The Biz

The State and Future of the Live Music Industry
Nashville International Airport sends out this notification email they cutely refer to as an “Aireport.” The one from mid-June warned of excessive security line delays as hordes of attendees from two major music events in and around the city began heading home. What it didn’t reveal was the very different experiences those two events had. The CMA Fest, formerly Fan Fair, set a new benchmark, averaging 88,500 fans per day for the five-day event. About 65 miles away, however, attendance the Bonnaroo festival was “slightly less” than the average of 80,000 that bought tickets for the last two years.

As more live shows are recorded, technical credits become more important for careers…

Who engineered Dire Straits’ hugely successful, self-titled 1978 Dire Straits LP, and where was it recorded? That would be Rhett Davies, at London’s Basing St. Studios. It’s right there on the back of the album, or on any number of online sources. Now, who was the FOH mixer and system tech when that album became the biggest tour of the 1980s? Yeah, I thought so.

Miami’s Ultra Music Festival reminds one of Fight Club. Not so much because no one talks about it — they do, sometimes to the exclusion of all else, like they were in mid-March, when half of South Florida ignored the Republican presidential primary held that same week and showed up at Bayfront Park in various stages of dress (or undress) and consciousness. But rather because Ultra, like many EDM fests, has turned into a gut-punch contest, to see whose subs can most efficiently rearrange the audience’s internal organs.

When the Bottom Line closed, in January, 2004 — a month shy of its 30th anniversary — it marked the decline of the cabaret-style rock venue in New York’s Greenwich Village. In fact, the owners, Allan Pepper and the late Stan Snadowsky, had kept the club going mostly on fumes for its last few years, the sit-down-and-listen format having largely already faded as live music migrated to pricey dance clubs and warehouses in Brooklyn and Queens. The demise of the Old World Order of record labels, which were falling to consolidation as online piracy and file trading undermined their creaky economics, meant they were no longer able to “paper the house,” as Pepper used to call the practice of a label buying out the 400 or so seats for the early show to support an act.

We’ve been down this road before. Way back in 2004, I told you about the initiatives by several companies (most notably, including Clear Channel, the radio giant that was a huge stakeholder in the touring business before it spun off Live Nation), to take a two-channel mix of a show as its last notes rang out and have it ready for sale before it had a chance to cool off. A copy, on CD, would be picked up by attendees who had either prepaid for them when they bought their tickets or as an impulse buy, like a pack of gum at the checkout counter.

It may seem hard to believe that the Affordable Care Act has been a thing for five years now, but it has. It’s managed to survive more political assassination attempts than Rasputin, and it’s become to healthcare insurance what Winston Churchill said democracy was to government: the worst of all possibilities, “except for all the others.” By that I mean that the ACA is the ultimate legislative platypus, a creature created by committee, one made up of people trying to scratch each other’s eyes out at the time. Had there been consensus, we could have wound up with something far less confusing and far more efficient. But we didn’t, so we have to make the best of what we have. And that’s important because most of those who man the touring consoles and rigs get 1099s around this time of year, not W-2s.

My Apple AirBook cost $1,500, but it is orders of magnitude above the computation power of bulkier computers costing more than twice that much a decade or so ago. My iPhone, which cost $650, could have landed Apollo 11 on the moon and had number-crunching horsepower to spare. Examples of Moore’s Law abound. I found another example of this recently in the middle of Iowa.

Those who work in office buildings never looked at them the same way after Sept. 11, 2001. Now, that same psychological phenomenon will inflict itself on those who toil in music venues. The coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris saw the highest death toll at Le Bataclan Theatre, where ISIS-inspired gunmen killed 89 and wounded over 200 people there for an Eagles of Death Metal concert.

Halloween is just behind us, but there may be plenty of goblins ahead. I’ve written before, here and elsewhere, about that moment of frisson when, at the 2012 Coachella festival, the audience was stunned by the reunion of deceased rapper Tupac Shakur with a very alive Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg during a performance on stage.

Last year, at the AES Show in Los Angeles, sound reinforcement took center stage for the first time. Literally. A stage was set up in the Los Angeles Convention Center, and a wide array of manufacturers hung their gear from the rigging. We’ll likely see that again this year at the Javits Center in New York City, when the AES Show arrives there October 29 to November 1 with the Live Sound Expo intact and apparently bigger than before.

Two years ago, I wrote about the just-completed IPO of SFX, venture capitalist and entrepreneur Robert F.X. Sillerman’s market capitalization of his electronic dance music empire. It’s a good time to take a look at how that’s turning out.

The population of Nashville swelled by over 100,000 people one week in June. Hoteliers, restaurateurs and others watched happily as people poured in for the perfect live-event storm of the week-long CMA Music Festival, which sprawled across numerous stages with massive NFL stadium LP Field as its locus; the Bonnaroo festival, which took place in Manchester, about 60 miles to the south but had the Nashville airport as its main funnel; and finally a visit by the Rolling Stones to LP Field days after the CMA shows concluded. But what really shined was how well the city’s storied touring infrastructure handled what would have been a huge load even in New York or Los Angeles.