Music Downloads = Expensive Concerts? 698
melonman writes "According to an article at BBC News, $250 tickets for the latest Madonna tour are the fault of P2P file sharing. 'Before the advent of illegal downloads, artists had an incentive to underprice their concerts, because bigger audiences translated into higher record sales, Professor Krueger argues. But now, he says, the link between the two products has been severed, meaning that artists and their managers need to make more money from concerts and feel less constrained in setting ticket prices.' And it seems David Bowie agrees. Is 'the fans always get fleeced' the rock industry's equivalent to Moore's Law?"
If Madonna prices it, they will buy... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you were Madonna and her management, would you rather sell:
10,000 tickets at $250 each, totalling $2,500,000
or sell:
20,000 tickets at $100 each, totalling $1,000,000 ?
In Madonna's case, she'll likely sell out at the hire price anyway and pocket $5,000,000.
thats fine... (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
or... (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously. $250 per ticket? Whatever happened to "making music for the purpose of making music?"
Re:or... (Score:3, Insightful)
Article is incomplete: (Score:5, Insightful)
When Robert Plummer states that artists need to charge more for their concerts to make up for sagging records sales due to file sharing, he conveniently leaves out the important fact that it is only the most popular artists that actually see a decline. As David Blackburn of Harvard illustrated in his paper, On-Line Piracy and Recorded Music Sales [harvard.edu] (PDF warning), the record sales of relatively unknown artists benefit from the exposure P2P file sharing gives them.
So, if the big names want to charge outrageous sums for their concerts, let them. As of now, the tatic seems to be working, but as the situation develops, I think they'll wind up pricing themselves right out of the market.
BULLSHIT!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
The prices are due to the public's willingness to pay $250 to see Madonna. The public is either stupid are has more money than sense. None of it has anything to do with P2P. If the public refused to pay $250 by simply not going to any of her shows, you'd see her tickets going for $50 in no time.
Conclusion correct, reasoning flawed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Finally, the Music Industry Gets it (Score:3, Insightful)
Bits can be copied. DRM will never work. So instead of praying for better DRM, let the music be free and serve as an *advertisement* for your concerts!
I've seen ticket prices as high as $400, $500 and up for seats to shows and that's fine. It's called supply and demand. Fans can't copy a concert seat, so they pay the going price.
Of course, all that being said, I think that the RIAA is wrong when they say that CD sales are down as a result of P2P. CD sales are down because the music sucks.
tagging system. (Score:1, Insightful)
Precisely. (Score:2, Insightful)
Additionally, high-end acts (supergroups, mega pop stars, etc) have always had insane pricing on their appearances anyhow.
So I don't see how something like this is a humongous surprise to anyone with enough neurons to form a synapse.
Concerts have historically been the artist's main (Score:4, Insightful)
There's really no change here.
It's been reported time and time again, that file-sharing has had very little or NO impact on music sales. Do a search withing
I stand by my own opinion that the majority of music file sharers are the same type of folks who used to sit by the radio with cassette-recorder and recorded music off the air. They were NEVER going to buy the premium product, unless they absolutely loved the music.
There seems to be fewer high quality albums - ie, albums with more than one or two tracks actually worth listening to. Is it any wonder that sales have been declining?
Now, let's add in those people who are still holding a grudge with the music industry over their CD price fixing and their attempts at forcing price changes on the legitimate online music sales.
Does the term "Shooting one's self in the foot" come to mind? Or would "blowing one's own head off" be more appropriate?
Bullshit, this has been going on before napster (Score:3, Insightful)
They're just old and don't want to tour as much.
What boggles me is that anyone would pay that much to see fading performers.
One girl I date long ago was a huge Paul Simon fan. So I got her tickets for her birthday. They were at least $100 a piece. She want a shirt? 30 bucks for some sweat shop labored fucking shirt.
Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember some people complaining about the ticket prices for the Eagles "Hell Freezes Over" tour - which for golden circle were at least as high as these madonna ones (some went in excess of $750 for some shows, IIRC).
That was in 1994.
Concertgoers have been getting fleeced by some (though not all!) big-name acts for a lot longer than P2P has been around.
