One of the definitive moments of my life was my first live concert. I’ll protect the shred of dignity I have left by not disclosing the artist, but rest assured that at that time, they were one of the most popular acts in the country. The show took place at a major venue in Hartford, Connecticut, and I paid less for those tickets than I pay to see some local shows in Brooklyn today. I was twelve years old, but I felt like I had the world at my fingertips.
Immediately hooked on live music, I started saving my allowance to buy tickets to the next great show coming to town, much to the chagrin of my father who was tasked not only with driving me and my friends to the shows, but also with taking us to the Ticketmaster outlets to buy tickets. (You couldn’t buy tickets on the Internet then, and it was generally agreed upon that there was really no point in trying to penetrate busy signal after busy signal on the phone.) In those days — because it really does feel that long ago — ticket sales began on Saturday mornings, giving everyone with Monday through Friday work and school schedules an equal opportunity to land tickets. I’d wake up at the crack of dawn and my father would drive me down to the local donut shop — you know, when towns had local shops — for some early morning trans fat before making our way to the empty parking lot of the nearest ticket outlet in the next town over. There we waited for hours, always the first in line to get the best seats available for whichever band had captured my attention. It was, for a young man, a grand adventure that is now a very fond memory.
Nowadays, I question how many young people will have the opportunity to make such memories. The state of live music has changed dramatically in the last fifteen years, and so has the state of ticket sales, neither for the better. With quality and affordability stacked against them, I wonder — and frankly, worry — about the increasingly limited access to events that not only create lasting memories, but that also reaffirm over and over again the importance of live music in our culture.
The irony, of course, is that there is no lack of musical performances going on in America today. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more musical acts taking various stages across the country than ever before. But quantity has never been a very good substitute for quality, and live music is the furthest thing from an exception. That there are hundreds of musicians lining the stages of bars, concert halls, stadiums, festivals, and the like does not mean that the live music industry is thriving. Instead, I suggest it means that music, like so many other things, has become far more about business than it is about art.
Take one of the most basic venues for live entertainment: the bar. Now the functional purpose of a bar is to provide people with a place where they can socialize, engage one another in community, and otherwise unwind. What people don’t — or at least, never used to — go to a bar to do is to listen to live music. Live music, once upon a time, was part of the package, one way among many in which bar owners sought to placate their patronage. Now, at least in New York City, bar owners don’t want to simply deliver live music to their customers, they want the live music to bring in the customers. And they frequently don’t want to pay their live music to do so — they offer a late time slot on a weeknight, require a pull of at least twenty people (usually friends of the musicians), charge five to ten dollars at the door and a two drink minimum, pocketing more than half of the door charge. Those looking to unwind apart from the music suddenly have to pay a cover to do so, and those looking to support the music have to force themselves to either down two drinks in an hour or simply pay for a drink that will never be consumed.
From the standpoint of the art, there are a few problems with this business tactic. The first is that bars offer slots to artists primarily based on how many people they can bring in, not how good they are. So a tone-deaf, lo-fi, prog-rock, insert-any-other-hyphenated-descriptor-here band of college students with a collective total of 3,000 Facebook friends might be offered a gig over an accomplished solo jazz artist ten years in the business not because walk-in customers happen to enjoy noise rock, but because the individuals playing the noise rock will bring their friends into the establishment, even if only for an hour. Those friends become compulsory customers, and so a bar’s business will likely be much greater than it would have been had they brought in a more talented act with a smaller network. Suddenly the tone-deaf, lo-fi kids are being offered regular gigs despite the fact that the quality of music being performed is questionable.
By bringing in audiences of twenty people or more to tiny or no-name bars, it may appear that a band has a particular talent or appeal, even though the majority of that audience is friends who are simply looking to show support. Regular draws bring regular gigs, presenting the illusion that a band has achieved some measure of musical success when in fact, they have only so far been successful in strengthening a bar’s cashflow. Through self-promotion — still not a measure of musical prowess — this illusion spreads to larger venues, which means finally reaching a wider audience. The larger venues are no different than the bars in that they want to know how many tickets they will sell, not whether the music is of any notable quality. When a venue promoter believes that a band will bring in a large audience of their own, they use it as a springboard to bring other people in. “Look at what everyone else is doing,” they seem to say, “Don’t you want to do this, too?”
