IQ Magazine (issue 29)

Live Music Intelligence May 2010, Issue 29

Bon Voyage

Wrapping up ILMC 22

Shamrock & Roll

Ireland market focus

Days of Thunder

Donington rocks at 30

They think its All Over...

Coldplay tour Latin America

Alternative Hits

The fastest growing sectors of live

European ticketing in the spotlight

Framing the Issue: Ed Vaizey A Roadie Writes: Matt McGinn Planting the Right Seeds: Colleen Zulian Raising the Game: Mark Hamilton

Issue 29, May 2010

Contents

News 8 In Brief The main headlines over the last two months 9 In Depth Key stories from around the live music world

Features

20

32

20 Bon Voyage ILMC 22 Wrapping up the cruise of a lifetime 32 Ticketing Report 2010 Mergers and consolidation keep European biz on its toes 44 Shamrock ‘n’ Roll Ireland faces tighter sales and thinner margins 54 Days of Thunder After 30 years, Donington is still ground zero for hard rock

Cover Story

60 Alternative Hits Family shows and comedy are fastest growing sector of live 68 They Think It’s All Over...

Viva la Vida wraps up in Latin America

Comments and Columns

44

16 Framing the Issue Shadow culture minister Ed Vaizey on live music 17 A Roadie Writes Coldplay guitar tech Matt McGinn’s unique perspective

54

18 Planting the Right Seeds Colleen Zulian on some Asian potential

60

19 Raising the Game Security expert Mark Hamilton on contractors at events 70 Your Shout Your finest conference moments...

Editorial

Not a Cloud in the Sky

It takes more than some dust to bust the old adage “the show must go on”, writes Greg Parmley...

THE ILMC JOURNAL Live music intelligence Issue 29, May 2010 IQ Magazine 2-4 Prowse Place, London, NW1 9PH, UK info@iq-mag.net www.iq-mag.net Tel: +44 (0)20 7284 5867 Fax: +44 (0)20 7284 1870 Publisher ILMC and M4 Media Editor Greg Parmley Associate Editor Allan McGowan Marketing & Advertising Manager Terry McNally Sub Editor Michael Muldoon Production Assistant Adam Milton Editorial Assistants Meredith Humphrey Emelie Swerre Sarah Frankel Contributors Lars Brandle, Mark Hamilton, Meredith Humphrey, Matt McGinn, Manfred Tari, Ed Vaizey, Adam Woods & Colleen Zulian.

Editorial Contact Greg Parmley, greg@iq-mag.net Tel: +44 (0)20 7284 5867

T

here have been numerous times when a dark cloud has hovered above the live music business in the last few years, but no one imagined the latest would be largely comprised of silica and somewhat deadly for jet engines.

Just as Iceland has gained a strong reputation for exporting music of late, so Eyjafjallajökull (not a threepiece electro outfit as some first presumed) made its own export effort, gaining spectacular media attention in the process.

The closing of European airspace due to volcanic ash in the upper atmosphere reminded us all how one small quirk of Mother Nature can ostensibly bugger everything up for many. Millions of travellers were stranded, insurance companies hid under their pillows, the UK started to feel like an island again, and it has had more effect on climate change than the whole of the Copenhagen Summit. But of the six days of chaos that ensued, particularly heartening was the resourcefulness the industry showed in dealing with the disruptions. Freight, bussing and trucking companies reviewed and rerouted; stranded artists played impromptu gigs; chartered flights were shared; and Metallica returned to overnight touring by bus (25 years after bassist Cliff Burton died

in a crash in Sweden). While there were casualties (see page 12), most agree that it could have been much worse, and the resolve that many crews showed to hit their showtime deadlines highlights just what a professional bunch of road warriors we boast on the sharp end.

This was certainly a view shared by many at the ILMC Production Day in March, which drew 150 delegates in addition to the 1,000 that the main conference attracted over the weekend. It was another sellout crowd, and several interesting discussion points emerged that we’ll be expanding on throughout the year. As is customary, you’ll find a conference rundown in this issue (page 20), with more reviews and photos online at ilmc.com.

Also in this issue we have our annual round up of all things ticketing in Europe (32); Ireland comes under the spotlight as a live music market (44); we take a trip to heavy rock heaven at Donington (54); Coldplay finally winds up Viva la Vida in Latin America (68); and while UK shadow culture secretary Ed Vaizey tells us about live music (16), comedy and family shows fall under the spotlight too (60).

If there’s not something for you in that lot, you’ve probably inhaled too many volcano fumes...enjoy!

Advertising Contact Terry McNally, terry@iq-mag.net Tel: +44 (0)20 7284 5867 Design & Production Martin Hughes, Dan Moe enquiries@oysterstudios.com www.oysterstudios.com

To subscribe to IQ Magazine: +44 (0)20 7284 5867 info@iq-mag.net Annual subscription to IQ is £50 (€60) for 6 issues.

News

In Brief...

Below: Whitney Houston Below Right: Jethro Tull Top Right: ARTmania Festival ‘09 Far Below Right: Jon Webster

As the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger gave way to a series of expansion moves, there was plenty to keep column inches full this period, from record breaking deals, cancellations and walk outs, to an executive turntable that kept spinning...

February

• Nordea Bank agrees to back Denmark’s cash-strapped national stadium, Parken, so it can recover from a DKR254million (€34m) annual loss.

• With the closure of promoter/ticketer Emma Entertainment, Ticketmaster pulls out of China.

• Dubai promoter Center Stage Management drops its festivals, including the annual Desert Rock event, to focus on international artist management and other projects.

• AC/DC smashes attendance records by selling 630,000 tickets for the band’s first Australian and New Zealand tour in nine years, grossing AUD82m (€56m).

• Promoter Marcel Avram sues the mayor of Bucharest for €340,000 after the official allegedly failed to contribute that sum towards a Bryan Adams show in September 2008.

• German promoter Prime Time Entertainment files for insolvency, leaving the tent which housed the loss-making show India standing in the centre of Hamburg.

• Whitney Houston’s dates in Australia are plagued by poor performance reports, with many fans demanding refunds. She later cancels several European shows due to illness.

• Irish promoter Denis Desmond is awarded $3m (€2.2m) damages against Prince after the artist cancelled a June 2009 show in Dublin without reasonable grounds.

• During an earnings call, Live Nation head Michael Rapino says the company is returning to Ticketmaster in North America, being unsatisfied with CTS Eventim’s ticketing system.

March

• Venue operator SMG wins the contract to manage the new Ora Arena and Convention Centre in Istanbul, Turkey,

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

which opens in November.

• Mojo Concerts cancels 1,000 concert tickets for shows by Editors and Mika after identifying 12 Dutch resale sites bulk buying tickets.

• Fans of Lady Gaga complain when prices to see her live double in the space of three months.

once leading London agency.

• Romanian festival B’estfest takes a break in 2010 citing a lack of suitable headliners and the economic downturn as the reasons.

• Following the approval of the Ticketmaster merger, Live Nation begins a round of redundancies which could affect up to 20% of its workforce, according to Pollstar.

April

• According to China Music Radar, AEG has its relationship with the Wukesong Arena in Beijing “restructured” after it fails to find sufficient talent or sponsorship for the arena.

• Live Nation France head Jackie Lombard returns to independence after her three-year deal with the entertainment giant expires.

• Michael Jackson’s estate signs a record-breaking $200m (€148m) deal with Sony Music Entertainment for ten projects over seven years.

• Helter Skelter agent Nigel Hassler departs to CAA, leaving just New York-based agent Pete Nash left at the

• Iceland Music Export Office takes over the running of the annual Airwaves festival in Reykjavik after the collapse of the country’s banks effectively halted the event.

• Bob Dylan cancels tour dates in Beijing, Shanghai and three others, claiming Chinese officials had refused to grant him a visa. Officials deny a visa was applied for.

• CTS Eventim issues a €19.9m dividend to shareholders – its largest ever – after record-breaking 2009 revenues of €447m and an EBIT profit of €71.3m.

• Former Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, 64, dies in New York after a brief battle with cancer.

• Agent Keith Naisbitt joins Agency for the Performing Arts in Los Angeles, having moved from The Agency Group.

• Live Nation announces the launch of an Australian office in Melbourne, just weeks after it sets up in Germany (see page 14).

• William Morris Endeavor Entertainment acquires country music agent Joey Lee’s 360 Artist Agency.

• Telefónica O2 wins the naming rights to the Color Line Arena in Hamburg.

• Ash from an Icelandic volcano closes airspace in Europe destroying many tour plans and promotional campaigns (page 12).

News

Top Dog for Ticketing?

CTS Eventim and Ticket Online are both claiming the title of Germany’s best ticketing company.

Computer magazine Computerbild recently crowned Eventim – which sells 80 million tickets in Europe annually – top dog, but Ticket Online, which sells 40 million annually as a group, says a similar accolade from the German Institute of Service Quality proves that it’s actually No. 1.

The awards come at a time when Eventim’s relationship with its highest profile client, Live Nation, is deteriorating both rapidly and publically. Eventim

recently filed for arbitration with the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce, claiming that Live Nation has breached the terms of its contract.

As IQ went to press, the UK’s Competition Commission was shortly expected to publish its final judgement regarding the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger; a deal which Eventim appealed against.

Ticket Online, which has traditionally struggled to gain a foothold in rock and pop is currently selling tickets for Lady Gaga’s German dates this month, promoted by Live Nation.

Scorpio Launches New Hamburg Site German festival promoter FKP Scorpio has taken control of a new open air venue in Hamburg – a 20,000m2 site adjacent to horse racing track Trabrennbahn Bahrenfeld. In exchange for the right to stage shows exclusively until 2012, the promoter is investing a six-digit Euro amount into the site, which it says plugs the gap for open air shows of

between 5,000 and 10,000capacity in the region.

Named Luruper Bogen, the site will be operated with bookmaker Winrace, which also manages the main site, and Scorpio has launched Hamburger Kultursommer, a series of summer events, to familiarise concert goers with the venue. The first show kicks off with Blink 182 on 24 August, followed

by Unheilig (27 August), a Classic Rock Festival with Ten Years After and Jethro Tull on 28 August and Xavier Naidoo on 30 August.

“This increases our ability to compete with [open air] locations such as Wuhlheide in Berlin or the Tanzbrunnen in Cologne, and it increases the chances that Hamburg will appear on more tour plans of popular acts during the summer,” says Scorpio’s Folkert Koopmans.

ARTmania Goes Abroad

Transylvania’s ARTmania Festival is targeting an international audience and adding a second stage for its fifth edition in the hopes of rising above the Romanian competition. The metal festival drew 15,000 fans last year, but organisers say they’re increasingly looking abroad to guarantee numbers.

“There are a lot of concerts this year in Romania, despite

the international economic crisis, so we really need to push the promotion of the event,” says ARTmania’s Claudia Stanciu. “We’re getting into big selling networks like Eventim Europe and reaching all of the countries they cover, we’re also promoting the festival via Facebook, Twitter and other social media, and presenting the festival in diverse environments such as international fairs and trade shows.”

The 13-15 August event is adding a second stage near to the main site in the Square of Sibiu, and confirmed artists include Serj Tankian, The Sisters of Mercy, Kamelot and Sirenia.

Managers and Live Industry to Engage The UK’s Music Managers Forum (MMF) and IQ Magazine have announced the second in a series of roundtable and networking events aimed to strengthen ties between the artist manager and the live music community. Held on 25 May at London’s new 2,500capacity venue Debut, organisers will be inviting up to 200 music industry professionals to participate in a discussion focussed around new business models for breaking artists.

“After the success of the last event, which brought the managers and the live music

industry at all levels together, we wanted to repeat this and take the debate further,” says MMF head Jon Webster.

“We don’t talk enough and we should.”

Taking place from 5.30pm to 7.30pm, and with networking drinks included, organisers are hoping it will allow participants to examine how they might work more closely together. “It’s going to be a lot of fun,” adds IQ’s Chris Prosser. “We’ll be presenting some interesting scenarios and asking people to really think outside the box in tackling them.”

News

2009 Best for Swiss The Swiss Music Promoters Association (SMPA) has announced record-breaking figures for 2009, with acrossthe-board increases throughout the market. A survey of the 24 SMPA members showed that events have increased 4.1%, from 1,002 shows in 2008 to 1,043 in 2009, while attendance also rose marginally to 4.56 million, with the number of paid-for tickets climbing to 2.79 million.

The average ticket price increased from CHF82.40 (€57.50) to CHF84.20 (€58.70), but the biggest improvement was in turnover, where the members – which collectively employ 185 full-time staff – saw an 8.6% rise, from CHF230million(€160m) to CHF250m (€174m).

However, while the figures paint a particularly healthy picture of the Swiss market, the SMPA was quick to highlight a number of issues it faces. In particular, it warned that promoters were struggling with increasingly high artist fees at a time when there were additional staffing requirements at shows due to amended health and safety and environmental policies.

The association is also currently fighting a campaign by consumer organisation SKS (Stiftung für Konsumentenschutz) and a leading member of Swiss parliament to limit ticket sales to the box office, and to print the name of each ticket holder on their ticket. “We would rather see creativity, art and culture as a driving force for economical and social progress,” says SMPAmember Phillippe Cornu of Appalooza Productions.

10

Ticketpro wins Commonwealth Games division of the state owned railway which handles onand offline ticketing, catering and packaging activities; and global e-commerce provider BroadVision. The games, which feature thousands of elite athletes from the 71 Commonwealth Nations, are the third largest in the world, after the Summer Olympics and the Asian Games.

Ticketpro International has won the contract to sell the 2.4 million tickets of the Commonwealth Games in Delhi, India, in October. The ticketing firm, headquartered in Czech Republic, won the six-month tender process as part of a consortium with the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), the

“[IRCTC] sells 400,000 tickets online daily, and refund about 25,000 daily, because people change their mind. It is staggering.” “[IRCTC] has the busiest e-commerce website in India for the last four years, five call centres and 8,000 points of sale says TicketPro CEO Serge Grimaux. “They sell hundreds

Sun is Star Rising

The sun is rising for Australia’s newest boutique music promoter. The Fur Group of Companies is entering the marketplace with its own standalone promoter, the Sun Touring Company (STC).

Former Albert Music A&R manager Danny Keenan takes duties as MD of the new promoter, which makes

a leap into the big league this May when it brings The Cult to these shores through a joint arrangement with Michael Chugg Entertainment. “We are not genre nor size specific.

However, it is safe to say that we aren’t looking at competing for the superstar tours like U2 or Pink,” says Keenan.

STC has gathered steam in

of thousands of tickets online daily, and refund tens of thousands daily, because people change their mind. And these figures are constantly growing.

It is staggering.”

Ticketpro has been active in India since it soft-launched with two sold-out Bryan Adams concerts in Mumbai and Bangalore in February 2006 before launching proper with Deep Purple that December. The first ticketing company to introduce barcode ticketing to the market of 1.1 billion people, Grimaux says its ticketing will be carefully integrated with IRCTC’s operation. “We’re bringing the know-how of event ticketing administration and the technology,” he says. “Our software is linked into their software and parts of their payment gateway to make the entire transaction seamless.” recent months orchestrating visits from Johnette Napolitano (Concrete Blonde) and Jeff Martin (The Tea Party). The goal is “just to consistently tour artists that we like and that we think there is a definite and enthusiastic audience for in the marketplace,” says Keenan. “The Cult are a perfect example.”

Sydney-based Keenan works alongside Sun Touring principals Zoran Romic and Darren Danielson, owners and directors of Fur Management, both of whom are based in Melbourne. The Cult’s Love Live tour of Australasia kicked off on 3 May at The Trusts Stadium Arena in Waitakere, New Zealand and is visiting six Australian cities. The Cult last toured these parts 15 years ago when the band was on the bill for the 1995 Big Day Out.

Top: Serge Grimaux Above: The Cult

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

News

Ash Clouds Throw Up Questions With flights returning to normal after the Icelandic ash clouds caused chaos across European airspace, the touring industry is still counting the cost of the disruption. And the six-day ban on flights that at one point paralysed 313 European airports has raised a number of issues regarding cancellation insurance for shows.

“The Icelandic volcano is now excluded from any new policies or amendments to policies made after the Friday [it erupted],” says Martin Goebbels at Apex Insurance, who says that while the cost of show cancellation and postponements will run into millions, it is too early to

pinpoint the amount. “It could have been a worse week, and the situation was just getting critical when the airlines opened up again,” he says.