Grateful Dead (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
And the problem with that is
Why should the artist get the lion's share of the money? What about the people that wrote the music, wrote the lyrics, recorded and mixed the tracks, corrected the artist's singing flaws during editing, the people who created the cover art, the people who advertise and market the album, etc. etc. etc.? Why should the self-absorbed drug addict who shows up 2 hours late and puts in a couple days' worth of work singing the songs that were written for him/her be awarded a disproportionate amount of the money? Just because its their picture on the cover?
Haven't you learned anything from INXS? American Idol? Talented singers are a dime a dozen, and totally interchangeable. Why should the people who actually STUDIED a craft (sound engineers, marketing agents, talent scouts, cover artists, songwriters, etc.) get shafted out of a fair salary, so that the egomaniacal "artist" can bling themselves out like some sort of movie star?
They're not curing cancer. They're just singing some songs. Since when does that entitle them to millions and millions of dollars?
Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... (Score:5, Insightful)
*I* sure as hell wouldn't pay $250 to sit in a hockey arena and watch a Madonna Concert. For that matter, I wouldn't pay that much to see a music act I really liked.
But my solution to that is to not go to such concerts. Instead of paying $200+ to see the Rolling Stones when they came to Minnesota last year, I spent about $50 to see The White Stripes instead. (And, from all reports, I saw the better show.)
There's no such thing as an "unfair" price for entertainment. It's not like the people that can't afford to go to Madonna's concert are being denied health care or something.
If seeing that elderly skank wiggle her ass while singing through a vocoder is worth $250 to you, then more power to you. Go. Enjoy the show.
If it's not, and you really like Madonna, then stay home and jerk off to the cover of your old vinyl copy of the "Like a Virgin" LP. You'll probably get just as much out of the experience.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
ugh. i just love more and more punk, indie and whatnot scene...
you know, the one where band members THEMSELVES (gasp !) write music & lyrics (that, suprisingly actually mean something besides "baby, oh yeah, lalala") ?
the one where recordings are made in small studios and artist flaws are not digitally eliminated for months ?
the one where band members themselves draw/create album art ?
the one where most advertising is by word of mouth, concerting and such ?
yes, such a mechanism does not earn billions for big studios and everybody around them, but isn't that something most people are happy with ?
yes, artists don't get millions (or an _impression_ that they are getting them...), but it's funny that in that case people go to concerts for a very low fee ($2) and get recordings from artists directly or with very little resellers. even if they already have full doscography in their computers and then some more.
they don't pay for these albums because they are unable to get to the music other way - they do so because they really like the music, the atmosphere in concerts and attitude by the band/artist.
now, i need to see one band in latvia again, as previous time i was not clear enough to buy all their cds
no, really, ignore music stores. if you are interested in local artists, most of them sell their recordings themselves. if they are from another country, usually you can order throufh internet or wait for a gig nearby. and that will result in a good music, happy artists - and happy you. yeah, and world peace, of course.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
The rapid selling out of concerts is evidence that the tickets were actually priced far below what the market would bear. In further evidence of this, scalpers generally could sell tickets for costs 2x or greater the face value. Hence, why I said "maybe yes". The scalpers were actually the ones selling the tickets at whatever the market would bear.
As the article points out, the goal of touring used to be as much (or perhaps more) about promotion as money making. You needed to tour to support an album. I can remember many concert t-shirts with a "sold-out" logo accross them. I think it used to be important to the promoters that a concert sold-out, even if it meant a loss of ticket revenue.
I think that the concert promoters have since realized that they are better served by raising ticket prices to whatever the market will bear. Essentially they are grabbing for themselves that extra money that used to go to scalpers.
Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... (Score:1, Insightful)
They are charging what their wealthy or incredibly in-debt financially stupid fans are willing to pay. Just because Madonna has 1% of her fan base that is willing to pay that amount does not mean that she's not alienating the other 99% by charging so much.
A woman reportedly worth over 3/4 of a billion dollars [about.com] at this time, charging $250/ticket is greed. Pure, simple, unadulterated greed, and a complete lack of care for the people who put her at that level.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Gosh, in the good old days, the popular bands all wrote their own music and performed it live. You're either trolling, or one of these young whipper-snappers that doesn't know what real music is. Why should some jackass writer get revenue for life+70 years for spending 20 minutes writing some lyrics? I agree with you too - why should someone who does 20 takes in a studio followed by a lot of editing be given that same benefit for their "talent"? Same goes for studio musicians.
