Just Married :: Live Nation and Ticketmaster

You’re in a band. You want to get your tickets to your fans so they can see you’re show. Simple, right? With online ticketing, for the past year or so you’ve basically had two options: Ticketmaster or Live Nation. The above photo is an actual plot for world domination made up by Live Nation in 2007.

With these conglomerated ticketing corporations, fans will often sit in front of a computer, refreshing the page since an hour before the sale time, only to find that not even ten seconds after they’re released, they’re sold out. Ticketmaster and Live Nation have long been suspected of payola. Essentially meaning that tickets are given out to everyone and anyone they see fit, in exchange for promotion or payment, ensuring that the general ticket consuming public does not get their tickets. If by the grace of the ticketing deities a fan does somehow make it to the payment page, they then have to face a slew of fees. Venue fees, ticketing fees and even charity fees (which defies the meaning of ‘charity’). In addition to these issues, most contractually obligated bands selling through these companies are barred from playing any venues that aren’t hosted by the ticketing agencies.

It’s about to get more complicated.

With the musical landscape changing and becoming more and more fragmented due to digital mediums, fewer bands can fill up entire stadiums. The result, Ticketmaster and Live Nation are merging. If you’re worried about it being more monopolistic than it already is, the Department of Justice has your back. They’ve allowed the merger, but on the condition that they license their ticket selling software and sell a division of Ticketmaster, essentially creating two competitors, AEG and Comcast-Spectator. The latter will deal mostly with college sports. If Live Nation Entertainment controls all those arrows in the middle of that photo up there...I wonder if ticket prices will go up? And because smaller venues and shows have smaller fees, the new company, called Live Nation Entertainment Inc., is focusing on large arena concerts, which will most likely leave those smaller acts and venues behind.

But what are you going to do? It’s not like you have any other options.

An interesting alternative to this system might be found with a company called Brown Paper Tickets. They call themselves ‘the first and only fair trade ticketing company’ and profess that they are a ‘not-just-for-profit’ group. Any artist or venue can sell tickets through the website for free and buyers will always pay a flat fee. Under ten bucks is .99 cents and over ten bucks is $1.99. And they donate 5% of their profits to charity. The tickets are secure, complete with holographic foils, black light imaging and bar codes, and they even have a print at home option. There’s no contract, so you’re not bound to anything. The company will even print you extra tickets if you decide you want to sell them through your website or another service. There’s also a bunch of services available to every artist or event producer, including marketing.

If more bands and venues start working with Brown Paper, the ticketing world could have its first fair trade rival.

brownpapertickets.com

Published in Performer Magazine, April 2010 issue.

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Monsters of Drawing Lines

There was a time when Conor Oberst, although thankful to the people that helped with the performance, condemned the show he was playing, because it was put on by a "horribly greedy and oppressive organization" called Clear Channel. A time when Oberst was embarassed about even selling music: "buy my records down at the corporate chain. I tell myself I shouldn't be ashsamed, but I am" (from "Hole in One" by desaparecidos). A time when Bright Eyes made sure if they played a Clear Channel venue that the media giant didn't see a penny. A time when Bright Eyes refused to play a show in 2005 at The Pagent in St. Louis, because of the venue's ties with Clear Channel.

Which was puzzing, when I saw that Oberst's latest project Monsters of Folk is selling tickets for their upcoming tour through Live Nation, a sister company of Clear Channel. On top of the reasonable expensive tickets you get charged several fees. You have your standard venue fee (which I'd question if the venue is really getting anything out of it), you get charged charity (which eradicates the definition of it as 'charity') and a 'ticket fee'($12.95, a whopping %28 of the ticket price, which is Live Nation's 'we've got a monopoly and you guys are all suckers' tax). I remember buying Bright Eyes tickets from ticketmaster, which is one thing. Crossing a line you drew yourself in the sand is another.

Maybe a band with three members that will draw a huge crowd has no other choice but to nationally distribute tickets through Live Nation. Maybe they're under contract. Maybe Oberst is just giving in and going along with the way things are. Maybe worse. But hey, even Faulkner wrote screenplays in Hollywood for a while to be able to eat.

As Oberst said: "If anyone wants to see music continue as an artform and not a commercial good, then nows the time to make a change, because that's the way it's going. And there will no longer be real music if we keep letting them shove it down our fucking throats."

The rant video's here. Conor Oberst's speech before performing "Let's Not Shit Ourselves" live on MTV at the Shortlist awards on October 5th of 2003. The band was riding the release of Lifted. Needless to say, MTV cut the speech out of the broadcast.

As penance for this heinous crime, I offer you a crooning M. Ward on "The Sandman, The Brakeman and Me." I think the song is a representation of the trio's alter egos. On Bright Eyes' Cassadaga there was a song called "If the Brakeman Turns My Way," making him the 'brakeman.' Seeing as M. Ward's singing, that probably makes him the 'me,' which leaves Jim James as 'the sandman.'

Monsters of Folk - The Sandman, The Brakeman and Me

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Bright Eyes is Dead...

The Omaha World Herald reported that Bright Eyes was found dead in his apartment in New York today, surrounded by clocks and calendars. The coroners have determined that he died from a sudden fit of vanity.

When departing on the Conor Oberst solo vision quest, Bright Eyes commented that he could only write so many songs about being lost. For many of his listeners that were uplifted by and identified with that indeterminable indecisiveness, lost is how Bright Eyes will remain. Shoeless, in the middle of the woods, surrounded by circling wolves, calling out to his fabled Arienette. Apparently, the sound of lonliness wasn't what made him happy anymore.

In his rigor mortis stilted hands he clutched what seems to be his requiem, a final album that will be released in the fall of 2010.

We all wish Mr. Bright Eyes luck clawing his way up from that chalk outline.

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Timber Timbre

with high quality modified microphones Brian Eno would be proud.


Diego Stocco - Music From a Tree

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Oldest Musical Instrument in Existence

This is what it sounds like.

They crawled out of the ocean, humming and chanting as their limbs and stature rearranged itself. They found themselves in Europe 35,000 years ago feasting on some prize vulture carcass. As they stood upright, their mashing mandibles blew air through bone and they even carved it holes. It was their need to make logic out of noise that set them ahead in the evolutionary race against the neanderthals. Little did they know that they were building our modern music even then. Campfires were the first blogs and their wandering tribe was the first UK tour. The idea is the same, the only thing that's changed is how its organized and what we call it. This creative spirit is what distinguishes us from unevolved protoplasmic goo.

BBC article.

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