While brokers work overtime to clear claims, Goebbels says the scenario threw up some unique questions that now need answers. “I can see problems for a lot of crew who were stuck abroad at the end of a tour who may not get paid for any extra days. Once a tour’s finished, the cancellation insurance is finished, so do you have to pay crew who are stranded?” he asks.

Artists affected included Status Quo who were stranded in Moscow; Metallica who were forced to take a 28-hour

boat and bus trip between Oslo and Riga; The Cribs, Gary Numan, Frightened Rabbit, Bad Lieutenant, Talvin Singh and others were forced to pull out of Coachella festival in the US, and London shows by Melissa Auf der Maur and Gil Scott-Heron were also pulled.

The only festival casualty looks to have been the first edition of Stockholm Rock Out festival in Sweden (30 April-1 May) which had ten international artists including Great White, Keel, Pretty Boy Floyd and Tuff from the US. Chris LeMon, promoter of the uninsured 1,500capacity event says he’s facing at least a SEK20,000 (€20,800) bill. “I had several

conversations with American acts, and carrying on was just too big a risk in case they got stuck in Scandinavia or couldn’t make it,” he says. At press time, LeMon planned to go ahead with a smaller one-day event on 1 May with local artists, having rescheduled the two-day festival to September 10-11.

Tax Hikes Squeeze Businesses

Promoters in several European countries including Greece, Hungary, Lithuania and Croatia are struggling in the face of recent VAT and tax hikes as governments seek to bolster economies weakened by recession.

Currently negotiating a multi-billion Euro loan from the EU, Greece raised withholding tax five points to 25% last month, while VAT on goods and services rose from 19-21% and VAT

on tickets from 9-10%. “We have to work very carefully and keep our costs down; we don’t want to increase the tickets because the people suffer,” says Nana Trandou at Didi Music. “I hope agents will take into consideration what a difficult phase this country is going through. If they want to keep Greece on the map for large shows they have to be more reasonable with promoters here.”

Sales tax in Hungary rose 5% last year to 25%, and promoter Marton Brady at Showtime Budapest says the repercussions are still being felt. “It’s a very difficult time for us,” he says. “Either we sell more tickets or we have to raise the prices.”

Croatia’s VAT rose from 22%-23% during the same period, and Live Nation Central European head Tim Dowdall says both rates are having “a crippling effect on ticket prices.”

Lithuania faces a similar issue, where VAT on tickets has risen from 5% since late 2008 to 21% currently. Combined with a performance royalty rate of between 3.5% and 6%, some promoters are simply focussing on alternative markets. “We’re surviving because we work in neighbouring countries,” says Giedrius Klimasauskas at Makroconcert. “We still do shows in Lithuania, but just less A-level acts. A lot of promoters have stopped promoting big shows, if at all.”

“It’s a very difficult time for us. Either we sell more tickets or we have to raise the prices.”

With 0% VAT in Latvia, and 7% in Poland, Vidmantas Siugzdinis at Lithuanian promoter, venue operator and ticketer Seven

Entertainment says that “neighbouring markets look much more attractive for bigger shows”. Seven remains focussed on the region and Siugzdinis cites recent successful shows with Metallica (which Seven promoted) and Rammstein and Eros Ramazzotti at Siemen’s Arena in Vilnius as proof that big names are still selling. “People are still buying tickets for the biggest (and most expensive) shows but they tend to save their money on the smaller and medium-size artists, and the older names,” he says.

“We are joining forces with other entertainment business sectors such as hotels and restaurants to lobby the Government.

We’re engaging with as many politicians and influential people as possible to explain the effect this is having on our market, and suggest possible ways out of it.”

Right: Vidmantas Siugzdinis Above: Eyjafjallajökull erupts

12

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

News

Roll-out Continues for Post-merger Live Nation

The opening of new Live Nation offices in Germany and Australia signify a change in tack for the global entertainment giant, as both moves come without the cost of purchasing a market leader or signing them to a multi-year deal. In both cases, Live Nation – which since early incarnations as SFX and then Clear Channel has traditionally spent big on major players when entering a market – has instead opted for a more modest approach.

“I’m not saying we won’t acquire another promoter again but as we’ve developed in our own markets we’ve seen that it’s not always necessary to acquire,” says Live Nation international CEO Alan Ridgeway. “We often get approached by promoters in different markets who want to join [us] and that’s what prompted us to go down this route.” Live Nation again eschewed an ownership model in June 2009 when it partnered with Big Concerts in South

In Germany, promoter Johannes Wessels was appointed MD of Live Nation Germany, while former Ticket Online GM Klaus Zemke has taken the post of MD at Ticketmaster Germany.

Wessels will continue to operate from his Munich base, while a new office will be opened in Melbourne, Australia, to house newly promoted VP of promotions Pacific Rim Luke Hede, and VP of promotions Australia and New Zealand, Roger Field. Hede is currently based in the Hong Kong office having taken over from longstanding Live Nation Asia head Colleen Ironside in late 2009, while Field was previously at Michael Coppel Presents (MCP).

Africa, and when bolstering its French operation in November, chose to headhunt promoters at local rivals instead. However, some big coin deals may yet be struck and Irish promoter Denis Desmond reveals that he’s “nearly there” with a Live Nation deal (see page 44).

Such a contract would carry a considerable price tag.

14

While the new operations in Germany and Australia – the world’s fourth and seventh largest music markets respectively – add missing pieces to a global puzzle for routing Live Nation tours, reactions in each market have been mixed. In Germany, “Competition within the entertainment industry will rise considerably,” predicts

Jens Michow of German promoters association IDKV, who expresses concern that “a further increase of the prices could lead to trouble and damages for the whole entertainment branch.”

IDKV fixed the value of the live entertainment industry at €2.57billion in 2008, while the Australian market was worth AU$1.061bn (€735million) over the same period according to Live Performance Australia.

The Australian market continues to be dominated by the big five local promoters and their respective companies – Paul Dainty Corporation & MCP (which have historically promoted Live Nation artists); Frontier Touring Company; Michael Chugg Entertainment; and Andrew McManus Presents. And, as in Germany, some believe there is scant room for a new entry. “Whether the arrival of Live Nation will be a better thing for the market, time will tell,” says Frontier’s Michael Gudinski. “One thing is for sure, there are too many people in the game over here.”

already too many of them.”

Ridgeway says that both Germany and Australia have “been on the list for a while.

They’re two major music markets that we wanted to have a presence in so it was just a matter of time before we found the right way to open up.” Moving ahead, he adds: “The global tours, and tours we’re buying internationally, are going to help get the offices started. But then, like any other market, you’re competing to buy the acts with the other promoters. So we’ll be making offers where we think it makes sense.”

Live Nation’s international CEO also adds that while his company is looking at expanding to other markets

“ I’m not saying we won’t acquire another promoter again but as we’ve developed in our own markets we’ve seen that it’s not always necessary to acquire.”

– Alan Ridgeway, Live Nation The business of live music is strong down under, but the abundance of promoters has helped keep ticket prices high as the big players have been known to outbid one another to lure the top acts to these shores. The vagaries of the Australian dollar and the tough economic climate have also added risk to the business.

“We don’t need another promoter in Australia,” says Andrew McManus. “There’s

(in Europe it lacks operations in Austria and Switzerland, for instance) “In terms of the major markets, with the recent announcements, we’ve got good coverage. Our focus will be on building our market share in those markets and in some of our existing ones like France where we’re very pleased with how the new team is performing.”

Additional reporting by Lars Brandle

Above Left: Roger Field and Luke Hede Above Right: Alan Ridgeway

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

Comment

Framing the Issue Ed Vaizey, shadow culture minister for the UK Conservative Party, comments on the importance of the live music sector as part of the creative industries.

Through my job as shadow culture minister I get to see the statistics to claim there isn’t a problem at all! I all kinds of concerts and live music events, from classical understand the UK Statistics Authority is investigating (the Simón Bolívar Orchestra) to large rock events (I saw this last one.

U2 last summer); and from opera to school concerts.

If I was in government I would like to bring back an Seeing Robbie Williams sticks in my mind – he is a exemption for live music in small venues as quickly as brilliant performer. Live music always has the potential possible. The DCMS (Departure for Culture, Media and to be magical, whether it’s a girl and a guitar at an open Sport), working with local authorities to foster a better mic night, or the full razzmatazz of a big stadium or and more understanding atmosphere, could also make a operatic production, and I consider it a great big difference, so that too would be a priority. privilege that attending concerts counts Finding a workable solution to digital piracy is as work for me at the moment! essential in supporting new talent. I know that I know that the significance of many new acts choose to give away live music in the music industry is their music on the growing – where it used to be that a internet, and that is band toured to sell the album, now their choice. Over the that situation is reversed long term, promise – with music being of the internet and would I t released to sell concert its potential for a en m n er v go tion “If I was in p tickets. The impact of The ‘long tail’ ought to em ex n a back O2 is impressive – it has enable bands, and acts like to bring all venues as sm in c si established itself as one can start earning money u for live m DCMS e Th . le of – if not, the – premier from their music without ib ss o ia ed quickly as p M , re venues in the world. Live having to wait for a record u lt u for C l ca lo music is one of the most label to come along and (Departure h it w working visible sides of the creative represent them.

Sometimes, d n a and Sport), ster a better fo industries: festivals such the debate about digital piracy to es ti ri o auth atmosphere, g as Glastonbury are world is framed as a face off between in d n a st er d ce, so more un famous, as is Glyndebourne! big greedy record labels and hard a big differen e k a m o ls a And in a sector where many pressed music lovers but I don’t could be a priority.” ld u o w o are struggling – recorded think that is true. At its heart, to t tha music, film, TV and so on are it is about whether creatives are all under pressure during the able to decide what happens to shift to digital – it’s great to their work and when, whether see that the live music sector is and how much they would like doing really well. to charge for it. If we establish a I am interested in what workable framework to manage this in the digital age, the Government can do to enable the live music sector it will be easier for new talent to earn a living. and new talent to support itself. For example, addressing The case for support, stimulation or tax credits is the problems created by the 2003 Licensing Act would put by several different sectors in the creative industries, be a big help in terms of returning the exemption for from video games, to fashion to (live) music. Personally, venues with a capacity of under 200, and it’s a change I would love to be able to invest more across the creative I would like to make as soon as possible. The present industries. Given the financial situation we will inherit Government says it cares, whilst holding a review that if we win the election, this is unlikely to be possible has reported so late that nothing will be done before the immediately, but I believe the creative industries election, ignoring the opportunity of a Private Members’ importance to the UK economy will continue to grow, Bill before the House and all the while misrepresenting and it is a great idea for the long term.

16

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

Comment

A Roadie Writes

Coldplay guitar tech Matt McGinn on why not everyone has time to get hung up about the state of things...

There’s a lot of chat at the moment about the state of our industry and not without good cause. Every publication from the NME to this one is running stories on what Florence thinks will happen to EMI, how David Geffen will afford to buy Mars if he doesn’t manage to sell Pluto etc. Chances are if you’re reading this you’re the sort of person – like me – who’ll: (a) have noticed; and (b) actually gives a toss that record/CD/gramophone/ handcart sales are down and everyone’s diving at the live music market like it’s the last bit of meat on the corpse.

Well, you’ll be pleased to hear, I won’t be adding my voice to the din. Not because I don’t care, or it doesn’t matter – roadies have feelings too, y’know – it’s just, well, when you do what we do it’s not like you’re in the driving seat as far as the flow of the biz is concerned. We in the live crews are mostly a bit like surfers; we hopefully catch the waves of employment as they roll in and ride ‘em as near to the beach as we can before paddling out again in the hope of grabbing another one and hanging in there for a second or third time. (Like most people that work freelance for others, really.) Some of us get lucky and are kept on by longer lasting acts but for the most part it’s a constant fight to keep your head above water, whatever’s causing the ebb and flow.

Tour bus chat rarely focuses on market performance or growth, much as it affects us all, directly or indirectly. We’re often too busy teasing each other or discussing what blew up onstage that night, while making frequent trips to the fridge and avoiding the nasty socks strewn about the gangway. About the furthest I’ve ever got into a natter about the business end of things would probably be something along the lines of: “So, how’s the album doing?” “ Dunno…are we headlining Glastonbury or doing the Arsecrack Stage?”

“Beats me. Fancy a cup of tea/bottle of beer/some meths?”

Which isn’t to say we bury our heads in the sand.

We’re all aware of the ways the business knits itself together and how the latest recession has affected – gasp – even those precious ticket sales. But there’s a definite ‘keep calm and carry on’ sort of ethos among roadies. A close colleague and long-surviving crew friend of mine used to think of it in military terms and when things got silly enough in the industry at large to affect us on the ground, he would always say: “Y’know, ours is not to reason why. Ours is just to do or die.”

It’s a bit extreme in tone, perhaps, but you see the point.

The daily challenge for all those on the road: caterers, lampies, vidiots, backline (that’s us, AKA The Country Club), production/wardrobe people and beyond is simply to get the show done, whatever and wherever it might be. There’re a thousand things that need attention and can go wrong enough to spoil the gig, or worse – from guitars melting to lighting rigs floating up into the sky – and it all needs a lot of TLC. We’re too knackered after 18 hours of doing it to be fretting (‘scuse the pun) about much besides where the nearest shower is, and whether it’s actually going to work.

I’m happy. I love being involved in music – live or recorded – and hope to fuck the crazy industry that’s built up around it has the balls to bend with the breeze. I reckon on the whole the signs are good, but really, what do I know? I’ll just keep my head down, get on with tuning the guitars and hope for the best, like I always have.

Thank heaven for show time, folks, and long may it be there for us.

Roadie – My Life On The Road With Coldplay is published

by Anova Books on May 16.

Comment

Planting the Right Seeds Colleen Zulian of Asia Sounds gives her view on how the massive potential of the Asian markets can be nurtured and developed to produce real opportunities.

Following ILMC 22, my concern is that our industry needs to look seriously at how to develop Asia; at how we can best capitalise on this fastest growing economy. The opportunities will be there – but they’re not now. We need a better understanding of the Asian market and recognition of its infancy in the live music industry; we need to apply our knowledge and expertise to help the Asian companies on the ground develop and grow so that it can be a viable part of the international live music market. We need to encourage major artists to invest in this market for the future and only then will we see big returns.

I own a company called Asia Sounds and this is my fourth year of working directly on the ground across Asia but I started researching the markets over eight years ago.

We produce a talent show called Sutasi, which helps us to source, encourage and brand, Western-friendly Asian contemporary artists whilst also building awareness through broadcast. Our show airs across India, Sri Lanka, China, South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia and Brunei.

I see the Asian marketplace for live music as being like the UK and Australia in the 60s. It is growing rapidly but still does not have the infrastructure or the culture in place. Some of these countries have the fastest growing middle classes but they have not yet been conditioned

“ Our show airs across India, Sri Lanka, China, South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia and Brunei.” to pay high prices for concert tickets, or in some cases, to pay at all. Festivals are growing and small live music venues are popping up but stadium concerts are still few.

A major reason for this is that you cannot sell enough tickets to cover costs if it is not a traditional music form familiar to the public.

Take India for example, Hindi, Bollywood-type shows or 80s-style metal are the mainstream; indie rock, pop, electronic and jazz are growing rapidly; and more venues are embracing original contemporary (Western style) music.

Original contemporary music is rapidly growing in Asia thanks to the internet, but in order for this music

18

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

to become more popular, it needs to be heard and accepted in the West. Inclusion in the Western market will bring more awareness and popularity in the Asian markets and aid the live music industry’s growth and development. Once this happens, the market will open up for all.

Conversely though, and in Asia itself, Western agents and artists need to think about investing in this future marketplace and not charge high fees for venues, festivals etc, in order to assist in building a live music culture in these massive populations. When I was a kid in Melbourne, I went to see live music every weekend, bands such as AC/DC, INXS, Cold Chisel, Men at Work and Australian Crawl. I saw them play at my local pub where tickets were affordable. We didn’t have major stadium tours then; the pub scene and festivals built the market in Australia and introduced the Australian youth market to original live music. These days, the Australian concert business is a very profitable market.

We showcased a Korean band called Biuret at the ILMC this year and got a fantastic response, and are now talking with agents from around the world who want to bring the act to their territories. Afterwards, we went on to Vietnam to perform at The Hi-Fi Bar in Ho Chi Minh City, where I fully expected the audience to be mostly expat Koreans and Westerners, but was pleasantly surprised that 90% were Vietnamese – and that they loved it! There was a real sense of pride that not only was this a great band, but hey, they are Asian!

