In what I can only imagine is a preview of the high-fiving and horn tooting which will occur on next week's Live Nation earnings call, it has been announced that the concert industry is officially out of the slump. Average concert attendance is up nearly twenty percent and a number of extremely promising tours are planned for the summer (a period which sagged last year).
Live Nation boss Michael Rapino was quoted as saying, "'All artists were playing to bigger audiences than ever, [which] shows the fans will come when given a quality show." However I don't know if that's the whole story. A show is always a crap shoot; going to see a veteran act may be less of a gamble, but you can't always know what the night will bring. With the average consumer only going to 2 shows a year and only 16 percent of music- related consumer spending going to purchasing concert tickets,I'd wager to say that most people pay the big bucks to SEE the acts they already love play the songs they already know and love in a clean and comfortable venue. The stage shows seem to inevitably automatically get bigger and flashier at that level. If I'm paying $150 to $200 for a ticket to a show at Madison Square Garen there is no doubt in my mind that I am going to get the standard big show. So I don't think the upswing is because of the quality of the show. It's something, I just don't think it's that.
AEG's Randy Phillips rephrases it in a way that works a lot better for me:
"It's not quantity, but the quality - commercially speaking - of the acts that are on the road in any given period,' says Randy Phillips, CEO of promoter AEG Live. 'This is why it is so hard to do a quarter-to-quarter comparison and why our business is not particularly conducive to the type of quarterly accounting required by Wall Street analysts."
I think it might be time for us to come up with a few other benchmarks for success and failure of the industry.
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