If someone claims to have talent, let them make a living performing. Oh right, that's what the article says is happening...
Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Either way, the article misses the point. Most artists see a very small percentage of revenues from record sales and rely on concerts to make their money.
Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Then the article gave the break-down of where their CD sales went. It went to the label, the distributors, the RIAA, the marketers, the recording studios, and so on. In the end, each band member made about 40 grand. We're talking superstars, the cream of the music industry here, making less for two years of work than a garbage man.
My point isn't that the poor artists deserve better. My point is that all the anti-bootlegging "you owe it to the artist to buy the CD" types don't know how little the artist gets from a CD (a negative amount, in some instances), and how much goes into the pockets of lawyers and Congressmen who pass more laws taking away your freedom (I say "your", because I'm not American).
If you want to support the artist, bootleg his music and send him a dollar. It's *far* more than he'd get if you bought the CD. Or go to a concert, or order a t-shirt, or whatever. Or, alternatively, don't support any RIAA-owned artists, and let a corrupt industry get what it deserves.
Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... (Score:5, Insightful)
What does an artist owe to the fans? Nothing.
Yeah, a "big name" got big because a shitload of people were willing to spend money on their records and t-shirts, but those people got records and t-shirts that they were happy with out of the deal. Fair exchange.
The fact that you bought all of U2's old stuff (even "October") does not buy you the right to dictate the artistic direction they choose to go next.
Likewise, the fact that you wore fishnet crop-tops in High School and know the words to "Express Yourself" by heart does not endow you in the inalienable right to get in to Madonna's concert for fifty bucks when others are willing to pay five times that for the same seat.
The fair way to set any price is supply and demand. There's a finite supply of Madonna tickets, and plenty of demand. If she sold the tickets for $50, scalpers would buy them all up and sell them for $250 on eBay. Fans would pay the same to get in, but Madonna's business venture would get less of it.
Economics 101.
Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... (Score:2, Insightful)
One could say that about any luxury item. Again, we're not talking about anything life-critical, or even needed to have a comfortable life, but a pure luxury. Let economics deal....
The real problem with this is the (deliberate?) misinterpretation of the this. While I wouldn't argue for file-sharing of copyrighted materials, such debates need to be done with real issues, not stuff pulled from dark orifices....
This is exactly what should happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is how the record industry, wait, music industry should be. The digital music is the advert to get you to go to the live gigs Where they make their money.
People complain endlessly about the lack of things for teenagers to do, and a gigging culture would benefit that endlessly.
This would have the benefit of solving most of our problems with "pop" today. You can't sing live? You can't make any money. On the plus side you can rapidly cut down on the people and skills you need to smooth you recorded sounds waves into something presentable, in your "adverts."
Music will not die. You can kill a record industry, but you cant kill a music industry. It's whether people except that maybe being a successful musician shouldn't mean that you earn more money than a brain surgeon.
The powerhouses try to tell us that if piracy kills them that will be the end of music full stop. And that would be a Bad Thing. But it wouldn't be the end, and a world with free music and constantly gigging artists, could even be better.
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be nice if sound engineers and cover artists made a good living, but they don't. That's not where the money goes--if all the rest of the artistic talent that goes into packaging and selling make even 20 cents per album, I'd be very surprised. Cover artists make peanuts. Even Andy Warhol couldn't get paid for cover art. Talent scouts used to actually know something about music, but now they're just marketers who try to guess what they can sell. As for marketing agents studying a craft, you obviously haven't met many of them. They are the most singularly inept, idiotic, and misinformed bunch I have ever met. Trust me, the vast majority of them have never studied anything, and seem to consider aggressive ignorance a great virtue. They, however, like the lawyers and the managers, probably take the bulk of the money.
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
!? Not in my world... Ed Sullivan had talented singers. Hee Haw had talented singers.
Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... (Score:2, Insightful)
I hate this argument. Just because something sits within a recognized pattern of behavior does not make it right by default.
Your post makes sense and is nothing something I didn't consider. But loyalty is something I do feel owed as it's in return for my loyalty. But I guess old-school notions of loyalty just don't exist anymore - not when there are dollars in question.
Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... (Score:3, Insightful)
So this is really about sour grapes on his part because people don't like his new stuff, they only want the old stuff. He just wants to blame P2P for his lost abilities.