Back in Australia, after only two days I received an email inviting the band to perform at the only contemporary music festival held in Vietnam in November. What matters to us is not how much money we make, but that the band will now play to tens of thousands of Vietnamese and build on their fanbase.

We are investing in Vietnam, where there are 30 million people in Ho Chi Minh City alone.

I feel very strongly that the only way we can build this market and ensure that it reaches its full potential is to start booking quality Western-friendly contemporary Asian acts into the Western market. Then Asia will jump on board to establish an original contemporary live music market. Until this happens, no one is going to make serious money in this large and growing economy.

Comment

Raising the Game Mark Hamilton, MD of G4S Events, outlines the growing importance of the role of contractors at live events, and their responsibility to improve the audience experience.

A Key challenge facing the music inDustry is to satisfy heightened consumer expectations of the live event experience. Given the economic environment, disposable income remains tight and many music fans will be circumspect with their spending, attending fewer events than in previous years. Fans will cherry-pick events and will have understandably high expectations for the highlight of their musical year. We are also witnessing reduced runs for concerts by leading artists. One leading stadium in the UK will be running just two major headline shows this year, catering for 100,000 fans compared to the eight shows and 500,000 fans that attended events in the summer of 2009. Reduced numbers of shows create additional ticket price inflation in the secondary market.

Tickets for Kings of Leon’s Hyde Park gig in London in June have a face value of £52.25 [€58] yet are being sold on eBay for in excess of £300 [€330]. Fans paying this amount will expect £300 worth of ‘value’ from their experience.

While no fault of the promoter, exaggerated expectations as a result of inflated ticket prices in the secondary market means additional pressure to deliver a great overall event, not just an amazing musical experience.

All contractors, from security to food vendors and merchandise sellers, are expected to deliver a first class experience for those attending live music events. Stewards and security personnel are expected to provide impeccable customer service, often expanding the traditional scope of their roles, fielding requests for everything from directions or timings for performances. Security personnel and stewards are one of the most consistent human touch points in the anatomy of a live music event. Be they fans head-banging in a mosh pit, or corporate sponsors ensconced in the sanctity of a private box, they will often be in closer

proximity to a steward or security personnel than any other contractor’s representative during a concert.

“ Exaggerated expectations as a result of inflated ticket prices in the secondary market means additional pressure to deliver a great overall event, not just an amazing musical experience.”

As a leading contractor, G4S Events is conscious that those attending gigs will want to secure absolute value for money. Practically, this means assessing all aspects of the experience that we support, from minimising queuing times so fans miss as little of a performance as possible, through to ensuring that car parking arrangements are streamlined to ensure a safe, prompt exit. Policies we will embrace include fast tracking those without excess baggage at events so they can enter quickly, ensuring they are not held up by those with bags to screen. In addition, at some venues we will deploy extra security creating a wide perimeter outside venues to clamp down on touts selling forged tickets, which creates significant delays at ticket screening barriers.

To ensure an enjoyable experience at live events, we need to better educate the public about the security measures in place and items that are prohibited at a venue. At a hard-rock event, for example, this could mean working with the promoter to highlight on the ticket that sharp body piercings may have to be left in a cloakroom, or telling those at festivals not to pack portable gas canisters. Ensuring there are suitable receptacles to dispose of banned items and installing signs that reiterate what cannot be brought into a venue will speed up the entry process. It can even be as specific as telling those preparing to drive to festivals that there are restrictions on certain vehicle types as it raises certain health, safety and security issues.

Third-party contractors must realise their services form a vital part of the fabric of the event experience. For concert promoters, our personnel are primary contacts often acting as the ‘human face’ of an event alongside the performer. All contractors will have to rise to the challenge if we are to meet the expectations of those attending a gig this summer.

ILMC 22

e g a y o Bon V 20

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

O

rganising an ILMC meeting is a bit like beating yourself about the head with a large, heavy object – it feels great when you stop doing it. But as ILMC 22 sails happily into the sunset after completing its ‘weekend world cruise’ – despite leaving most of its crew feeling like they’d swum most of the way – in some strange, masochistic way it feels quite sad to see it go.

I

LMC 22’s mission was to identify any icebergs that lay in the path of the live music business, and it succeeded in spotting quite a few – while the conference itself somehow managed to avoid bumping into any of the many obstacles that could have put a nasty bump in it’s highly-polished hull. The stats were certainly impressive – with a shade over 1,000 industry figures responding to the invitation and making the trip from a record number of 62 countries to give us yet another maximum attendance. The meetings were productive, well attended and brilliantly chaired by this year’s crop of volunteer moderators, and a gratifying number of new voices were heard from among the ranks of new members and rising industry stars who have arrived at the ILMC during the past few years. Seeing old unresolved problems addressed by fresh minds along with all the new issues sometimes brought back memories of our earliest conference sessions – and gave hope that perhaps

this time some new solutions might be found.

But above all ILMC 22 was fun. It highlighted the conference’s role to be as much an annual party as it is a meeting of minds. My pervading memory is of lots of smiling faces – whether singing their lungs out in the hotel bar, scurrying off like naughty school kids with armfuls of Disney ice-cream mugs, being force-fed vodka shots on a boat, or watching in stunned disbelief the unique spectacle of Ed Bicknell being completely phased by an irrepressible Michael Eavis. You can read all the reviews and look at the photos in this Report, but if you weren’t there then you didn’t only miss out on a lot of information and networking – you also missed out on a lot of laughs.

ILMC 22 was a genuine pleasure to be involved with throughout most of the 12 months of planning that led up to it, and it was great to see that everyone seemed to have enjoyed the end result so much. It does leave us with one very real problem, though: how the hell are we going to better it next year..?

I suppose there’s only one way to find out... ...ILMC 23 here we come!

Martin Hopewell

A large selection of photos compliment the full conference report at ilmc.com

Thursday 11 March The ILMC Production Day The third ILMC Production Meeting (IPM) welcomed 150 professionals from the world of production: production managers, promoter’s reps, venue operators and specialist suppliers. Numbers had doubled since last year’s event, and alongside the main room sessions, breakout meetings were also held.

The main topic of the day’s discussion was who is – or should be – responsible when things go wrong on tour (possibly resulting in death or injury), the burden for which normally falls on the shoulders of the production manager. Everyone agreed that more planning was needed to anticipate, and thus eliminate, potential disasters. “Decisions shouldn’t be made on the day,” said Britannia Row’s Bryan Grant. But ultimately the meeting considered that the artist and manager should be held liable, because they are, in effect, acting as employers.

“Lots of these issues would disappear if the artists and their managers were made responsible,” Grant said.

Other topics included dealing with adverse and increasingly erratic weather, discussion about which

focussed on improving communication, not only to the audience but to artists, staff, vendors and production companies. Also tabled was a meeting on power, rigging & statics, and the final session of the day looked at venues and their relationship with production, with several venues berating the lack of technical production they were given in advance.

For the full IPM report, including comment from chairman Chrissy Uerlings, please visit the report section of the ILMC 22 website at ilmc.com.

Friday 12 March The Talking Shop

Chair: Carl Leighton-Pope (LPO Agency) Carl Leighton-Pope kicked off his annual Talking Shop by asking just who was affected by the impending Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger. He struggled to find someone who was.

“Am I [affected]? No. Are most of the agents in London affected by it? No. Who is it going to be a

ILMC 22

problem for?” he asked. “AEG aren’t going to open their books to Live Nation, they’ll cut off Ticketmaster – and so they should.” The statement was echoed by one staff member at The O2 in London, who said: “AEG will look at what they’re going to do with ticketing and the world’s their oyster.”

And while it was acknowledged that corporatisation of the business would do nothing but continue, LeightonPope pinpointed a growing trend for Live Nation promoters to revert to independence on the expiry of their deals, citing recent moves by promoters Paul Ambach and Michel Perl in Belgium; Serge Grimaux in Czech Republic; and Jackie Lombard in France.

The majority of The Talking Shop, however, was spent trying to answer the question of how the industry will safeguard its future. “In the past 10-15 years we’ve successfully pulled the big dog down from the hill,” Leighton-Pope said. “But now we’ve done it, you wonder whether it’s really what we wanted.”

The session considered alternative and new routes for funding artists, and Leighton-Pope referenced a 3.5% ticket tax in France that is recycled (via the government) back into the industry. “We’ve got 17.5% going to VAT, and restoration levies in venues, so a lot of money is going out of a ticket already. Why shouldn’t some of it be ring-fenced?” asked DF Concert’s Geoff Ellis. The last of Leighton-Pope’s suggestions was a fee for every guest-list ticket, an idea that was met with nodding heads and a murmur of agreement.

Saturday 13 March The Emerging Markets’ Place: ‘Submerging Markets?’

Chairs: Serge Grimaux (Ticketpro) & Thomas Ovesen (AEG Live Middle East)

Sponsorship and production were top of the list for discussion, as well as a rising need for more artist transparency around a show, and the panel considered

that artists, sponsors, and promoters should all be clear of expectations before signing anything.

One issue raised was the discrepancy between the artists’ expectations and the promoter, who may well expect meet and greets. “Sometimes it’s courtesy and culture and not just money-driven,” said Thomas Ovesen of AEG Middle East. And Wayne Forte of Entourage Talent reported that sponsorship in the US is morphing into a marketing partnership between promoter, sponsor and artist. “If the information is upfront and part of the contract, the artists can then say yes or no,” he said.

Conversation also turned to how to infiltrate China and a prediction that by 2018 most emerging markets will have caught up with developing markets, and China, India and Russia will have a higher rate of growth than current developed markets. “[The emerging markets] will definitely be the future of the business and they can offer solutions to the problems everyone is facing right now,” says co-chair Serge Grimaux.

The Green Room: ‘Turning the Tide in Global Touring’ Chair: Ben Challis (Charming Music)

In the lead-up to the release of music industry greening group Julie’s Bicycle’s May report on touring, a crossindustry panel was assembled to address how best to improve awareness and the reduction of carbon emissions across the industry.

Catherine Bottrill, research director at Julie’s Bicycle, outlined that the forthcoming report would focus on the movement and emissions of people and equipment involved in putting on a show. Data would be drawn from samples of over 30 tours covering the UK, Europe, Asia and beyond, and the report also accounts for international legislation, oil volatility and consumer demand.

Focusing on more immediate strategies to “going green”, the remaining panel touched on the issue of accountability, with CAA’s Emma Banks confessing that the topic is not raised as often as it should be due to various constraints in the planning process. AEG Live’s Rob Hallett added: “We’re lazy as promoters because we don’t tend to look at this [issue] until the artists tell us to.

We need to put pressure on the artists and venues; there is a lot more we can do.”

The Engine Room: ‘Keeping an Open Channel’ Chair: Mike Gartside

After a last-minute change of chairman (Chrissy Uerlings was unfortunately taken ill), the panel kicked off with a general agreement that crowd management had improved greatly since the tragedies at Roskilde and Big Day Out which prompted the formation of the ILMC Safety Group.

A large selection of photos compliment the full conference report at ilmc.com

22

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

“The industry has become a lot more professional,” noted Martin Hoube of Germany’s Special Security Services. Roskilde’s Henrik Bondo Nielsen commented that since the tragic death of nine fans at the event in 2000, organisers now hold a series of health and safety seminars throughout the year, as well as sharing best practice with other festivals via European festivals’ association Yourope. Additionally, and a number of formal crowd management courses were referenced.

Of contention, however, was the question of who was ultimately responsible for crowd safety, with Ricoh Arena’s Anthony Mundy insisting that the responsibility was the venue’s: “...it’s my name on the safety certificate,” he said. Showsec’s Simon Battersby summed up the session by stating: “A good safety system is based on improved communication and understanding of each other’s roles and responsibilities, whoever is ultimately in charge.”

The Politics of Live: ‘The Steering Committee Meeting’ Chair: Melvin Benn (Festival Republic)

The ILMC’s main room political panel provoked a wideranging debate covering areas from tax and subsidies to new talent and tour support. Beginning with a discussion on subsidies, Eric van Eerdenburg of Mojo Concerts said that in Holland, the government subsidises rehearsal spaces and venues to the tune of 20-30%, although there still “needs to be an extra push to raise acts to a higher level”.

Aline Renet of French promoters’ association Prodiss explained that her body is lobbying the government on areas such as tax breaks for promoters and ensuring increased ease of international touring. She said the French government is “hearing us because the music industry is in difficulty”. The proposals, if passed into legislation, could result in “around 200-350 more tours a year”.

It’s all a far cry from the situation in the UK where, as UK Member of Parliament Lord Tim Clement Jones noted, there is “deafness” on the part of the British Government regarding the business, a situation which has worsened since the disbanding of the Live Music Forum.

Melvin Benn pointed to tax as one of the main issues affecting the business, noting that with VAT of 17.5% levied on tickets sold in the UK, “I end up paying £5million to the government for running the Reading and Leeds festivals and I get nothing back for that privilege”. Benn praised his colleagues’ initiatives in continental Europe, admitting that the live music industry is a relatively new one and that “we are treated with disdain in the UK, but we’re beginning to think we deserve a voice at the table of government”.

Fan Data: ‘Charting a New Course’

Chairs: Greg Parmley (IQ) & Steve Machin (Stormcrowd) With a packed room, the panel considered how data can be best utilised and manipulated to target audiences, locate epicentres of band popularity and set “dynamic” ticket prices. Although 18- to 24-year-olds (“Generation Y”) were identified as the most effective demographic to target, there was recognition from Music Glue’s Mark Meharry that the older, “silver surfer” generation is increasingly engaged online.

Correctly analysing data, however, was considered problematic as the misinterpretation of information can be damaging. “Data is misleading more than it is useful,” cautioned Sparklestreet’s Gary McClarnan who also commented that when it came to data, the music business was still in “the stone ages”, particularly compared to big-coin industries such as oil, pharmaceutical and telecommunications.

TicketPro’s Serge Grimaux saw the consumer leading the charge, saying the future “depends on how the internet will start reaching people instead of people reaching the internet.”

“The topic can be pretty dry but the panellists really brought it to life and gave examples outside the concert business that brought a different perspective on how people can use data,” says co-chair Steve Machin.

The Venue’s Venue: ‘Any Port in a Storm?’

Chair: Steve Forster (Mama Group)

The session kicked off with the UK’s National Arenas Association statistics, which revealed an 18% rise on performances in 2008 alongside a 30% increase in attendance. But despite such a positive beginning, chairman Steve Foster said it was debatable whether the stats were a true measure of the industry as a whole. “Last year was the hardest year The Barfly ever had,” he said. “... there’s still an absence of money in people’s pockets.”

Full length reviews of all conference sessions are available at www.ilmc.com Left: Rob Hallett and Emma Bank participate in the Green Room Right: Mojo’s Eric van Eerdenburg talks Dutch subsidies at the Politics of Live session

ILMC 22 “We can’t be stuck in rental mode, we must be more creative,” said Brian Kabatznick of AEG Facilities.

“Whether public or privately funded, as venues we need to be challenged every day to look for new content.”

The discussion also covered sponsorship and whether a naming rights sponsor was the only way to stay afloat.

“Partnerships are being drawn, people are taking sides and while we’re certainly not out of recession, people are still choosing to go out,” concluded Forster. “It’s a fascinating time.”

The Festival Forum: ‘The Other Side of the Fence’ Chair: Jim King (Loud Sound)

The annual Festival Forum covered licensing, insurance, artist development, the weather and exclusivity, and the session began with an open question from chair Jim King: “Has anyone experienced one of the festivals you’re involved with failing last year?” The resounding silence was positive, but there are exceptions. “It was a record year for us but we lost the V Festival due to increased competition,” said Viv Lees from Australia’s Big Day Out. Adverse weather and relevant preparations were high on the agenda and Paul Twomey from UK insurers Robertson Taylor said that more festivals are taking out bad weather insurance and that prices are subsequently coming down. The meeting also touched on exclusivity and while the speakers agreed that such arrangements for headliners are now commonplace, they questioned the worth of such deals for acts lower down the pecking order.

“If you want acts to play as many festivals as possible you suffer on the fee,” said Peter Elliott from UK agency Primary Talent. The meeting also discussed that festivals are moving towards permanent or at least multi-year licences. Melvin Benn revealed that, as a result of the signing of a ‘personal premised licence’, Glastonbury has been licensed until 2016.

