Fed Up With the High Price of Concert Tickets? Blame Wall Street.
I can’t see much wrong to poke holes in Bob Leftsetz’s theories about the current state of of the concert industry. Can you?
There’s been this b.s. that concert tickets went through the roof because of Napster, that the acts had to make it up somewhere. But that’s just lemmings trying to emulate rich lifestyles, to go back to the cause you’ve got to retreat to 1996, when Bob Sillerman rolled up the concert promoters into what was then called SFX and is now called Live Nation.
Our entire business has been ravaged by this roll-up. With concert promotion now a public business, with a ton of debt and quarterly reporting, it was hard for promoters to say no, they needed acts to fill the sheds, they could not have a decrease in revenue, and as a result, the price for talent went through the roof. It was a market share grab, a scorched earth policy that changed concertgoing from a working class activity to one akin to going on vacation, oftentimes that’s what tickets cost.
Not that the acts were against this. It’s hard to get someone to say no to a check. Especially when you’ve been doing it for decades, haven’t had a hit in years and have kids in college and multiple mortgages, as so many classic rock and early MTV stalwarts possess.
So as the rappers emulated billionaires, as kids on street corners believed they too could be rich, from watching MTV and then “American Idol”, the underpinnings of the music business fell out.