I don’t mean to say that buzzworthy bands never catch a break, but oftentimes, the wrong bands are given opportunities because they are better at promoting themselves than they are at playing music, and venue owners and ticket brokers are happy to cash in. It is at this stage where the cultural value of live music really takes a hit. While the quality of music presented remains relatively subjective — everyone has different musical tastes — the imperfect way in which ticket sales are handled has hurt music fans across the board.
As long as I can remember, there have been service fees associated with any ticket purchases made through a vendor as opposed to a box office. And while these surcharges have always been annoying, they were also nominal — maybe four dollars a ticket — so we dealt with it. Now, tickets sold through a vendor like Ticketmaster will cost the music fan somewhere in the vicinity of fifteen dollars on top of the list price — and that doesn’t even include receiving the tickets in the mail. Indeed, the only method of ticket delivery that does not include an additional charge these days is e-mail delivery, which means the consumer is now even responsible for his own printing costs. Why, exactly, have surcharges increased if the service provided has decreased?
More frustrating is the increasing popularity of presale tickets — tickets that can be purchased ahead of the release date by those willing to spend more. That isn’t to say that those who want to pay more shouldn’t be able to if it guarantees them seats to their favorite band, but true fans aren’t the only ones paying inflated pre-sale prices, and frequently, they are in the minority. Professional “scalpers”, or ticket resellers as they’ve come to be known, have access to significantly more funds than the average music lover, and ticket presales open the door wide for them to make the investment because they will only turn around and sell the tickets at marked-up prices anyway. The profits still outweigh the costs, leaving music fans with less access to regularly priced tickets on regular sale dates.
Ticket resale sites like StubHub and TicketsNow provide a platform for people to sell their tickets to any event, at any price set by the seller. Thus if I happen to purchase two tickets to see the Rolling Stones for $100 each, I can turn around and sell them for $1,000 each. It’s bad enough that the average Joe is empowered to make such disgusting profits off a ticket resale, but imagine the field day for the brokers. Because they have more resources to access tickets — as a business, they have more computers, phone lines, and agents seeking to purchase — they are more likely to actually land high-demand tickets. With entire teams of people working under brokers to secure tickets to the hottest shows, the access music fans have to those same tickets exponentially decreases. And I can’t help but feel that there is something fishy about the best seats to the best shows appearing on StubHub and TicketsNow within five minutes — barely enough time for the average person to complete a transaction — of going on sale through Ticketmaster, and for unreasonably inflated prices.
Unfortunate as it may be, I won’t deny that as long as capitalism is here, then business will need to remain a part of music so that musicians can make livings for themselves just as anybody else. But there was a time — and it wasn’t that long ago — when this was achieved with more harmony. Musicians were paid to do their jobs, ticket outlets and venues made money doing theirs, and fans had access to the bands they wanted to see at prices they could reasonably afford. Now at the grass-roots level, musicians aren’t paid fairly (if they are even paid at all) and at the higher levels, many fans are denied access to their favorite bands because of obstacles put up by venue owners and ticket sellers and resellers who are seeking to make a profit, regardless of whether or not they are promoting something of value.
All of this needs to be taken back to formula, so to speak. In a culture saturated with songs and sounds, we have grown to take music for granted, viewing musicians as dollar signs for those who would give them a platform to make a name for themselves. We need to remember that music is, first and foremost, a gift, one that is able to transcend the routine of everyday life, providing us an outlet for our thoughts, emotions, and our souls. It’s not the sort of thing that should have ever had a price tag on it, but since it does, then it is not merely a good idea, but it is our duty to ensure that the musicians who offer us this gift are provided for, without robbing audiences of the myriad other priceless riches that music will always, no matter the state of the economy, afford to culture around the world.