—But Moving It is Getting More Complex
Fuel prices are down and everything’s looking rosy for getting gear on the road for the upcoming concert-touring season, right? Well, maybe not. Some of the handful of freight forwarding companies that specialize in packing, shipping and handling musical instruments and pro audio gear are reporting that a combination of more burdensome Federal regulations and a general malaise at still-floundering airlines that have cut routes, changed aircraft and in some cases transferred that chimp from the luggage ads to cargo handling is creating new headaches for getting tours where they need to go.
Larry Bretherton, manager of the Los Angles office of freight coordinator NewDirex, says that if anything, conditions for concert shippers have become worse more than seven years after the 9/11 attacks in New York. “I don’t know if they’re keeping America safe but they’re keeping us busier then ever,” he says, referring to the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) and its parent entity, the Department of Homeland Security (DSE). “We get two visits a year from TSA and at least one from Customs.”
Major problems include the fact that the finalization of TSA’s own database of commercial shippers is substantially behind schedule and their Known Shipper program has added additional layers of complexity that are costly in terms of both time and money, often compelling the shipper to physically go to the sites of clients and destination venues to satisfy TSA regulations. All clients and destination venues have to be submitted in dense detail for TSA vetting. “And if they kick one back to us, we literally have to fly there to confirm all the details,” says Bretherton, who says his list of known shipper entities has about 10,000 entries. In particular, it’s starting to wreak havoc with newer venues and ones in less-traveled locations.
Fuel prices are under control for the time being, but the airlines are not out of the woods by any means. U.S. carriers cut their domestic schedules by an average of nine percent in 2008, and are also changing out wide body aircraft for narrow-bodies on some of more marginal remaining ones, thus reducing cargo capacity on those routes. “I have to continuously check on schedules, routes and aircraft type,” Bretherton complains. “I might be bidding on a project that starts two months from now, but if, two weeks before it starts they switch from a 767 to a 737, everything has to be recalculated. It’s important to have a caveat in any bids that makes it clear that they are based on current information.”
Keith Mitchell, president of operations for Shockwave Cargo, which operates from Los Angeles and Elizabeth, N.J., agrees that Federal regulations are becoming more onerous, as are the airlines’ own cargo requirements, which increasingly reflect the fee-soaked nature of passenger baggage. But he’s also noticed another trend when it comes to routing gear for touring artists: more and more of it is going to places he’s never shipped to before. “In the past three or four months, I’m seeing a lot more activity going to places like Bali, Indonesia, Panama, Colombia,” he says, citing artists including Hoobastank, Third Eye Blind and Marc Anthony, among others, for whom Shockwave has sent gear overseas. “It used to be going mainly to Europe when it went overseas. Now, much of it is headed to Asia, Central America and South America. I’m not sure why, but the trend looks like it’s going to extend into 2009.”
Nonetheless, fuel costs will remain volatile in 2009, affecting shippers’ cost and their ability to project those costs for future bids. Even the usual harbingers of price increases are no longer reliable; the announcement last December that OPEC was cutting oil production resulted in gasoline prices further declining that same week. But some things still allow some useful crystal ball action: land shipping costs will rise and fall quickly in relation to the price of gasoline; jet fuel tends to lag those changes by as much as a month, and airlines have been good about announcing fuel surcharges in advance.
Production companies have also been changing their strategies in reaction to air freight costs and the increased time that it takes to clear complex productions through customs and security. One of the more significant of these has been to create multiple versions of assets like stage sets and backlines, then pre-positioning them in advance of a tour moving from on continent to the next. Upstaging did just that with Radiohead’s recent tour, creating two productions that would leapfrog each other ahead of the band, which then picked up sound and video from local vendors.
The concert freight sector, relatively cozy as it is, has seen some consolidation, most notably Rock-It Cargo’s acquisitions of shippers Rogers Worldwide and Soundmoves. About the same time, a consortium of small and mid-sized shippers that share a specialty, or at least an affinity for, the touring concert business formed Entertainmentcargo.com, through which a half-dozen or so independent freight coordinators offer those and other tour support services in The U.S., Canada, the ANZAC region, Japan/Pacific Rim and Europe. Troupes touring the world can be handed off to member companies in each region, though the originating company controls the budget and invoicing, consigning the work to the other affiliates. NewDirex is the West Coast affiliate for Entertainmentcargo.com, and Larry Bretherton says it’s as much a marketing proposition for each of the shippers involved as it is a reaction to consolidation elsewhere in the market. “It’s worked well,” he says. “We’re all neurotic small-shop owners who want everything to go exactly right. That’s tough to do in this business.”
The thing everyone wishes for this touring season, though, is stuff to ship. Lots of it.