Expensive Productions not P2P (Score:1, Insightful)
Madonna is also a megastar with longevity of success, a huge back catalog of hits, and possibly won't put on many more concerts. You can make your own supply/demand arguments based on that (and not P2P). It also helps to compare her with a band like U2, who also have past success, lots of hits, and put on a big-production show. They *somehow* charage a hell of a lot less ($60 when I saw them this past fall).
Personal Note: I'm going to see an indie artist tonight for 18 bucks. I assume it's going to be the singer, her band, and a couple of microphones. I istened to a couple songs thanks to P2P, bought two albums and am now going to the show (it's Kathleen Edwards, by the way).
Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... (Score:4, Insightful)
But Bono and Madonna never asked for your loytalty. They are not friends of yours. They are just people who recorded music in the hopes that other people would like it enough to buy it.
The CEO of Target is where he is because I (along with a lot of other people) buy clothes in his store. That doesn't make him somebody that should be expected to "respect" me in any way whatsoever. If he wanted to turn Target into a chain of boutiques which only sold $300 jeans, that would be entirely up to him. I wouldn't feel "betrayed", or like the jeans I bought there in the past any less... I'd just look for another store to buy new jeans from.
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Bullshit. Sure, the artist may get the same dollar amount at the end, but by buying the album you send a message to the record company (mega-conglomorate or cottage label) that YOU want MORE of this band. When no one buys the album, the record company drops them, no matter the size of the label. That's the "market forces" that everyone loves to talk about only when it benefits themselves.
Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... (Score:5, Insightful)
It depends. Are you loyal enough sell your house pay whatever is asked? Are you loyal enough to quit your job and follow Madonna wherever she goes?Or does loyalty go out the window when enough money gets involved?
They ask what they can get (Score:3, Insightful)
Loyalty (Score:4, Insightful)
We are talking business here. No freaking charity, no loyalty. Money first, faith last.
Why Americans are so unhappy about their two greatest inventions - show business and entertainment industry???
Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... (Score:3, Insightful)
Other merchandising doesn't count for this argument unless you can "share" it by P2P.
The argument is flawed at best.
Re:Right.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Concert seats are a fixed supply, so traditional economics apply. The point where the demand drops off is the proper price point. If that's $100, $200, $300, it doesn't matter. Basic economics.
But these rules don't apply to music downloads, where the supply is infinite. THERE, the idea is to sell for as little as possible to cover your costs, and profit based on quantity.
This DOES tie back to the concert sales, but not like they're claiming. The more copies of your song there are floating around, the more people are going to hear it, and maybe want to see you perform live. That translates into HIGHER demand for those scarce concert tickets, which drives the price up.
Subsidising the concert ticket prices with CD sales just skews the model. Let 'em charge what they can get, and the market will sort it all out.
Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... (Score:3, Insightful)
In the 80s and early 90s, it was fairly commonplace for pop acts to sell concert seats at a loss, since album sales were so profitable for the company, and the band made a killing on merchandise.
These days, most record labels are money-losing divisions of bigger media companies. The reason for this is not P2P, but the simple fact that a wealth of media options is now competing for teens' entertainment dollars.
When "Sgt. Pepper's" came out, High School and college kids on four continents rushed out to buy it, and would sit at home listening to it for hours on their record players. But what else would they be doing with their leisure time back then? There were no playstaions, no home theaters, no MySpace pages, and certainly no way to stay in touch with their friends while out and about.
If a kid is spending $60 per game on their console system, and $20 for their MMPORPG, and another $20 on a NetFlix account, they are not going to spend much on buying albums. Especially when a Soundtrack CD often costs five bucks more than a DVD of the movie the sountrack is coming from!
Add to that the fact that the pop music industry is the most risk-averse it has been since the early 60s, and you've got a sure formula for overall long-term failure. The industry is stuck adapting to the fact that a "two hits pluss filler" pop album is simply not worth $18 to the typical mall rat anymore. If you are very lucky, the kid will spend $2 downloading the hits off iTMS, and that's the last money you'll get out of them until you bring the concert to town.