The Manager’s Office: ‘Steer by the Stars’ Chair: Jon Webster (MMF)

The annual meeting of managers came to order with MMF’s Jon Webster at the helm, and topics this year included where the recorded music industry was headed, fighting music piracy and engaging with the younger music community. There was early dissent from Harvey Goldsmith on the lack of communication within the industry – a factor he believes is directly linked to the demise of the recorded music business. “Our industry, as a whole, still doesn’t talk to each other properly,” he said.

“The most important people are the consumers, yet we still go out of our way to ignore them.”

Passion also ran high on the topic of ticket pricing,

a traditionally sensitive issue that came to the forefront of discussion via Lady GaGa’s exorbitant hike in ticket prices to compensate her rising touring costs. Many in the audience believed that if GaGa’s fans wanted to pay that much to see her, it was their prerogative.

The panel identified the “trickle-down effect” still plaguing the industry, where greed starting at the top continues to cause problems for the many more struggling at the bottom, and it proposed more open sharing of information to assist the flailing business structure.

Meet the New Boss: ‘In Search of New Horizons’ Chairs: Bex Wedlake (CAA) & Rense van Kessel (Friendly Fires)

Compared to times gone by, where labels would throw money behind tour support and artist development, the modern-day artist requires a team effort to ensure successful development, growth and recognition on the touring circuit. If anything, while the New Boss panel focussed on all interested parties working together to find success with an artist, the role of the A&R was almost conspicuously absent from the discussion.

Now, opportunities like playing festivals are often integral to break even on tour and for events like Hungary’s Sziget, the inclusion of a new talent stage and filling half the entire line-up with local artists makes this road definitely worth travelling for a developing act.

In closing, The Agency Group’s Natasha Bent stressed the importance of fan involvement in artist development.

Utilising platforms such as social networking and viral campaigns, the connection between artist and fan can be the leading factor in filling venues and gaining decent support slots in the earlier stages of a career.

“It’s about finding new strategies and solutions,” said co-chair Bex Wedlake. “It’s the idea of moving forward.

Everyone has to be open to having conversations because the old way of touring isn’t working and the consumption of music isn’t the same anymore.”

A large selection of photos compliment the full conference report at ilmc.com

24

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

Above: Bex Wedlake (CAA) and Rense van Kessel (Friendly Fires) chair the New Boss session Right: Michael Eavis spots a friendly face in the Breakfast Meeting

ILMC 22 Sponsorship: ‘Sailing Under Flags of Convenience’ Chair: Lars Vogt (The Sponsorship People)

Early on, chairman Lars Vogt reminded the panel that sponsors have but one goal – to sell – and that promoters often forgot to provide a suitable sales platform. All The Worlds’ Becky Morgan provided three key tips for approaching potential sponsors: approach them as far in advance as possible, amplify the event for media, and offer ‘now’ content. Categorizing sponsors is also key – while almost every market has a soft drink, energy drink, hard liquor and tobacco sponsor, Vogt raised possible missed opportunities with banks, insurance companies, health products, electronics and travel.

Red Bull and Jägermeister have begun supporting bands at the beginning of their careers so that when they reach the festival level they bring their sponsors with them. “If a band knows they can’t tour without Red Bull, they’ll be a lot more respectful,” said Stuart Galbraith.

Galbraith also stressed the importance of taking a partner and matching it properly to a product to ensure a long-term relationship. “In the last ten years, sponsors have gone from a bloody inconvenience to an absolute necessity… my advice is say, ‘yes’ if you’re approached and then work out how you deliver it.”

Sunday 14 March The Breakfast Meeting with Michael Eavis Host: Ed Bicknell (Damage Management)

It was a headline act that was hard to beat. From the moment he walked on stage to the standing ovation at the end, Glastonbury Festival’s Michael Eavis had the room in the palm of his hand.

Host Ed Bicknell had to quickly adapt to Eavis’s unique approach – he insisted on standing up and pacing about the stage, and he meandered and twisted and turned around the questions, embarking on circuitous diversions en route. But Eavis was candid about his work and his “modest” festival.

Eavis described himself as “an old-fashioned benevolent dictator who holds the purse-strings” and he entertained the gathering with stories such as how, with his beard and talk of farming, he was mistaken for a member of the Amish community on a recent trip to the States. He was full of admiration for his team and for his daughter Emily who now books for the festival and was instrumental in bringing over Jay-Z two years ago.

In terms of booking acts, he admitted that US acts cost around 20% more than UK ones but that he got this year’s headliners U2 at “a fair price”.

Looking ahead, Eavis said that it was important to keep Glastonbury unique by “diversifying into theatre, circus and avant-garde…to make sure it’s more interesting than any other show, ‘cos there’s a lot of competition out there,” he said.

The Booking Ring: ‘Agents and Promoters First’ Chairs: Stefan Lehmkuhl (Melt!) & Andrew Leighton-Pope (LPO Agency)

The session kicked off on questions of cancellation and liability, but it was the topic of signing artists to contracts, both by agents and promoters, which dominated discussion. “I can’t believe you pick up the phone on an act that doesn’t have a record deal or any money, and you do it with no guarantee, and nothing at all,” said Carl Leighton-Pope from the floor. “For years we did it, and I’m as guilty as anyone standing in the room.”

“Madonna signed to live Nation for touring and took the money, and the concept is the same for a small act,” added Charmenko’s Nick Hobbs. “The question is what form the contract would take, how legally enforceable it would be and what investment is required.”

The Agency Group’s Natasha Bent added that she’s already being approached by promoters with

ILMC 22 investment models that require contracts, although while she’s presented them to the acts, no managers have yet signed them. Live Nation’s Toby Leighton-Pope added that he’d recently given funding for a new artist/ manager team, and that a contract was involved, and other examples were given from the floor.

“You young guys are the juice,” said Carl LeightonPope. “There’s no reason why you can’t get together and say look Neil [Warnock], we feel very strongly about this and we want you to step up. There’re only six agencies in London and you all hang out together. Six together lobbying for your position would be a fantastic start.”

The Show Room: ‘The Entertainer’s Turn’ Chairs: Vanessa Adam (ADaM Productions) & Peter Tudor (Ticketmaster Entertainment)

With comedy shows pulling ever-larger crowds, the session considered this rising genre of entertainment and comedy agent Hannah Chambers provided much of the insight. Chambers, who works with comedians Jimmy Carr, Frankie Boyle and New Zealand duo Flight of the Conchords, revealed that merchandise spend is equivalent to music, with live DVDs a major and rising source of income, but she warned against the business slavishly following the music model, especially in terms of stadium and arena gigs. “Part of its appeal is intimacy and atmosphere,” she said. “When it’s just one person on stage with a mic, the experience at the back of the hall is not quite the same as at the front.”

Dave Gaydon from the Roundhouse in London, added another crucial difference: “The bar take is far smaller,” he said. “We make around £18,000 at the bar on a rock concert and only £4,000 on a comedy night.”

While it was also considered that comedy doesn’t travel far beyond national borders, the panel also covered a variety of successful family shows, and possible future money-spinners which included live cooking shows with celebrity chefs. Then it was time for lunch...

The Sunday Supplement: ‘A View from the Crow’s Nest’ Chair: Allan McGowan (IQ)

The smaller, intimate atmosphere of the Sunday Supplement once again provided a productive roundtable discussion to summarise the key topics over the ILMC weekend. Panellists agreed a major point raised at this year’s ILMC was the live industry’s need to embrace the entire music industry, as it cannot survive in isolation, alongside the fact that it’s going to have to become more professional.

“With health and safety regulations, insurance and copyright matters, we’re all going to have to grow up or be

left behind. It’s naïve to say I just want to go on stage and play my music,” added Alexis Grower of Magrath & Co. Alongside how the industry is preparing for and nurturing its stars of the future, conversation also covered the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger, which was mentioned very little over the weekend. While it was agreed the merger may increase ticket prices and dominate sponsorship, Ben Challis reminded delegates it could serve as a strong voice that politicians could not ignore.

“We absolutely need representatives talking our language, but we need to define the issues first,” agreed Marc Lambelet of Black Lamb Productions.

Artists: ‘Keeping an Even Keel’ Chair: Keith Harris (IMMF)

Artists are the one asset the music industry cannot do without, but as some spiral into self-destruction and addictive lifestyles, the Artists session asked whether they were being pushed beyond breaking point. It was acknowledged early on that drugs have been the catalyst for many masterpieces in all areas of the arts, but the key was to assist those who cannot function without them, rather than interfere with responsible users.

Some, such as Chrissy Uerlings, felt drug usage was the result of the industry itself as professionals put the need to make tours cheap above the health of the musicians. “You book as many shows as close as possible, to make it cheap,” he said. “Instead of giving people the right to get rest we look at the costs. Don’t pretend that people really look after each other.”

All parties agreed that adequate support and education is generally unavailable for the artists who acknowledge needing help. Chris Difford stated that artists frequently need financial support to attend costly rehabilitation centres. “The main thing is not about intervention – it’s about support,” he said. “There’s support on the High Street and major institutions like Barclays look after their own, but music is all about making money, not about caring.”

Full length reviews of all conference sessions are available at www.ilmc.com

26

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

Above: Delegates Talking Shop

ILMC Events 2010 Curious to know who won the football, the poker or the Nordic vodka drinking competition?

Reviews of all ILMC events, and a huge selection of conference photographs are all online at www.ilmc.com

3

1

2 1) Biuret go down a storm during the Sutasi Casino 2) The vodka drinking competition during the Sunday night dinner left a few delegates with wobbly sea legs 3) Competition hots up in the ILMC Table Football Coup de Monde 4) The HMS President proved a beautiful venue for hosting the 窶連bandon Ship! Sunday Night Dinner 5) Winners of the Poker Tourney are awarded. (l to r) Event sponsor Colleen Zulian (Asia Sounds), Marc Lambelet (Black Lamb), Richard Ardemark & Marcus Wiking (Live Nation Sweden), and Josh Javor (X-ray Touring)

5

4

The ILMC Gala Luau and Arthur Awards

I

t’s not often that delegates discover an untamed tropical island in the heart of West London, replete with its very own talent show to amuse the natives, but this year’s Gala Luau did just that. From entering Jumeirah Carlton Tower and receiving a customary Hawaiian lei, to the champagne reception with tropical cocktails in the Belly-Hi Bar, by the time the doors swung open to the main dining room, some guests already looked as relaxed as the locals.

More than 350 of the live music industry’s finest – another sold out crowd for the main social event of the ILMC weekend – were treated to a sumptuous spread of five-star cuisine, impeccable service and a selection of fine wines, and if the conversation on tables wasn’t enough to keep them occupied, the Hawaiian hula girls dancing in grass skirts and live luau music certainly was.

After dinner, Michael Chugg took to the stage for the annual pop quiz, dressed as the bucolic proprietor of the Belly-Hi Bar, resplendent in Hawaiian shirt, Aussie lifesaver’s bathing cap and inflatable parrot. But as costumes go, the most outrageous garb was reserved, once again, for master of ceremonies Carl Leighton-Pope, who hosted the A Factor, a TV talent show that rewards the finest in the business with Arthur Awards.

Billed as the island’s oldest inhabitant who’d spent several hundred years since being shipwrecked on its perilous shores, Leighton-Pope arrived in tattered, 1

28

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

weather-beaten clothes, with a skull-topped staff and bushy beard that oddly ended up on his forehead. “You look like a wookie,” shouted Chugg from the floor.

This year’s ceremony was a highlight of the weekend, ably compèred by Leighton-Pope, who mixed his trademark humour with gravitas around the awards, accompanied all the while by his Girl Friday, the lovely Caroline Wade. And once Leighton-Pope had finished presenting the awards, it was down to ILMC’s Martin Hopewell to present the Bottle Award for outstanding contribution to the industry, which this year was given to a somewhat surprised John Giddings.

“We are delighted to have had the opportunity to be associated with such a quality event,” says Ian Thomas at co-sponsors MGR Media. “My own view is that it was the best Gala since the move from Claridges. Certainly the best food I have had at the Carlton Tower,” adds MGR’s Ed Grossman.

Paul Twomey at Robertson Taylor says the firm was “delighted to return as co-sponsors … and were privileged to have three nominees on their table for the Most Professional Professional award’. Twomey adds that Robertson Taylor “were even more pleased when one of our own, David Bishop, won this prestigious award – a double following Willie and Bob’s success the year before, despite the abuse of insurance in general from Chuggy! Oh and we even won the quiz!”

2 3

4 1) (L to r) Boxing promoter Frank Warren, Carl Leighton-Pope, Raye Cosbert (Metropolis Music), Danny Betesh (Kennedy Street) & Barrie Marshall (Marshall Arts) 2) Michael Chugg and his parrot get into the annual Pop Quiz 3) Martin Hopewell welcomes delegates to the island 4) Hawaiian hula girls set the vibe 5) The Ballroom at Jumeirah Carlton Tower 6) Cocktails and champagne on arrival put smiles faces 7) Compère Carl Leighton-Pope hosts the Arthur Awards 8) Guests are presented with leis on arrival 9) The ILMC luau band make beach bumming an art form

5

6

7 8

9

The Arthur Awards 2010 SECOND LEAST OFFENSIVE AGENT

LEAST PAINFUL TOUR

“Winning the award this year really was a surprise and a great honour – I thought people would be sick of me by now! It’s fantastic to be recognised by your peers and by everyone you work with in the live music industry.

Winning an Arthur is a very special occasion and I would hope that people voted for me because I always try to work fairly; be easy to deal with and straightforward; because I get good deals for my artists and I also try and look after promoters.”

Barrie Marshall: “I sent Pink her award and she’s thrilled.

I was very proud that she won it, and so is her manager, Roger Davies. Pink’s a remarkable lady; she really is a talented woman. Once every decade someone really special comes along and she’s been it. Alongside the fact that the show itself is stunning, I was very pleased – I really thought she deserved to win.”

Emma Banks, CAA

MOST PROFESSIONAL PROFESSIONAL David Bishop, Robertson Taylor

“Willie Robertson and Bob Taylor won this award last year, so for me to get it this year is very much an accomplishment and an honour. I was very surprised. I suppose over all the years that I’ve been in the business it’s just a nice recognition of my work. I feel very proud to have received the award and it’s not just for me, it’s for everyone I work with as well.”

TOMORROW’S NEW BOSS

Natasha Bent, The Agency Group Ltd “This is one award that your peers and everyone you work with votes for, so it was pretty emotional actually. I started out as an agent with the simple idea of loving music, being nice to people and treating everyone equally and with respect, and getting something like this perhaps means that people appreciate that or like the way I work. Being an agent isn’t an easy job. It’s very stressful and very competitive and this gives me a nod that I’m doing it the right way.“

30

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

Pink (Funhouse Tourw)

THE PROMOTER’S PROMOTER Barrie Marshall, Marshall Arts

“I was amazed! I really, honest to God, didn’t even think I would be given an award. I won it once and that was tremendous, so to win it again was very special to me, and really it’s on behalf of the team, because it’s my name, but it’s all about the team of people here who made it possible and also the people in Europe that I work with. I am proud to say that I’ve got a very good relationship with them all. I look after them and they do the same for me. So winning this award was an honour and it’s not something to be taken lightly.”

BEST IN SHOW

Cirque du Soleil Aldo Giampaolo, executive producer: “It’s great to get this award. Live Nation is the promoter of the shows we’re doing in arenas now and it’s really expanded our brand – there’s a lot of places that our traditional tent shows can’t go, so we’re entering lots of new markets, but retaining the same level of quality. So there’s a new level of brand awareness happening, not just in the public, and we’re getting noticed by people at events like ILMC and CIC; we’re touching arenas and promoters that we only flirted with in the past. I’d like to think this is why we were chosen, along with the quality of the show that we bring to people.”

LIGGERS’ FAVOURITE FESTIVAL

SERVICES ABOVE AND BEYOND

Glastonbury

Rock-It Cargo Michael Eavis: “I think it was about 20 years ago that I received my first Arthur. I think you people could see Glastonbury coming before anyone else.

Thank you very much.”

