympic stadium, sold out both nights.
Just today the video of that concert was shown in theaters around the world. I figured hey. I can walk to a movie theater and watch this concert for $20 from a comfy seat, a huge screen, and a better sound system, and with subtitles during the talking parts. That’s probably better than going to the actual show.
Sure enough, I was right. What a value! The only thing I think I missed out on by watching a video instead of being there in person was the energy of the crowd. In the movie theater the view was better than front row seats. The sound was terrific. The film was edited, so I saved a lot of time. And at $20 it was cheaper than the cheapest nosebleed seat by orders of magnitude.
TL;DR: I would absolutely go see more concert videos in the movie theater.
As for the concert itself, holy shit. This was the biggest production for a concert I have ever seen in my life. It included:
And if all that wasn’t enough, at one point she got in an honest to god hot air balloon. She said it was so she could get closer to the people in the cheap seats at least once during the show.
OMG.
You could do a lot worse things with 3 hours of your life than watch this concert.
I’ve been seeing more and more movie formatted concerts come out, like the recent Talking Heads one that I want to see. And that’s cool, but wonder if there’s going to be any trend or move towards a few companies that make it a regular thing and for more varied and somewhat obscure bands. For instance if there was a production outfit that would package up concert footage from all kinds of smaller bands and then put in a little work to format for the big screen, bundle it with official merch and then have a bunch of these similarly formatted events in their roster; then they can book regular slots at the cinemas so that people would know (for example) every Tuesday/Thursday one screen at the local movie house will be showing some kind of 2-3 hour concert and you’ll be able to get some basic merch like CDs, shirts, stickers, etc…
The other thing would be having ‘diet’ concert venues that give the full concert going experience such that there’s a bar, a pit area, smoke and extra lights that can be programmed to go with the movie, and with some seating, etc; but the performances are all on a screen with speakers and such. The upside is very predictable and repeatable sets, and no need for the infrastructure to handle an actual touring act and their various gear and stage pieces. Also unlike a cinema, for bands where you do wanna do a bit of head banging, moshing, dancing, etc you can totally do that.
I mean if given the opportunity to go see a really cool band in person or in some faux-concert hall with a movie screen, I don’t know if the latter would be worth the same effort to go. But if I knew the band either no longer existed in the same way (such as some remastered quality footage of a classic 80’s band) or was never going to play locally, it would be as you say; a much better option than sitting and watching the concert alone on YouTube.
Those are interesting ideas for sure. But at least for me, I don’t see the value in the movie version of a small concert.
For a smaller band at a smaller venue, their actual live performance is already inexpensive. Paying $20 and only getting a video of it is weak. It’s not much cheaper than seeing them live, and it’s much worse experience.
For a big arena show, it’s the opposite. Going to see that show live is ridiculously expensive. If you do pay to go live, you’ll probably be far away. The movie is much cheaper and in a lot of ways, a better experience. That’s why it works.
I don’t think I would pay any money to watch a video of a concert if the concert itself wasn’t originally some absolutely huge arena/stadium show with big time production value.
One thing I haven’t gone to see, but I think also might be a very good value is the Met Opera live in HD.
https://www.metopera.org/Season/In-Cinemas/
Most people don’t live a subway ride away from the actual opera house. And even if they do, the real thing costs several hundred bucks per ticket. Going to see a live stream of it in your local movie theater is great. And clearly it is successful enough as they’ve been doing it for years, and it’s still going.
Yeah I agree wouldn’t want to spend $20 to see a concert that could normally see something similar for $20 at the local venue.
But also have to be in a city for the $20 concert for a band you really are hoping to see to be $20-ish. Otherwise it’s likely they won’t be coming to your specific local venues and instead it’ll be another $60-100 in train/parking/etc at least for me here in the US.
In any case I wouldn’t expect the numbers to work out for say a real small band, but thinking theres gotta be acts that are well enough known but not touring heavy that have really cool shows worth seeing. I see so many cool events on YT from all over and the description and idea of seeing it on a proper system sounds really cool vs a monitor and headphones.
Clickbait title, YouTube guy thumbnail, 30 minutes video.
I’d wager whatever this person has to say can be summed up in a few paragraphs of text that could be read in under 2 minutes, but I’m not about to spend 30 minutes of my life trying to find out.
Tank is legit, a former pro musician and current professional roadie who just came back with electric callboy discussing Live Nations’ latest PR campaign that seems to be great until you look into the details.
That’s great and all that it’s a trustworthy good person, but it doesn’t save me 30 minutes of my life.
Here’s the actual news, which I read in under a minute.
And the official site for the program.
No worries just filling in the gaps about his work that you may be unfamiliar with basically this is a monkey’s paw situation in which they earn good PR from bands but in reality, there are a lot of unseen exceptions.
What exactly are these exceptions? The official website did not post the actual terms of the program, so how do they know about exceptions? Do they have a copy of the terms and conditions that they have shared?
It seems incredibly clear to me.
If you perform at participating venues, you get a $1500 travel stipend, that’s nice.
If you perform at participating venues, no merch fees. Keep all the moneys from your merch.
That seems to be all there is to it. The only scammy part seems that they are trying to encourage acts to make tour stops at their venues and go all in with LiveNation and its venues instead of performing at competing venues. I expect that the upside for them is you will have more acts competing to get gigs at those venues, increasing the quality, quantity, and popularity of acts that make tour stops there. And thus, more prestige for those venues and more money for them.
It’s just creating incentives on the supply side. Sure, it’s profit motive, everything is. But pumping is a lot better than squeezing.
Scott have you considered that these contracts could be too complicated to be simplified into plain language on a webpage?
Surely, any summary of any information results in information loss.
But I’m going to wager that the 30 minute video does not consist of the person reading the contract terms aloud verbatim. It is also a summary, in the same language.
Even a direct transcript of the video would be vastly preferable for all other than perhaps those who can not read or see.
I’m just particularly bothered by this kind of nonsense lately. Since the death of Twitter and another wave of culling on the feeds, I’ve experienced a lot less clickbait and bs. So now when I see it, it really stands out and bothers me. Just like how I used to not mind ads, until I didn’t see them for a long time, and now they are extremely irksome when they appear.
An update from my previous comment about Live Nation on the road again program.
This hits home at the beginning but I just saw HEALTH the other night at Brooklyn Steel for all of like $40, paid no more for a beer than I did at a restaurant beforehand, and that’s been my experience for many bands I’ve seen in NYC and CT. I guess the big big acts can get away with the $200 gouged tickets but the metal and industrial and more niche scenes are still generally very reasonable shows to get into and enjoy by and large. And those are the groups I would actually pay to see live these days where the experience is more organic and raw.
Even if the experience is still being jammed into a small space where some 6’2" bloke with a big curly hairdo is up in the front.
