Sports presenters get into the concert game

As concert attendance dwindles and large arenas continued to be shunned, promoters and developers are looking towards 5,000 seater spaces as the wave of the future. In Seattle, a collaboration between (former Microsoft honcho) Paul Allen's company First & Goal and AEG (the nation's second largest promoter) could bring more concerts to the space south of the city's football field known as Qwest Field Event Center.

The event center could fill a potentially lucrative niche in the Seattle market, which now lacks a venue geared for shows that typically draw 5,000 to 7,000 people.

"That's the sweet spot for concerts," said Bill Alves, a Seattle City Council analyst who has studied KeyArena's finances.

Pollstar, a publication that tracks the concert industry, reported that half of the 100 top-grossing concert tours of 2004 had audiences of 2,501 to 7,500.

"There seems to be a decreasing number of acts capable of selling out a major arena," said Gary Bongiovanni, Pollstar's editor in chief.

"Many of them that fueled the concert business today date back to the 1960s and '70s, and soon that gravy train is going to end."

While the space meets the capacity needs, many artists and concertgoers have criticised the venue as having terrible sound and being unfit for musical performance. Julian Casablancas of The Strokes called the venue "fugly".

A spokesman for AEG declined comment on any event-center plans. Fuller (Martha Fuller, chief financial officer for First & Goal) acknowledged the Qwest center has some "acoustic challenges." Seattle Times' music critic Patrick MacDonald, for instance, has called it the "worst venue in town."

"Conceivably, we'll be making some improvements," Fuller said.

As more non-theater venues begin to transition over to keep up with the mid-size concert trend, it will be interesting to see how/if they can make the structural and acoustic changes that will keep fans coming back for more.

Complete article here in the Seattle Times.

(BTW, sorry for not posting yesterday. It got hectic over here.)