PLUMBER OF THE YEAR

Mike Scoble, tour manager – Leonard Cohen “Getting the Arthur really means a lot actually, as I’ve been in this business since I left school which was a very long time ago! So it’s fantastic to get an award after all those years. I’ve been with Leonard Cohen for two years now and I have to thank Rob Hallett for getting me involved with him in the first place. It’s been such an amazingly successful tour to work on, so I guess the award is all to do with that. And probably because lots of people know me from before, I hope, and they think I’m a nice chap!”

Matthew Wright: “I was very surprised actually because we won this award two years ago so to get it again was just fantastic. What’s great about it is that because it’s voted for by the people in the industry, winning it is a real achievement.

We work hard to go above and beyond the call of duty for all of our clients, so it’s great to be recognised again.”

THE BOTTLE AWARD

John Giddings, Solo Agency “I was stunned ... I really had no idea. I actually had another party to go to later that night so I was only still there by chance really.

When Martin announced that it was me I really was taken aback, and also humbled. I really didn’t know what to say so perhaps that’s how to shut me up! I just hope this lifetime achievement award doesn’t mean that my life is over just yet!”

Mergers, consolidation, new formats and widening distribution channels‌ anyone would think the European ticketing industry was still in a state of flux, writes Greg Parmley.

32

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

When the US Department of Justice cleared the merger between Live Nation and Ticketmaster at the start of the year, there were few who greeted the news with surprise. Of some surprise though was Live Nation’s public remonstration of CTS Eventim’s system, and the announcement that it was returning to Ticketmaster in North America. The idealistic might surmise that any failings of Eventim’s system were convenient for Live Nation, giving just cause to renegotiate its ten-year deal with the German ticketer. The cynical might imagine witnessing a significant move in what has turned out to be a long and complicated chess game.

It’s 15 months since the world’s largest live entertainment company and its equal in ticketing announced their engagement, and the knot is now tied in all but the UK where the Competition Commission seems intent on chasing its own tail, having first blocked the merger, then cleared it, and having now reversed its decision once more. When this last hurdle is finally cleared, the world’s largest entertainment company will effectively swallow the Ticketmaster brand to become Live Nation Entertainment, an entity which boasted combined revenues of $5.52billion (€4.04bn) in 2009.

Eventim’s 2009 revenues of €466.7million (which include its promotion division) are more modest, yet having sold 80 million tickets in Europe last year it still claims to be the continent’s top dog for ticketing. And some of the sting felt in North America will be salved by income from the fees Live Nation is still paying for its system. Nonetheless, relations have reportedly soured between the two camps of late, and the launch of Live Nation Germany in Eventim’s backyard (led by veteran promoter Johannes Wessels) probably haven’t helped.

Having sold back its 20% stake in promoter Marek Lieberberg Konzertagentur (MLK), Live Nation has effectively severed all ties with Eventim in Germany, and will undoubtedly begin pumping tickets for its concerts through Ticketmaster Germany (now led by former Ticket Online GM Klaus Zemke), which has historically struggled to gain a foothold in the market. Ticketmaster’s VP of European development Tim Chambers says he expects the volume of tickets in the 50-strong German office to increase significantly.

“Germany is a focus of international growth and a priority to the company, so it would not surprise me if more resources were added to the German market,” he says.

If anything though, the merger throws up more questions than it answers, particularly in Europe where ticketing is a global concept but a local activity, governed by tradition, culture, tax law and legislation in each market.

After announcing the Live Nation deal, Eventim moved into several countries where Ticketmaster already has operations: Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Hungary, Czech Republic and the UK, and for now at least, Live Nation says it’s sticking to the agreement it has.

“We’ve got a contract with Eventim although none of us would say we’re happy with the services being provided,” says international CEO Alan Ridgeway. While it recently filed for arbitration, publicly, Eventim is remaining tightlipped, but for other European players, the corporate wranglings are being viewed as an opportunity.

“For us it’s an opportunity to find a position in this market sector,” says Norbert Stockmann, MD of Germany’s number two ticketer Ticket Online, which is on track to sell 20 million tickets this year and recently ticketed the World Championships in Athletics in Berlin. “We’d never have got [Live Nation’s tour with] Lady Gaga last year, but now we’re selling tickets for the shows, and we’re able to prove that we can sell tickets in this area. It’s a positive development.” And Ticketpro’s Serge Grimaux, a former Live Nation promoter recently returned to independence, says that whether positive or otherwise, the merger will affect everyone in the market. “It has helped to change the landscape and to crystallise several things,” he says. “If you pay attention and do what you’re supposed to be doing, you should be able to cruise with this change and it should benefit you.”

Others believe that the consolidation of the ticketing industry is far from finished, and the fallout will yet redefine the map. “Europe has, especially in some markets, lagged behind North America and the UK experience, so there will likely be the development of more advanced retail ticketing,” Chambers says. “Over the medium term, venue box offices or retail sites will migrate more to online destinations, to aggregators of ticketing inventory; and whether via mobile phone companies, traditional ticketing agencies or new entrants, there will be more distribution hubs that will reflect local marketing conditions; national, regional or genre ticketing destinations, like westendtheatres.com or spanishfootball.com.”

This prediction is a departure from Ticketmaster’s onestop-shop model, which Chambers says, “may not be the predominant model going forward”. Certainly, Ticketmaster (which had a “flat, if slightly up” year in Europe last year) and other established players are facing more competition than ever, much to the chagrin of some. “There are too many people trying to be ticket sellers,” says Nick Blackburn, MD at See Tickets. “Who knows how many times a ticket is sold before it reaches the end user and who is involved in the process. The public is very confused ... in my view you need strongly resourced ticketing companies with good operating systems and strong financial backing.”

“In the Czech Republic right now we have seven ticketing companies,” adds Grimaux. “There are more ticketing companies in the Czech Republic than in America.

How can a market of 10 million people sustain seven ticketing companies?” Grimaux is sensitive to competition – last year alone, Ticketpro launched in the Baltic States and Belarus, and it recently won the tender for the Left: Frankie and the Heartstrings © Barney Britton

Commonwealth Games in India in October, a deal worth 2.4 million tickets. But new players are being taken seriously, as Stockmann illustrates: “We have a couple of smaller players here who we have to watch – they play their strength in regional corners and provide very lean, cheap ticket solutions which are cheap. They’re niche markets, but it’s still probably 200,000 tickets. The question for us is how we can provide for this part of the market?”

percentage back to Ticketpro HQ in exchange for the ticket software, branding, expertise, hardware and staff pooling for large jobs. It’s a deal that empowers the local companies, and one that correlates with Grimaux’s belief in the potential of online communities. “It creates a design ready to grow as the operation grows,” he says.

“It’s lean with the lowest possible overhead.”

Keeping that competitive edge also requires keeping up with technology, and a number of new developments are worth noting here, such as See Tickets’ See360 system which unites every point of customer interaction – from marketing to F&B – into one database (see page 42). In January, Ticketmaster launched an interactive seating plan for venues, allowing ticket buyers to choose their seats, and Live Nation COO John Probyn recently revealed that RFID festival wristbands are in development. Add to that the April announcement by UK ticketing platform Fatsoma that it has developed software to sell tickets via Facebook, and the industry is hardly standing still. Not all future-facing solutions rocket off to quick success, though after years spent heralding the age of mobile ticketing, mobile ticket provider Mobiqa says the time is almost upon us.

“We’ve been going for eight years and arguably we’ve been seven and a half years ahead of our time,” says MD Nick Rankin, who reports that since 2D barcode boarding passes became standard in aviation in December, Mobiqa’s volumes are growing by 30% a month. “The airline sector is the sharp end of the knife, and it will help change awareness and whatever scepticism there is around mobile ticketing.”

Partly due to the lack of suitable access control equipment in most venues, Rankin says mobile ticketing uptake is still in “low single-digit” percentages, but some arenas are installing scanners, and with the airline industry having already driven dynamic pricing, there’s a strong

“ Europe has, especially in some markets, lagged behind North America and the UK experience, so there will likely be the development of more advanced retail ticketing.”

– Tim Chambers, Ticketmaster “The long tail is bigger than people thought,” says Chambers of such niche areas, and the UK alone boasts several examples of such specialist providers and confident new players. Ticket Factory, the venue box office of the NEC Group of arenas is utilising detailed CRM and data analysis (see page 42) to sell for UK-wide tours and events. “We’re targeting two million tickets for this year” says new general manager Will Quekett, who predicts that half of all tickets sold by year end will be outside the NEC’s borders. WeGotTickets now shifts close to 500,000 tickets a year for club dates and festivals without issuing a single physical ticket; the SECC recently rebranded its box office Ticket Soup, selling events across the UK; and technology company MusicGlue recently repositioned its business model to focus on selling tickets directly from artists’ websites. On last month’s tour by English indie folk band Mumford & Sons, it sold 56% of the 12,800 tickets direct. “We’re being asked to tender for all of Universal Records’ artists,” says MD Mark Meharry. “Direct-to-consumer via the artist-controlled sites is going to be a huge part of the next two years and you’ll see every band realising the value in accessing the consumers themselves.”

Meharry is outspoken about the role of traditional ticket companies that he believes are struggling to acclimatise to the digital world. “Their model is based on getting into the middle of the relationship and blocking it,” he says. “It’s very restrictive, but the internet and all the shifts that are happening is the direct opposite of that, and it’s about providing good service and encouraging those relationships. They’re two polar approaches to marketing and service.” But many business models are adapting, and sometimes radically.

By the end of 2010, the shareholding of everyTicketpro outpost (of which there are 19 on four continents) will have changed to 100% local ownership, with each local operator paying a per ticket licence fee and a small profit Right: Lady Gaga

34

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

chance it will also drive acceptance of mobile barcodes.

As airlines show, the ticketing industry might be a vibrant marketplace, but the influence of external industries has the potential to affect the most change. “[Telecoms provider] O2 now do presales for shows, and Deutsche Telecom have announced that they intend to launch a competitor to iTunes,” Chambers says. “Does it have a ticketing aspect?

Maybe, maybe not. But it is indicative that in the same way that record companies don’t have recorded music just to themselves anymore, ticketing is not necessarily just the reserve of ticketing companies.”

Is there a comparison to be drawn between the major records labels and their equivalents in ticketing? Both have struggled to change consumer behaviour (in the latter’s case with the fight against secondary ticketing), both face unparalleled competition from low overhead start ups using the internet as their main distribution channel, and both have historically sat between the artist and fan; a position proving increasingly unpopular in some quarters. Indeed, in the same way that the 3600 model swept recording, a lone ticket company operating without a parent company or any other complementary divisions today, would be a precarious one. See Tickets counts theatre producers and venues under its wing, Eventim has promoters and venues, and through its merger with Live Nation, there’s very little Ticketmaster doesn’t have access to.

the possibility of putting it in the venues,” says HMV’s ticketing head Jason Thomas. With ticketing systems in 275 of its 420 stores and a strong High Street presence, Thomas says that in addition to guaranteeing footfall past gig promotion, they’re experimenting with bundling.

“For example we did a John Mayer promotion where if you pre-ordered the album you got a 48-hour window to buy tickets for the tour,” he says. “It generated over 3,000 presales – well above expectations.”

Online sales might be increasing across the continent, but HMV aren’t the only ticket seller combining clicks and mortar.

“We have an exclusive deal with the German Automobile club ADAC that gives us access to 11,000 points of sale,” says Ticket Online’s Stockmann. “This type of distribution is getting stronger and is a real competitor to the established points of sale which are still important in Germany.” In the US, Live Nation recently signed a deal to sell tickets for local shows from 500 selected Wal-Mart stores, and for all the advances in technology and whether via networks of kiosks, box offices or good old fashioned post, the paper ticket is proving an enduringly popular choice.

If there’s one sector of the ticketing industry that loves paper tickets, it’s resellers. And while primary companies continue to advance the ways consumers can access and purchase tickets, the secondary market continues to find ways to resell them. Removing the physical ticket from the equation would make things trickier, and with Ticketmaster’s Paperless Ticket technology, which ties the credit card holder to the ticket, and Live Nation’s mooted RFID chips, options are being explored.

The vitriol the likes of Viagogo and Seatwave once faced, however, has now largely subsided, as promoters and artists choose either to engage with the market directly or to ignore it and accept that an element of resale might just be inevitable. So is it still a contentious issue? Given the headlines when England football captain John Terry was discovered touting his Skybox at Wembley Stadium in February, perhaps. And while some governments refuse to legislate against resale, the Belgians are, “ Direct-to-consumer via the artist-controlled sites is and the Dutch are in the final stages of passing a law that limits ticket mark-up going to be a huge part of the next two years.” to resale to 20% of face value.

- Mark Meharry, MusicGlue An in depth discussion on the evolution of the relationship between Also sporting vertical integration tendencies is British primary and secondary ticketing companies, and indeed music retailer HMV, which completed its purchase of the promoters they serve, would occupy another six promoter/venue operator Mama Group earlier this year pages of text, but the primary market is reporting a and has just launched its own ticketing system having positive picture overall. Technology, competition and united some 3 million customer records. The Mama consolidation are keeping the industry on its toes, and venues are currently powered by a Ticketmaster system, while ticketing might be “invisible” to the consumer, contracted until the autumn. “One of the reasons we behind the scenes, there are more levers being pulled and were looking at getting our own system was based on more tickets being issued than ever.

Top: John Mayer

Euro Box Office Austria

Major ticketing companies: CTS Eventim, Wien Ticket CTS Eventim is the market leader, followed by Wien Ticket, the inhouse system of the Stadthalle arena in Vienna. “I sometimes get the feeling it’s only Vienna,” says Norbert Stockmann of third-ranked company Ticket Online. Most sales are made online (around 70%) with box office accounting for roughly 20%.

Average Ticket (Av Tick): €45

Baltic States

Majors: Ticketpro, Piletilevi, Piletimaailm The Baltic States got into internet ticketing when Ticketpro launched with a Madonna show last year and sold 90% of tickets (40,000) via the web. Promoters report that outlet sales are gradually decreasing and the market is fairly segmented with many local promoters putting on smaller shows and using local ticketing agents. The main issue the market faces is the low consumer purchasing power making it difficult to attract high calibre international names.

Av Tick: 800eek-1200eek (€55-€75)

Belgium

Majors: TTS, Sherpa, Proximus Goformusic Live Nation Belgium reports that the main operators are TTS and Sherpa while most tickets are sold via Belgian telecoms platform Proximus Goformusic. Belgian reservation fees are some of the lowest in Western Europe, with fees averaging €4. Live Nation’s Herman Schueremans is in the latter stages of establishing a law to cap the resale of tickets at 10% of face value.

Av Tick: €40

38

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

Denmark

Majors: Billetnet, Billetlugen There are two main ticket suppliers, Ticketmaster-owned Billetnet and Billetlugen, which is owned by Icelandic ticketing company Midi.is.

The two companies have a roughly equal share of a relatively small market, although there are a few smaller players, run directly from theatres. Booking fees are fixed at €2.68 and advertising a ticket above face value is illegal, so there is little secondary market.

Av Tick: DKK 400-DKK 500 (€53-€67)

Finland

Majors: Lippupalvelu, Lippupiste, Tiketti, Menolippu The market is well developed and dominated by two major operators, Lippupalvelu (Ticketmaster) and Lippupiste (CTS Eventim). Due to consumer laws, all box office fees must be included in the ticket price, so service fees have remained reasonable – between €0.50 and €1.50. Occasional system failures have resulted in fans having difficulties getting hold of tickets, but secondary ticketing is not a significant issue.

Av Tick: €50-€60

France

Majors: Fnac, Ticketnet Online sales account for 25% of tickets on average, although several stadium shows have recorded 50% online. Booking fees are an average of 10-12% of the face value of the ticket and France has recently seen the major secondary marketplaces – Viagogo and Seatwave – arrive.

Av Tick: €45

Germany

Majors: CTS Eventim, Ticket Online Germany is a fragmented market, both regionally and in terms of content. A raft of regional players operate alongside the three national players, of which Eventim is the leading ticketer. However, Live Nation’s arrival in the region will see Eventim ceding ticket sales to its rivals, including Ticketmaster.

Av Tick: €40-€60

Greece

Majors: Ticket House, Ticketpro All tickets for live shows and music events are sold exclusively through Ticket House in Greece, which is partnered with Ticketpro for online sales. Since several high profile shows sold out quickly, advance purchasing of tickets is replacing the traditional pattern of buying on the day. The majority of tickets – 70% – are sold at points of sale and the other 30% are sold online. The Greek market is unique in that all tickets are physical – eTickets don’t exist.

