Whitney Houston was under water and apparently unconscious when she was found in a hotel bathtub, Beverly Hills police said Monday.It’s not as if this is the first summer concert season that has proved disappointing to the people who’d hoped to make money from it.
Is 2010 really all that different?
Yes, say the experts.
“It is unprecedented,” Memorial Coliseum general manager Randy Brown says. “We are dealing with times and conditions that have never been seen before.”
“This summer will finally mark the turning point in the concert business when things will get analyzed and I believe the business will become more grounded as a result,” says promoter Don Kronberg, whose company Nitelite Promotions recently brought the Moody Blues to Embassy Theatre for a sold-out show.
Because of disappointing ticket sales in most markets, many national acts have had to curtail or cancel their summer tours.
John Mayer, Rhianna and the Jonas Brothers were forced to cancel dates as were the organizers of the Lilith Fair and “American Idol” tours. One of Rhianna’s canceled shows was an appearance scheduled for Aug. 3 at the Verizon Wireless Music Center in Noblesville.
Simon and Garfunkel, Christina Aguilera and Limp Bizkit decided not to tour at all for the time being. U2 postponed its tour because of Bono’s back surgery.
Other cancellation plans don’t seem to have affected the Indianapolis or Detroit markets, but it is not known how tickets have been selling generally at sheds and amphitheaters in and around those cities.
Requests for interviews with representatives of Live Nation Entertainment, the No. 1 concert promoter in the world and the megacorporation responsible for most of the biggest tours that pass through the region, were not answered.
When business ramps up in the summer at such venues as the Verizon amphitheater – which can seat 6,000 concertgoers and accommodate 24,000 on the lawn – and at the similar DTE Energy Music Theatre in Detroit, concert business traditionally hibernates a bit at the 2,000-seat Embassy and the 13,000-seat Coliseum, Brown says.
Brown says the bulk of summer concert business long ago shifted to large venues that offer both indoor and outdoor features.
The Coliseum did see the cancellation of one high-profile show this summer – “Star Wars in Concert,” which had been slated for July 15.
But Brown says there were many factors involved apart from disappointing ticket sales, including the logistics of transporting an orchestra to Fort Wayne from the city it was scheduled to perform in the night before.
So the summer live music debacle isn’t hitting the Coliseum and the Embassy directly, although the fallout is likely to affect how both venues do business in the future.
Brown says the recession is only part of the reason for this downturn.
“The industry has done things to compete with itself, finding new ways to alienate the consumer,” he says.
In recent years, artists have looked for ways to score bigger and bigger paydays out of touring as record sales have tanked. This has led to skyrocketing prices for tickets and concessions.
“When Live Nation made these multimillion-dollar tour offers, the artists were glad to see them,” Kronberg says. “But the only way to make that money back was to charge as much money per ticket as fans were willing to spend. And after they plunked that money down, they got the rude awakening of the $10 beer price and the cold hot dog for $6.”
One of the money-generating strategies devised in recent years was VIP ticket packages costing from $200 to $900 (the latter amount earned the buyer an audience with band Kiss).
Superfans who bought VIP tickets were assured prime reserved seating and other perks, including face time with the artist in some cases.
The problem, Kronberg says, is that this practice drove slightly less devoted, not to mention less wealthy, fans away.
“When you see the price range for a concert advertised as $20 to $500, it is natural to assume that every decent seat in the house is too expensive,” he says.
“They don’t want to stand in line because they know the best seats are already gone,” Kronberg says.
One of the ways Live Nation has combated the glut of unsold tickets this summer is by staging $10 fire sales or offering $10 upgrades at the last minute in an attempt to fill empty seats in the rows closest to the stage.
Of course, this practice likely angers anyone who paid $400 for a seat in the same section, Kronberg says.
A review of a Lilith Fair show in Entertainment Weekly confirmed that this anger is not merely conjectural.
“I hate to pick on Live Nation, but we’re sort of in the midst of a Live Nation roast,” Kronberg says. “They made outrageous deals with the artists and set outrageous ticket prices for the customers. Then the customers didn’t show up. So they reduced the ticket prices after the fact, basically telling any customer who’d bought early, ‘You’re a fool.’ ”
Both Brown and Kronberg wonder how Live Nation is going to re-train patrons who bought tickets at an eleventh hour discount to pay full price earlier in the process.
Last spring, when Live Nation merged with Ticketmaster, it was thought that the upper limit on ticket prices had not been reached.
“Now that it’s united with Ticketmaster, the sky will be the limit when it comes to fees,” Sally Greenberg, executive director of the National Consumers League, told the New York Times in April.
In that same article, Irving Azoff – the chairman of the newly united companies – was described as wearing a T-shirt with the phrase “He Who Dies With the Most Toys wins” on the front and “Irving Wins!” on the back.
It was reportedly a very different Azoff who appeared before Live Nation investors this month to try to explain why ticket sales for the top 100 touring bands are down 12 percent this year.
According to a story in the Los Angeles Times, Jason Garner, the company’s CEO for global music, admitted to the crowd that “ticket prices need to come down” and promised that artists and managers would be told: “Your guarantee needs to come down.”
Kronberg says a lot has to change, but the bottom line is that artists who want to stick around for the next 10 years need to be less greedy, more appeasing and more creative.
Kronberg will bring Straight No Chaser to the Embassy in the fall and he says the members of that vocal group are willing to adjust their fee to suit various markets and venues.
“They have come to me and said: ‘What do you think is fair? We want to play the building. We want it to be affordable for the people in that city.’ ”
The big acts that have traditionally been able to command huge guarantees and can charge high ticket prices that patrons are willing to pay are on the verge of growing too old to tour, Brown says.
“Someone in the (Rolling) Stones turned 69 (recently),” he says. “I think one of the members of the Moody Blues turns 70 soon. Some of these guys are just not going to be playing in a few years.”
And acts haven’t been and aren’t being developed that can replace them, Brown says.
“They’re just not out there anymore,” he says. “Lady Gaga can charge just about any ticket price she wants. She’s very talented, and I think she’s going to be around for a while. But I thought the same thing about Evanescence.”
Kelly Updike, executive director of Embassy Theatre, believes the present unpleasantness could be good for theaters its size. She thinks performers accustomed to amphitheaters might start considering theaters now.
“They seem now to be poking their heads above the foxhole,” she says. “Industry news we’ve been reading for years now has called theaters the venues of the future. They’re big enough that artists and promoters can make money and get a sellout, and consumers like the intimacy.”
Updike says the Mannheim Steamroller show scheduled for December at the Embassy is likely evidence that some big acts are willing to think a little smaller.
Kronberg says everybody needs to start thinking a lot smarter.
“At the end of the day, how much money do you need?” Kroneberg says, referring to classic rock acts that tour too often and charge too much. “Why not spend the last five years of a long career rewarding your fans by giving everybody the opportunity to attend?”
Kronberg says Live Nation needs to go back to the business model where the customer who buys early is rewarded with lower prices and where the customer who buys early has access to the best seats.
The business must return to placing the customer before the artist. This will benefit everybody, he says.
“We need to build that concertgoer again,” he says. “We’ll need that concertgoer if we’re going to build artists that will last. We need to deliver a product and deliver an experience that creates fans and makes them keep coming back. We have to make that experience affordable to the average concertgoer.
“We haven’t been doing a very good job of that,” he says.