I suspect that the next Big Thing in pop music will be something that takes greater advantage of multimedia and the Interactivity offered by modern computers. Something like DEVO was hoping to do when VHS was emerging, or what Brian Eno has been up to lately (although he seems to be slightly missing the mark.) The element which is missing from a lot of these early attempts at interactive performance art is sex appeal, something which has always been an essential part of pop. The "Idol" shows in America and England seem to be a step in a direction which is generating interest, but it seems to me that somebody is going to come along and go farther with it.
I've been mocking the Nintendo Revolution's motion capture interface as much as anybody, but perhaps something like that, in which you choreograph how you want a virtual Britany Spears to dance by demonstrating the moves yourself, would be one example of a new way to sell pop music. I don't know. I suspect that it's going to take something that weirdly different to get people to care about it. After all, would teens be aware of a song like "Wakka Lakka" if it were not for DDR?
Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... (Score:3, Insightful)
If Target started selling $300 jeans, and people were buying it, they certainly wouldn't need me and my 3-pair-of-$20-jeans-per-year.
Same with U2 making millions off their silly "Zoo TV" tour back in the 90's. Fans of "War" and "Boy" really didn't matter to them anymore.
No (Score:2, Insightful)
Increased demand mean high prices from which high salaries can be derived.
And you know what? Supply and demand works. People will use less gas. High prices are the market's way of saying "use less of this", more or less.
There are no shortages because of this mechanism.
That's a long way around the barn to say: look for supply and demand causes first. The other stuff second.
Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... (Score:2, Insightful)
I saw Neil Young'a 'Greendale' concert, and people were bitching about the same thing. They missed a great concert because they were in such a twist to hear 'Cinnamon Girl' for the 50,000th time.
Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically it works like this, there are a limited number of concert tickets available. Madonna can underprice these tickets in an effort to placate fans that don't have a basic grasp of economics, but that doesn't necessarily mean that these fans will actually be able to get into the show. Worse, it basically guarantees that a great deal of the profit that *could* be made on a concert goes not to the artist in question, but to scalpers on Ebay.
Seriously, when was the last time that you actually got your hands on tickets to a show that sold out in a few minutes? You still end up buying the ticket for $250, you just put the extra $200 in the pocket of someone on Ebay.
It's not about loyalty, it's about setting a price that takes a finite commodity (seats in an ampitheater) and distributes them among interested consumers. People with more time than money might wish that artists would charge lower prices and use things like waiting in line for a week (or whatever) to determine who gets in, but that's hardly fair to fans with a life. Besides, Madonna (or whoever) doesn't really benefit from you waiting in line. It's in her self interest to simply charge money.
The good news is that if you have time to wait in line for a week there is a good chance that you could take that free time and easily find a way to turn your free time into cash. Where I live McDonald's is always hiring :). At $5.50 an hour 45 hours should just about cover the price of entry. This time of year it is also possible to mow lawns. $250 is about 10 small lawns where I live.
Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... (Score:1, Insightful)
This is kind of like saying "Light doesn't make grass grow. Photosynthesis does."
The value gained from being able to promote a recording to a larger audience (which used to be, and still is to some extent, the main point of touring) used to cause ticket prices to be artificially low. A higher ticket price resulted in a smaller audience, which meant less effective promotion of the record, which meant less money from record sales and a lower position on the charts. It's still market economics at work, it's just not as black-and-white as you're trying to paint it. The idea was to maximize money all around; not just from touring, but from touring and record sales combined.
Now there is less to be gained from touring in terms of record sales. P2P is not the sole cause of this change -- a lot has changed about the way music is promoted and purchased -- but it is certainly one of the variables.
Bullshit (Score:4, Insightful)
This is just plain FUD from the record industry and their puppets, like Madonna.
Most musicians make money with concerts, because the share they have in record sales is awfully low. Everytime you buy a CD, you're not paying for the valuable work of the musician, most of the money goes directly inside the gaping throat of the record industry. We feed them loads of money and they create plastic, lab-made stars to fill the airwaves with.
In my dream world, real artists will start to sell or give away their music direcly in the Internet, and make money from shows. They're not making big money selling records, anyway, so what's the problem? This would be a great incentive to make shows more interesting and worthwhile going to. I personally think nothing beats a live show.
Plastic-made pop stars and record companies can just go fuck themselves and maybe we could start giving good artists more opportunities.
Re:If Madonna prices it, they will buy... (Score:3, Insightful)