Av Tick: €50

Hungary

Major: Ticket Express Hungary, Ticketpro CTS Eventim-owned Ticket Express Hungary is the largest supplier with 50-60% of the market and it currently distributes tickets for Live Nation. Ticketpro holds 20-25% of the market followed by Interticket.

Most tickets are still sold at the box office, however, internet sales have grown rapidly in the last two-three years and now account for 20-25% of sales.

Av Tick: 15,000 HUF (€56)

Ireland

Majors: Ticketmaster Ticketmaster holds 70% of the market, with the rest of tickets being sold in-house at venues. Business is still good, although due to the recession, promoters report that customers are holding back and making ticket purchases closer to the day of the event. The Irish market is distinct for its remaining tradition of over-the-counter sales, while online sales account for roughly 50%.

Av Tick: €50

majority of tickets (over 60%) are sold online.

Av Tick: €65

Poland

Italy

Majors: CTS Eventim, Ticketpro Promoters report a recession-proof market, with fans snapping up tickets to big name acts when they go on sale.

Consumers are sceptical of e-ticketing and cash sales are still very popular.

Promoters are trying to endorse credit card and online purchases by running exclusive web sales, although this has yet to prove successful.

Av Tick: €35-€50

The Netherlands

Majors: Ticketline, Blueticket Blueticket and Ticketline are the leaders in a market hit hard by the recession, and the latter’s fees are higher, being an online service in a country where most tickets are sold via the web. However, many Portuguese ticket buyers still enjoy purchasing physical tickets at outlets and the savings banks still play a part in ticket sales and distribution.

Av Tick: €50

Majors: TicketOne The dominant ticket company is TicketOne, which sells 80-90% of all tickets. Additionally, there are a number of smaller ticket companies, mainly distributed in the north and central Italy. Tickets sold in outlets are often sold for less than online, and over-the-counter sales still account for the majority of sales (around 65%).

Av Tick: €50-€55 Majors: Ticket Service Nederland, See Tickets, CTS Eventim, Live Nation The market in the Netherlands is well organised and runs effectively.

Live Nation has scrapped all its outlets and is now exclusively selling tickets via the internet and call centres. 98% of their tickets are sold on the web, up 1% from last year.

The Dutch Government is currently pushing through a law to limit resale to 20% above face value.

Av Tick: €49.50

Norway

Major: Billettservice Billettservice, owned by Ticketmaster, is by far the dominant ticket provider, while many venues run in-house systems. The market is well organised and the ticketing fees are fairly low compared to the rest of Europe. The

Portugal

Spain

Majors: Tick Tack Ticket, Serviticket, Entradas. com

The market in Spain was very much in the hands of the banking system, and uniquely to the country there is a large network of cash dispensers which work closely with Serviticket and Entradas.com. This changed slightly when Tick Tack Ticket entered the market. Booking fees are low, and print-at-home is starting to gain popularity, but it is hampered by few venues having suitable access control systems. A high proportion of tickets are still sold in record shops and larger department stores.

Av Tick: €42

Sweden Majors: Ticnet

Live Nation began selling its own tickets at the start of last year, backed

by CTS Eventim. It remains to be seen whether Eventim will continue to sell the promoter’s tickets, or whether market leader, Ticketmasterowned Ticnet will take over the role.

With a traditional reservation system still in operation, most tickets are picked up at outlets (60%) although they can be booked online.

Av Tick: SEK500 (€45)

Switzerland

Majors: TicketCorner, Starticket CTS Eventim paid €60million for market leader TicketCorner in February this year. The most established ticket seller in the Swiss market, TicketCorner has a 60% share of the market and sold 9.3 million tickets in 2009, including through its network of distribution points in train stations and post offices across the country.

Av Tick: CHF75 (€45)

Turkey

Majors: Biletix, Ticketturk, MyBilet Ticketmaster-owned Biletix has a near-monopoly on concert ticket sales in the market, as well as the rights for selling home tickets for the three largest football clubs. Etickets are the most common form of purchase for big shows, whilst door sales are dominant in club shows.

Av Tick: €25

UK

Majors: Ticketmaster, See Tickets Ticketmaster holds the top slot in the UK, followed by See Tickets, although the market has many other sellers vying for market share, including HMV, Ticket Factory, WeGotTickets, and recent new entry CTS Eventim, which began selling tickets for Live Nation in February this year. Around 90% of sales are now online.

Av Tick: £35 (€40)

Relationship Advice When it comes to wooing customers, ticket companies are realising that a little understanding goes a long way.

Life must have been easy before the internet. In the days when physical tickets were printed, customers queued up or called a phone number to buy them, then they went to the show. Hopefully they enjoyed it, hopefully they came back again, hopefully tickets would sell the next time around. It was chalk to today’s cheese when technology is removing the guess work, and allowing ticketing companies to empirically know their customers. If they want to.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is something of a catch-all phrase for nurturing and interacting with a company’s clients and customers. And if one area of ticketing is developing apace of the rest, this

scanners at each entrance record when and where ticket holders enter, feeding the information back into the Audience View system.

See Tickets MD Nick Blackburn is currently focussed on rolling out his new ticketing system, See360, for football club clients. It is currently being used by Fulham FC, West Ham FC and Stoke City FC in the Premiership as well as several football league clubs. “It offers ticketing, CRM, retail, corporate hospitality, catering and bar access control,” Blackburn says. “There is one database for every interaction between the fan and the football club, and we are looking to put the system into arenas as well. For example, you only need one point of “ The live music industry has effectively sale to buy a piece of merchandise and siloed itself. All we care about is what a ticket, and clubs are already making people buy once a year when they want savings by using the integration it to buy a ticket.” offers – I see this as the way forward.”

Yet some within the industry – Steve Machin, Stormcrowd believe that ticketing companies could go to much greater lengths to get is it. There are a multitude of ticketing companies now to know their customers. “They do an adequate job in profiling customers, gathering information on them to managing data, but they’re probably not tasked that hard,” better know what they’re interested in and how best to says Steve Machin at ticketing consultancy Stormcrowd. communicate with them. If it sounds a bit like dating, it “If all you’re doing is selling tickets, what you want is probably is. At least in wanting to keep their many other more people paying a more efficient price, or to save halves engaged and attentive. Live Nation categorises money on marketing. If those are the kind of parameters, concert goers by music taste and level of fandom; Ticket Online has been focussed on CRM for the last two years and recently opened its second data warehouse, in France, dedicated to international projects; and in the UK, the NEC Group’s Ticket Factory is positively evangelical.

“One of our strengths is the quality of our digital marketing and that is only going to get better; it is a tremendous focus for the group as a whole,” says newly appointed general manager Will Quickett. “We have a custom-made electronic marketing system built for the NEC Group by the Royal Mail, in which the data from our Audience View system and other sources is mapped out and it has enabled us to come up with very interesting profiles on people who come to different events here.”

The system also includes number plate recognition which matches cars to the postcode of its keeper, allowing the group to see where exhibition audiences are coming from and how long they’re staying. Additionally, barcode

42

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

you’re quite limited. You could analyse a truck load of data but ultimately if you’ve got a capacity room that’s as good as it gets.” Machin cites Ticketmaster’s weekly customer email as an example of traditional blanket marketing whereas “a bespoke company that’s selling on behalf of an individual artist would be very careful with that data and only send them really relevant pieces of information.

“The live music industry has effectively siloed itself,” he continues. “All we care about is what people buy once a year when they want to buy a ticket. Companies will have to start paying attention to what social network fans are on; what pages they’ve joined; what groups they’re in … all that sort of good stuff. Managing data is going to get much more complex and require more sophisticated analysis tools, and it will reach much deeper relationships with those customers. Potentially knowing more about those customers will make it easier to find the right customer for the ticket.”

While UK promotion and ticketing platform Fatsoma recently launched software to sell tickets on Facebook, a similar product is being developed by veteran promoter Serge Grimaux at Ticketpro. “A lot of research has been done, experiments have been very conclusive and I am shooting for Q3 and Q4 this year,” he says.

“This is definitely part of the future; missing out on this would be unthinkable.” Grimaux is also developing what he terms “a completely new approach to RFID so that festivals can start to manage, understand and use data to better understand who they are dealing with and to better provide services.”

At ILMC 22 last month, deputy chair of the Music Managers’ Forum Gary McClarnan warned that “data is misleading more than it is useful,” cautioning that it can be easy to misinterpret information, and therefore misunderstand the consumer. But without a robust, capable database to house such data, relationship management is an entirely lost cause. As an example, since teaming up with Mama Group, music retailer HMV has invested in amalgamating three data sources – Mama’s own customer database, the 1.2 million entries on hmv.com and details of its 1 million loyalty card holders. “Our ticketing and marketing now works from one integrated system,” says HMV’s Jason Thomas. “We’ve completely changed the way we do everything.” Indeed, one of the major benefits of the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger could well be the sharing of data sets that were once kept apart by data protection laws.

“The ‘win’ is where you have two existing databases, like Live Nation and Ticketmaster, or HMV and Mama,

and identifying the subset of consumers that co-exist in both,” says Machin. “It’s in that crossover that you get a better view of your customer.” It’s certainly an argument for vertical integration of companies, and just as reams of fan data are available online, Mobiqa’s Nick Rankin says that mobile technology has the potential to bring them even closer.

“Say that you go to The O2 with a mobile ticket and a sponsor sends you an advert for discounted drinks and money off some merchandise,” he says. “Each interaction is scanned and entered into the database so we know your profile. The next gig that comes up, we send you an alert, so there’s a link between mobile and CRM

“ There’s a link between mobile and CRM which I don’t think anybody has really bridged yet.”

– Nick Rankin, Mobiqa which I don’t think anybody has really bridged yet. It’s quite a big jump to get there but there’s a powerful link which makes mobile ticketing more than just a ticket.”

While currently underutilised, mobile is arguably the closest, most effective channel of communication, and yet another source of data that can give companies a more holistic view of their customers. And while CRM may have bags of potential still waiting to be tapped, it’s an area that’s fast developing, and for those willing to invest time and resources into it, one that pays quick and worthwhile dividends.

Left: Mumford & Sons Top: What the fans are saying

IBERIA Ireland

Shamrock

&Roll

44

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

Having emerged from an unprecedented five-year boom, Ireland is coming to terms with tighter sales and thinner margins. But as promoters argue, sometimes less is more anyway. Adam Woods reports.

If any European nation thinks it has got economic difficulties at the moment – with the exception of Greece and Iceland – Ireland has probably got it worst. Nursing an 11% fall in its gross national product and an unemployment rate that recently ballooned to 12.7%, the one-time Celtic Tiger currently has a big thorn in its paw. Any island with a normal degree of passion for live music might have simply boarded up its venues in the face of such gloom, but Ireland is no such place, which is why 2010 will only be a busy year, rather than an utterly hyperactive one.

“We had an unbelievable run for about five years,” says promoter Peter Aiken of the Irish live sector’s own economic miracle, which began in 2003 and finally soured in 2008. “It wasn’t realistic for the size of the population. Maybe things have levelled out now to a much more realistic level of business.”

Irish entrepreneurs and consumers alike wince to recall the excesses of just a couple of years ago, but there is a bright side even now. Other sectors of the Irish and Northern Irish economies may or may not have put their money in the right place during the boom times, but the live business, particularly in the south, has emerged with a much-improved infrastructure and an updated experience.

“The economy is down at the moment, but it is not all doom and gloom,” says Denis Desmond, MD of Ireland’s largest promoter, MCD, the day after he was awarded $2.95million (€2.2m) against Prince over a last-minute cancellation at Croke Park Stadium in 2008. “Over the last eight years, a lot of money has been spent on infrastructure and improving facilities – the traffic system, access roads, motorways, venues, new stadia,” he adds.

As a consequence, Dublin’s venues offer something for more or less every live requirement nowadays. The city has small and medium clubs and theatres such as MCD’s Academy, Academy 2 and Olympia and the Aiken-operated Vicar Street, along with outdoor venues such as the 35,000-capacity RDS Arena and 82,300capacity Croke Park. Somewhere in between those are the new, 2,111-seat, Daniel Libeskind-designed Grand Canal Theatre and The O2, formerly The Point, which reopened in December 2008. Soon to arrive is the €350m, 50,000-capacity Aviva Stadium at what was once the Lansdowne Road rugby ground, which opens in November with Michael Bublé.

All the money that has been spent in recent years might not have been pledged if everyone had known

quite what was coming, but the live industry’s prospects are the better for it. “Money has been spent in the right ways, and when you have got the right facilities, the punters enjoy it,” says Desmond. We have got purposebuilt venues and have caught up with the UK now.”

As a man with substantial interests on either side of the Irish Sea, Desmond is in a good position to say so.

Indeed, with a handful of other honourable mentions, a conversation about big-time promoters in the Irish markets is essentially a conversation about MCD Concerts and Aiken Promotions. Cork man Desmond has built the former from scratch over the past 30 years, starting out as the entertainments officer at Hull University and gradually amassing a market share currently estimated at between 65% and 70%.

Last year, MCD sold 1.3m tickets in Ireland at events including Oxegen and three U2 shows at Slane Castle, plus a host of other shows of all sizes. Through his Gaiety Investments vehicle, which owns Dublin’s Olympia, Gaiety, Ambassador and Academy venues, Desmond takes a 49.9% share in Festival Republic to Live Nation’s 50.1%. Factoring in MCD’s slice of the Academy Music Group and T in the Park, Desmond’s latter-day acquisitions have made him probably the most powerful independent concert entrepreneur in the UK and Ireland.

Recent years have seen persistent rumours that Desmond was preparing to sell a share in his Irish bu siness to Live Nation, and he is happy to acknowledge there is truth in them. “In England, we have got Live Nation/Gaiety, which works great, and the plan is to recreate that in Ireland – I have always said that. We are talking,” he says. “We are nearly there.”

Belfast-born Peter Aiken’s father, Jim, meanwhile, founded the family business in the 1960s. The older Aiken, who died in 2007, is credited with putting Ireland on the map for international acts. The company was the first to draw major stars to Ireland, staging Springsteen, Bowie and the Stones at Slane in the 1980s. It presented U2 at Croke Park that same decade and, more recently, brought The Eagles, Pavarotti and Elton John to Stormont. These days, Aiken Promotions goes headto-head with MCD in a brutal yet mutually respectful two-way race and takes the bulk of the remainder of the market, though Aiken’s share has grown in recent years.

Both promoters operate from Dublin, and though Aiken maintains his particular strength in Northern Ireland, the larger proportion of his major forthcoming events are in the Republic, including Paul McCartney at the

Ireland RDS, Bob Dylan at Thomond Park in Limerick, and the summer Marquee series in Cork, where acts include Westlife, the Horslips, and Al Green.

“ In England, we have got Live Nation/Gaiety, which works great, and the plan is to recreate that in Ireland – I have always said that. We are talking. We are nearly there.”

– Denis Desmond, MCD If Ireland is generally seen as a straightforward, two-city touring destination, that shouldn’t imply that Dublin and Belfast are particularly comparable places to do business. “Dublin is much more expensive to do business in than Belfast,” Aiken says. “It’s a different VAT rate, different taxation rate, different rates for staff – everything. It is not a slight difference either, it’s a major difference in taxation and costs. You can’t just do the one budget for an outdoor in Belfast and do the same in Dublin, because they aren’t even close.”

Ironically, Aiken suggests, even with a busy schedule at larger venues such as the nine-year-old Odyssey Arena and the 13-year-old Waterfront, Belfast doesn’t hold quite the same romance for big artists as it did when the situation in Northern Ireland was significantly less settled. Tina Turner, Diana Ross and Cher, he recalls, once all played the city in the same week at the height of the conflict. “Back then, some big, big stars made a point of saying they wanted to play Belfast,” says Aiken, declining to name politically motivated names. “It was always a big security operation, there was excitement and they felt they were playing their part. And they were playing a major part – one of the few things people did

together at that time was see live music.”

For smaller touring acts, however, Belfast’s boom years have definitely come since the cessation of violence, even if they have been rocked in recent years. “In the 1990s, I was trying to book bands in Belfast and it wasn’t an attractive city at all, whereas now, it is on the route,” says David Neely, director of CDC Leisure, the Belfast-based promoter and venue operator, whose properties include The Limelight, Spring & Airbrake, and Auntie Annie’s.

Belfast doesn’t have the same inflationary problems as Dublin, and its recession may not be quite as deep in technical terms, but its grass-roots business is certainly down. The further problem Belfast venues face, Neely suggests, is the disconnection between the Dublin-sized artist fees demanded by UK agents and the Belfast ticket prices as decided by the local market. “The problem is that because of the exchange rate and the market in Dublin, people expect our ticket prices to be the same as theirs,” he says. “But that would put us 60% or 70% higher than the average UK ticket price.

“Sometimes, you do get the impression we have to pay extra because the band has to get across that extra bit of water, and the fees are still going up,” he adds.

“It is too easy in Northern Ireland for us to feel all the pain” says Neely’s co-director Ciaran Smyth. “We are offering guarantees, and if we undersell, we get hit badly. That’s something we are going to have to look at.

Over the next couple of years, in the current climate, the whole thing could morph into a different business altogether, and it wouldn’t be a bad thing.”

Of the larger venues in Belfast, SMG’s 14,000capacity Odyssey on Queen’s Island is the biggest. Chief executive Nicky Dunn reports that comedy and TVrelated shows have done much to enhance a strong music line-up this year, which already includes three Westlife shows, two by Metallica, three Rod Stewart’s and more.

“Last year was our busiest concert year ever, even after The Point reopened, and this year is shaping up to be

Above: U2, Croke Park © Kyran O’Brien/KOBPIX

46

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

Ireland

quite good” says Dunn. “So far, we are on a par with our projections. I think the smaller shows have suffered a bit and some of the family shows were hit last year, but our ticket sales have been buoyant.”

“ Y ou can’t just do the one budget for an outdoor in Belfast and do the same in Dublin, because they aren’t even close.”

– Peter Aiken, Aiken Promotions The King’s Hall complex is aiming to compete on a similar scale this year by reopening its arena to live music for the first time in twenty years for a Pink show in June. For the past two decades, it has only been used as a showjumping arena. “It can hold 26,000 and it is in the city, with really good transport links,” says King’s Hall commercial director Theresa Morrissey. “We are talking to quite a few promoters at the moment, so we are fairly hopeful that a bit more new business will come in.”

Belfast’s Ulster Hall is the city’s key classical venue, accommodating 1,000 seated and 1,850 standing. As well as keeping a busy schedule of shows by the resident Ulster Orchestra, it will also host shows by DJ Shadow and Pendulum in the coming months. Its sister venue, the 2,250-capacity Waterfront Hall, is bringing in Air, Ray Davies and The Priests in the same period. “Across the Ulster Hall and the Waterfront, contemporary and pop music is strong, so although we are slightly down on hard bookings, it’s not catastrophic at all,” says Simon Magill, programme manager for both venues.

A striking characteristic of the Irish market is the limited success enjoyed by outside promoters. Denis Desmond believes that reflects the hands-on method of staging shows that has until recently prevailed. “The difference over here is, when you promote, you tend to have to arrange everything, though it is gradually changing,” says Desmond. “In the UK, the venues do a lot – they arrange security, have in-house riggers, whatever – but here, the promoters literally brought in their own riggers, and safety was very much the responsibility of the promoter.

“There is no infrastructure at Croke Park like there would be at Wembley, for example,” he adds. “That just hasn’t existed in Ireland, though it is beginning to exist. The Point and then The O2 have done more and more.”

The O2, operated by Live Nation and co-owned with property and venue magnate Harry Crosbie, evolved from a once pioneering but somewhat clappedout 8,500-seater venue to a state-of-the-art, fan-shaped Right: Blur @ Oxegen 09

hall with room for up to 14,000. Since it reopened, it has welcomed U2 – on its private opening night – as well as Kings of Leon, Coldplay and The Killers. “We very much wanted to create a new facility that gave a lot better service in all areas,” says Mike Adamson, CEO of the venue and of Live Nation Ireland. “More by luck than judgment, we commenced building before the recession happened, and I think in some ways we were fortunate, in that having a new building gave us a better standing in a more difficult market.

One consequence of the infrastructural developments of recent years is that more promoters are trying their luck now, according to Desmond. “But it’s a tough market to crack,” he notes, “as some of the people coming in have found out.” One newcomer, Pod Concerts, made a splash in 2004 with the launch of its highly successful boutique festival, Electric Picnic at Stradbally Hall, County Laois. The event has sold out its 32,500 tickets each year since, though Pod struggled in the downturn and allowed Festival Republic to take a majority stake a year ago.

“We over-extended ourselves a bit too much in 2006 and 2007,” says Pod’s head of music Declan Forde. “A country festival called Midland didn’t do the business, and we did an Irish version of Lovebox in 2007 [at Malahide Castle, near Dublin], which was a good

Ireland

event, but it was badly hit as well.” Electric Picnic rolls on nonetheless, with what Forde says has been minimal involvement from Festival Republic. This year, running in its usual slot at the beginning of September, the event has drawn Roxy Music, Leftfield, Massive Attack and LCD Soundsystem, and all the tickets are long gone.

All the same, Forde agrees Ireland is a difficult market in which to gain a foothold. “Oh, definitely,”.

“There’re a lot of barriers to entry. Established promoters don’t always welcome competition, and that’s probably as much as I will say on that.”

It is perhaps easier to find a niche outside of the mainstream, which is what Michael Durkan’s GFD Promotions has achieved by touring theatrical productions with an Irish flavour. Durkan’s Gaelforce Dance production has been on the road since 1997 and a new show, Dancemasters, has performed 550 shows in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in just over 18 months. “You hear all the time that the Irish dance thing is finished, and then you get a show like this, which defies all the logic of this business,” he says.

“ T here’re a lot of barriers to entry.

Established promoters don’t always welcome competition.”

– Declan Forde, Pod Concerts In a small market, change tends to happen slowly, and recent expansions of the circuit are among the most significant developments of the past few years. Where Belfast and Dublin were once the only stops on an Ireland trip, deeper reaches of Ireland have lately been fighting their way onto tour schedules, as high-end venues have evolved in tourist spots such as Killarney in the southwest and Castlebar, a little further up the west coast.

From March into the summer of this year, Pat Jennings, owner of the Royal Theatre Castlebar, could boast a line-up including Irish folk hero Christy Moore, Crowded House, Willie Nelson, the Beach Boys and

Kris Kristofferson, not to mention stars of UK talent show The X Factor, Jedward. “We do about 150 shows a year,” says Jennings, whose complex includes two luxury hotels, and a conference and banqueting centre, as well as the 2,200-seated, 5,500-standing theatre, built in 2008.

The Royal Theatre works with both Aiken and MCD, as well as doing exclusive deals of its own on theatrical shows, often in partnership with INEC in Killarney, which has three rooms – an acoustic club with a capacity of 350, a ballroom for 1,000 and a 2,000seater theatre that can take up to 4,000. Both believe they have put themselves on the map. “The touring circuit now in Ireland is Dublin, Belfast, Killarney and Castlebar, whereas up to five years ago, it was just Dublin and Belfast,” says INEC head of entertainment Shane O’Driscoll.

In Castlebar, Jennings has pumped in €37m to create a modern entertainment and hospitality centre on what was once a guesthouse and two-pump petrol station. “We were in the doldrums and out in the sticks now there is a credible venue and serious acts,” he says.

But regional sites are also feeling the pinch. High School Musical On Ice came around in January 2009 and sold 18,000 tickets at INEC in a fortnight; when it returned in January 2010, it moved just 3,000 tickets and the second week had to be cancelled. A similar pressure is operating on bands. “A lot of the managers and artists have to understand that a ticket that was €70 two or three years ago costs about €40 now,” says O’Driscoll.

“Getting that message across is not easy.”

There may be comfort to be taken in the fact that Denis Desmond has high hopes for 2011. In the meantime, from the top to the bottom, the entire market is feeling a version of the same pain. Even MCD expects to sell 1m tickets this year to last year’s 1.3m.

“It’s cyclical,” says Desmond. “This isn’t actually a busy year for touring bands, but 2011 is going to be very busy.” In the meantime, he adds, the important thing is to remain cautious. “There’s no point running big shows just for the sake of it,” he says. “Sometimes less is more, you know?”

Top: The O2, Dublin

50

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

Ireland

Irish Rovers

IQ’s Terry McNally takes his pick of the best new Irish talent...

Two Door Cinema Club

Villagers

The Coronas

www.twodoorcinemaclub.com/

www.wearevillagers.com

www.thecoronas.net/

A male electro-pop trio formed in 2007 and signed with French label Kitsuné Music. The debut album Tourist History was released on 1 March and garnered excellent reviews from NME and BBC online, which named them one of the ‘Sounds of 2010’ – a title previously bestowed on LaRoux and Mika. The band is currently touring the UK, with plans to expand to Europe and America before returning to play Oxegen and T in the Park in July.

Villagers is the brainchild of Conor O’Brien, the singer-songwriter who was formerly involved in The Immediate. O’Brien has already released a solo EP, Hollow Kind, and is now working to finish Villagers’ debut, which is shortly slated for release through Domino.

Having previously opened for the likes of Neil Young and Tracy Chapman, the band played several gigs at this year’s SXSW, and is currently touring Europe.

Three of the four members of The Coronas have played together since they were 15 and toured the Dublin college circuit years before the release of 2007 debut single Decision Time.

Since then, the quartet has released two studio albums and numerous hit singles including San Diego Song which was in the Irish singles chart for 24 weeks. In February, they were awarded the Irish Meteor Music Awards for Best Album, beating Snow Patrol and U2.

General Fiasco

The Chakras

The Brothers Movement

www.generalfiasco.co.uk

www.thechakras.co.uk

www.myspace.com/thebrothersmovement

Formed in 2007, General Fiasco built a following supporting The Wombats, The Pigeon Detectives and The Enemy, as well as playing at Oxegen and Reading and Leeds festivals. The debut single Rebel Get By was released in November 2008, and their first album Buildings is due for release this spring through Infectious Records. General Fiasco heads out across the UK in May and the band is also confirmed for London’s Underage Festival in August.

Dublin’s The Chakras released digital single Build Me A Swan in September 2009, taken from their forthcoming debut album which will be released on Universal Records Ireland. Last year, the reverb-loving group and its trademark ethereal sound were snapped up for management by Connected Artists/ Sound Advice in London and are managed by former Hut Recordings head David Boyd. In February, the band signed to CAA for agency.

And So I Watch You From Afar

Panama Kings

Hailing from Belfast, this male quartet is signed with Smalltown America and has already released EP Letters.

Citing both Fugazi and The Clash as influences, ASIWYFA recently held a spot at SXSW, and is currently in the middle of a 30+-date European tour that winds up in Bologna on 13 May. According to BBC Radio One: ‘If the apocalypse is televised, these guys will provide the soundtrack.’ www.myspace.com/andsoiwatchyoufromafar

Before forming in early 2007, all four members of Panama Kings were members of other successful Northern Irish bands. Now united, their sound has been compared to Modest Mouse and the Walkmen, and debut single Young Blood has received critical acclaim. This acclaim led to support slots with Young Knives, the Undertones and British Sea Power, and forthcoming dates include Indiependence Music Festival in Cork, and the Take it to the Bridge Festival in Banbridge, in July. www.myspace.com/panamakings

Thanks to their psychedelic indie rock tunes, Dublin’s The Brothers Movement has already shared billing with The Jesus and Mary Chain, MC5 and The Chemical Brothers.

Compared with both Kasabian and The Verve, the band has been tipped to usher in a new ‘Brit pop’-style era.

Their eponymous debut album was released last November and they have previously performed at Oxegen, Popkomm in Germany, and SXSW.

Joe Echo

Joe Echo AKA Ciaran Gribbin is a Belfast-born singer-songwriter who went solo last year after his previous band, Leya, split. Echo is currently recording his debut album with award winning producer Chris Potter (The Verve) and has contributed tracks to the soundtrack of upcoming film Killing Bono. He has previously supported Paolo Nutini, Franz Ferdinand and Snow Patrol, also contributing backing vocals on the latter’s album Eyes Open. www.joeecho.com/

Left to Right: General Fiasco, And So I Watch You From Afar, Panama Kings, The Coronas

Days of Thunder

The holy grail of heavy rock, Donington has always attracted denim and leather-clad pilgrims in their thousands. Adam Woods reports on 30 years of ear-busting heritage.

M

onsters of Rock is long gone – shut down in 1996 as the touring circuit boomed, and finally replaced at Castle Donington by Download in 2003. Maurice Jones, the festival’s wellloved co-founder, is sadly gone, too – he lost his fight against cancer last November. But Jones and the legendary event he created are still exerting their influence, as Live Nation vice-president of music Andy Copping knows from his dealings with this year’s Friday-night Download headliner AC/DC. “I had approached them a couple of times before and they had turned the festival down, for the same reason they have turned everyone else down: ‘we do our own thing’,” says Copping. “But I was in the office late one night and I thought to myself, ‘if I was AC/DC, what would make me want to play Download?’ And I constructed a very quick email you could read in 15, 20 seconds, on all the reasons they should play.

“I said: it’s the 30th anniversary of Donington; it’s the 30th anniversary of Back In Black; Maurice Jones passed “There are no festivals like an English festival and to me Donington is the king of all English rock festivals. I’ve performed at Donington three times in my career, but the one that sticks in my head the most is the first...It was 1984 and AC/DC, Van Halen and me were the top three acts on the bill. It’s a show I’ll never forget.”

– Ozzy Osbourne

away last year and he was very close to the band, and it would be a fitting tribute to him, because if it wasn’t for Maurice, there would be no Download. I sent it to the agent [CAA’s Rob Light] and twenty minutes later, after a couple of emails to and fro, he said, ‘I think they’re going to do it’. It was the quickest negotiation I have ever done.

Normally, booking the headliners takes months.”

Such is the power of Donington, and the almost religious significance it has assumed for bands, fans, and fans who one day end up in bands. In a piece written to mark the 30th anniversary of the first event, veteran rock journalist Malcolm Dome describes Donington on behalf of rock and metal worshippers as “our Mecca, our Jerusalem, our cathedral”.

The fact is that Donington is vastly important in rock circles, and pretty significant in the wider live arena too.

Compare the poster for the first ever Monsters of Rock festival in 1980 with that of last year’s Download and you’ll also get a pretty accurate sense of how the festival experience has changed in 30 years, and how it has stayed the same. Download 2009 advertised 97 acts over three days and three stages, with VIP camping and hotel packages available, and sponsors including BBC Radio 1, HMV and last.fm. Monsters of Rock simply listed seven bands on one stage over one day, with enough room left on the poster for two fire-breathing bat-creatures.

One was brought to us by the international might of Live Nation, the other by independent promoters MCP and Paul Loasby. But both were as heavy as possible, making room for British and overseas bands new Left: Aerosmith headline 1994’s Monsters of Rock © Mick Hutson

Donington and old, and both asserted Castle Donington as the uncontested home of live rock music. “As a punter, I went to most of the Monsters of Rock,” says Copping.

“There was something about the spirit and the vibe of those festivals that was just so good. It was an event, something you would save up for from year to year.

A lot of people are still coming back to Donington because they had such a good time back then.”

Between June 11 and 13 this year, the rock and metal faithful will once again descend on north-west Leicestershire, just as they did every year from 1980 to 1996, and as they have since the first year of Download.

The programming of the newer festival has noticeably broadened in recent years, embracing everything from classic rock in the old-school, Monsters of Rock vein, to heavy techno bands like The Prodigy who achieve the same ends, just by slightly different means.

“We had to be different to Monsters,” says Live Nation COO John Probyn. “We wanted to create more of a destination, rather than just watching a load of bands on one stage. We also weren’t particularly sure of our age range, and then the first people through the gate at the first event were 16 years old. That’s when we realised we had totally underestimated our age profile. It was great, and over the years, we have worked with the audience, listened to the audience.”

T

he addictiveness of both long-running Donington events is legendary. Maurice Jones himself, only eight years into Monsters of Rock’s 16-year (15-festival) run, had long since recognised the phenomenon. “I know we could sell 20,000 tickets for any Monsters of Rock without even announcing a band,” “Those early years were full of the British ‘Get On With It’ vibe, so you didn’t ask for a fancy star trailer dressing room with AC, you made do with a Father Ted caravan and it was all elbows and bums as you got your kit on stage. Port-a-loos? Forget it mate!

Use that ditch behind the van! Ah, the memories full of grit and metal camaraderie. It’s posher now, but the root of it remains solid as the music it continues to deliver and support.”

– Judas Priest

56

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

he said in 1988, “because the fans have such a love for the place and what it represents.”

The emergence of an entire summer calendar of branded festivals since the early Monsters of Rock days makes Maurice Jones’ claim of guaranteed ticket sales seem less extraordinary than it was at the time. But Dante Bonutto, another longserving journalist, now head of Universal’s Spinefarm label in the UK, has been to every single Donington event, and he remembers how it was in 1980.

“There wasn’t any other festival like that, where you had all these headline bands matched together, American and British,” he says. “It was obviously fairly rough and ready, that first one, but it had a fantastic vibe.” Kilimanjaro Live’s Stuart Galbraith ran Monsters of Rock as the festival’s site manager from 1984 to 1992 and booked it until its final year in 1996, before founding Download in 2003. In between the end of the one brand and the beginning of the other, he promoted A Day at the Races and Ozzfest on the same site, and he identifies Maurice Jones as the single most important influence on Donington’s long-term success as a rock destination.

“If you look at the time that Monsters of Rock started, you had Michael Eavis at Glastonbury; and the Pendletons and Vince Power were developing and running Reading, but there was no national promoter that was running a festival,” he says. “Maurice took the knowledge of rock that he had learned in touring and applied it to putting on a festival, and that was probably the first time it had been done in the UK.” Nowadays, although all this rocking still takes place at the very same Castle Donington, it all goes off in a different place than before. Since 2008, the festival has left its accustomed spot in the racetrack infield for a site west of the circuit. Where punters once trudged back to their cars, they can now bring a tent, rent a yurt or head for a hotel.

Download, the bearer of the flame, effectively demonstrates a modern-day, multi-revenue model that simply didn’t exist when Monsters of Rock first walked the earth.

Indeed, it was another business model which led to the demise of the original festival as the rise of blockbuster touring began to generate sums that Monsters of Rock could not compete with. “The level of bands that we had at the time had almost outgrown the festival,” says Galbraith. “Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Aerosmith etc. were playing their own stadium shows and could make

Left: As the bills got bigger, the space on artwork got smaller...

Right: Lost Prophets close Download 2008. Photo © Denis O’Regan

more money that way.”

What made Download possible was the evolution of multi-day festivals and their economies of scale which allowed promoters to match headliners’ stadium fees. “I can remember innumerate conversations with Maurice about running two days, but we hadn’t got the innate knowledge to work it all out,” says Galbraith, adding that a key missing piece was the insight that the same fans would stay for several nights and traffic chaos consequently wouldn’t be a daily occurrence.

T

he last decade or so has been a very different time. Download was a sell-out for the first time last year, and Copping believes that watershed, combined with the maturing programming policy, has put the event on a new footing. “The bill was a lot more eclectic and it really seemed to click,” he says. “Bands like Whitesnake, Def Leppard and ZZ Top worked really well alongside Pendulum and Slipknot.”

“What is fascinating is that Download is relying on a lot of the classic rock acts,” says Bonutto. “If you think of all the icons of rock, they are all 70s and 80s icons now, pretty much. My feeling is that these older bands can’t actually be replaced. Anyone that has had a 20- or 30-year career, we probably won’t see the likes of again.”

“For a hard rock band Donington is the centre of the universe, it’s like ground zero.”

– Lars Ulrich, Metallica

Donington But while the musical heritage of the site is securing the success of the current festival, even the choice of geography was influenced by the original rock artists. The Midlands location of Monsters of Rock and Download owes itself to the fact that the old-school British heavy metal scene was focused on that area of the country. “Judas Priest, Slade, Black Sabbath were all from Birmingham or the West Midlands, and the strongest market for that music wasn’t in London – it was in the Midlands,” says Galbraith. And if you look at those early bills, you’ll see a strong Midlands focus.”

Rock and metal now are a broader church, geographically and otherwise. But the place of worship remains the same.

It’s in Donington, and it shows no sign of moving.

“The thing that always stuck in my mind from watching Donington coverage on ‘Headbangers Ball’ when I was growing up was the big Dunlop tyre that you could always see the bands playing towards. It was my dream to perform for that tyre and it was a magical day when that dream was realised.”

– Ryan Richards, Funeral for a Friend

Mishaps & Mayhem

D

ownload, like Monsters of Rock, is partly defined by happy accidents and heroic mishaps. In 2003, scheduled headliners Limp Bizkit dropped out and were replaced by Audioslave, after Metallica were prevented from headlining due to their commitment to Reading and Leeds that same summer. The one-time thrash-metal overlords instead played an unadvertised set, allegedly with no sound check, and in the process enshrined the tradition of the secret special guest. Headlining the following year alongside Limp Bizkit, Metallica were forced to perform with guest drummers after Lars Ulrich was hospitalised.

In 2006, Guns N’ Roses bass-player Tommy Stimson temporarily walked off after he was hit by a bottle, and a spate of fires at one of the campsites that night prompted crowd trouble and necessitated the arrival of riot police. On such incidents are legends made, good and bad, as Monsters of Rock fans know very well. Things started small at the original festival when in the first year, a member of New York’s forgotten melodic-rock exponents Touch swallowed a bee. But by 1986, the stakes were rather higher. That year, Def Leppard’s third-on-the-bill performance was their first show since drummer Rick Allen lost his arm in a car crash, while Motörhead’s Phil Campbell had earlier narrowly avoided a firework shot onto the stage.

58

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

In 1988 – by which time the festival crowd had almost tripled from 1980’s 35,000, two fans were crushed during the performance by Guns N’ Roses, second-from-bottom on a bill that also included Iron Maiden, Kiss, David Lee Roth and Motörhead. The deaths were attributed to a crowd surge on a site that had been saturated with rain.

The festival was cancelled the next year before returning in 1990, but the event remains one of the most notorious moments in the history of the modern music festival, and one which has informed many others ever since.

“In the 20-odd years since then, standards of training and professionalism in the festival industry have progressed massively and safety has been held very, very highly in John [Probyn]’s time at Live Nation,” says Showsec operations director and Download head of security Simon Battersby. Today, the front-of-stage barrier is the heaviest in the country. Showsec, the Knebworth security incumbent since the earliest Monsters of Rock days, puts more than 1,000 stewards and security staff into the site and conducts constant analysis of rock-crowd trends. “Crowd-surfing in particular is something that is part of the festival,” he says. “Last year, during Killswitch Engage’s set, we had something like 2,500 come over the barrier in 40 minutes. To staff that barrier is quite an awesome thing to do.”

Top: In the shadow of the Dunlop tyre, Download 2007 Above: Main stage, Download 2009. Both images © Jess Gilbert

Alternative Hits Recent figures* show that comedy was up 45% and family shows up 32% in UK arenas last year, so what is it about these alternative hits that are proving so successful? Adam Woods reports.

In a world where big, high-quality shows have rarely had much trouble selling tickets in recent years, it is not easy to pull off a genuinely jaw-dropping feat of arenafilling. In that light, Peter Kay’s Tour That Doesn’t Tour Tour, which has made short work of selling out 750,000 tickets on 90 dates – including 35 shows and 350,000 tickets in Manchester alone – speaks for itself.

The scale of demand for the funnyman’s first tour in seven years not only establishes him as the Michael Jackson of northern England, but single-handedly skews the usual balance between comedy and music in the arenas of this land. It all just goes to show that, even if you think you’ve seen everything the live business can do, you should still be prepared for surprises.

Of all the alternative mainstream pursuits sometimes adopted by rock ‘n’ roll promoters – from blockbuster dinosaur shows and orchestral movie extravaganzas to post-modern circus spectacles and musicals (of which more later) – comedy is simultaneously one of the most straightforward and most inspired. It may also be the hottest of all, just at the moment, even if some acts are significantly hotter than the rest. “Peter Kay’s tour is the biggest arena tour by anybody, ever, in this country, not just a comedian,” says Manchester Evening News (MEN) Arena GM John Knight. “It doesn’t doesn’t matter who you are – whether you are Bon Jovi, Prince – nobody has ever done anything like that.”

Speaking on The Show Room session subtitled The Entertainer’s Turn at this year’s ILMC, Ticketmaster senior director of group sales Peter Tudor identified Kay as the ticketing giant’s single biggest-selling act of last year in the UK for his 2010 and 2011 shows. Michael McIntyre, another arena draw, was Ticketmaster’s fourth-biggest act of 2009. Along with Kay, comics hitting the larger venues in the next year include John Bishop, Russell Howard, Jason Manford and Flight of the Conchords.

Others with similar appeal, such as Jimmy Carr and Frankie Boyle, eschew arenas only because they don’t particularly like them.

“I think comedy has been a particularly hot live property for many years now, and the growth has not been overnight,” says Hannah Chambers, manager and promoter of Carr, Boyle and the Conchords. “But certainly, as other genres are perhaps not growing in the recession, comedy is showing signs of growth, with a lot more acts playing large venues and arenas then ever before.”

The huge appeal of comedians in gloomy times is hardly mysterious, and the advent of comedy as the new rock ‘n’ roll is far from a new concept, but from a promoter’s point of view, such shows are manifestly good business. Generally, low production and touring overheads allow for reasonable ticket prices, which in turn help to further stoke demand. According to Knight, Sarah Hodson, the MEN’s event development and bookings manager, is the only dedicated comedy booker at any UK arena. She believes there are two dimensions to the current arena-level comedy boom, and points out that, due to the scaleable nature of a big room, not all arena shows are equal.

“It is a little bit like the reality TV thing,” says Hodson.

“The artists you see having a lot of success are people like Russell Howard and Lee Mack, so it seems to be TVgenerated. Peter Kay is his own phenomenon. Artists like him, Eddie Izzard and Lee Evans were the first comedy guys who really did the big arena tours, and they sort of paved the way for the smaller acts who come in and build from 4,000 to 6,000 to 10,000 or the whole hall.”

T

o an extent, music promoters are getting in amongst this action. With the exception of the Manchester dates, which were negotiated directly with John Knight, the Kay tour is promoted by SJM Concerts rather than Kay’s former long-term representative Phil McIntyre, once a big-name rock promoter himself. All the same, it would be overstating the case to suggest that rock promoters are flocking into comedy, not least because comedy-promotion is a more sophisticated art than simply booking a big room and watching it fill up. *National Arenas Association’s Music & Event Research 2009

“Some acts lend themselves to the arenas more than others, and certainly music or more physical comedy acts are more suitable than static ones,” says Chambers, a comedy specialist. “Having said that, all comedians can play the larger rooms, as long as the shows and productions are adapted for these larger spaces so there’s still a feeling of intimacy – something that is more important in comedy than it is in pure music shows.”

For venues of various sizes, a major part of comedy’s appeal is the ability to drop in low-maintenance comedy acts to plug gaps in a schedule. A downside, as many venue operators and managers are well aware, is the disappointing bar take, which can be as little as onefifth of the rock-show equivalent. The booze sales in rock ‘n’ roll certainly tend to dwarf those to be found in other areas of mainstream arena entertainment, but once again, the past year has demonstrated that there are plenty of other reasons for promoters to gamble on a different type of show.

P

rehistoric extravaganzas such as Bruce McTaggart’s Walking with Dinosaurs and AKE Concerts’ Days of the Dinosaur continue to romp around the world to significant commercial effect; Star Wars: In Concert, meanwhile, has put the Royal Philharmonic on the road with the world’s largest high-definition screen.

Shows based on TV formats such as X Factor, Top Gear and Strictly Come Dancing have packed arenas; Cirque du Soleil has brought its particular acrobatic concepts to theatres, big tops and sheds; even Mexican-American dog-whisperer Cesar Millan brought his dog-training show to the UK arenas of Birmingham and Cardiff.

Gregg Perloff, MD of Berkeley, Californiabased Another Planet Entertainment, introduced the aforementioned Star Wars show to London’s The O2 last year. A former Bill Graham staffer who ran Graham’s organisation for 12 years after the legendary promoter’s death, Perloff is the model of a music specialist who has expanded laterally with much success, and he is a great advocate of the practice. “When you do a contemporary music show, generally speaking you have the same age group, within about ten years, and the same racial group, in many cases. It’s not intentional – that’s just the way it is,” he says. “Whereas these shows appeal to people of every age, every race, every economic level – classical music fans and rock fans.”

As demonstrated by the recent bankruptcy of German promoter Art Concerts, backer of last year’s multi-million pound Ben Hur Live show, a potentially big mainstream entertainment hit is almost always accompanied by a corresponding degree of risk. Nothing new for rock promoters there, but unlike comedy, family shows carry a big overhead. “These are very expensive Above: Peter Kay tries a MEN staff uniform for size with general manager John Knight

[

“ Peter Kay’s tour is the biggest arena tour by anybody, ever, in this country, not just a comedian … nobody has ever done anything like that.”

– John Knight, MEN Arena

]

Alternative Hits

[

“ All comedians can play the larger rooms, as long as the shows and productions are adapted for these larger spaces so there’s still a feeling of intimacy” –H annah Chambers, Chambers Management

]

shows to put on the road,” says Perloff of Star Wars: In Concert. “We have an 86-piece orchestra, a 60-piece choir, a 60-strong crew and a touring exhibition, and it is just a giant undertaking. The gratifying thing is that both the general public and the Star Wars fanatics like the show; kids and 70-year-olds and everybody in between.

I have never been involved with a show where I have had such fabulous feedback.”

Cirque du Soleil, another staple of the mainstream live entertainment market, branched out of its big-top comfort zone when it sent its Saltimbanco show out into arenas in 2007. So, to an extent, did Live Nation, the European promoter for that tour and all those since.

Saltimbanco is back in the UK between May and August this year for a lengthy arena run, and Finn Taylor, Cirque’s GM of arena shows, says the fit with the larger rooms continues to be a good one.

“We maintained the show very true to the original creative concept,” says Taylor. “The biggest changes we make are behind the scenes and the technical aspects – the big tops take about eight days to do a full set-up, but we set up the arena stage in about eight hours.” The fit with

the promoter, too, has helped the show. “They have been good for us to work with,” he continues. “We are not the first company to do shows in arenas, and there is a lot of knowledge out there that we are able to plug into.”

Operating in a similar field is S2BN Entertainment’s Fuerza Bruta company, whose Fuerza Bruta: From Above has been around the world several times and is currently resident in New York and Chicago. In each of those cities, and wherever it has travelled, the aerial dance show has inhabited very different venues, from museum spaces to conventional theatres. “The audience is actually standing on the stage during the show,” says Caron Bell, S2BN VP of communications. “It is an interesting dynamic, because the audience becomes a part of it – the action takes place all around you, and you don’t really know what’s going on.”

Conceived by the makers of the De La Guarda show, the high-velocity production has recently wrapped up in Taipei and Buenos Aires and is examining the potential for a European trip later this year. “We have had to add a touring company because the demand for the shows has been so positive,” says Bell. “We did Eurovision two years ago, which was different in that it was adapted to a stadium, so there was a completely different kind of view.”

At Christmas in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Dallas, S2BN premiered a new children’s show based on the Nick Jr Yo Gabba Gabba! TV series, and has since sent it out to other US cities. “Pre-schoolers are obviously the target demographic, but the adults really love it,” says Bell. “MGMT, The Ting Tings, Of Montreal – some pretty cool bands have been on the TV version, and when we opened in LA, for instance, we had Snoop Dogg doing ‘the dancey dance’. The kids have no idea, but the parents go absolutely bananas.”

T

he family entertainment market was perhaps the hardest hit in the recession when it finally took hold of the live sector last year, but Robert McHugh, SVP of international business development at Feld Entertainment, producer of Disney On Ice, Disney Live and Ringling Bros. Circus, says things have demonstrably picked up. “Last year was a pretty tough year, but we decided to move forward, keep all of our tours out there and keep moving, and we started to see things turn around in December,” he says. “Slowly, I don’t know if it is worldwide, but there’re different parts of the world where you can see that we are coming out of it, as long as you have decent offers out there.”

Spain, France and the US have all notably turned around, McHugh adds, while markets including China and Korea are Left: Cirque du Soleil

64

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

[

“ Last year was a pretty tough year, but we decided to move forward, keep all of our tours out there and keep moving, and we started to see things turn around in December.”

–R obert McHugh, Feld Entertainment

]

becoming more interesting all the time and will be receiving visits from Feld shows this summer.

Doing reliable business in some surprising markets are other old faithfuls including the various Irish dance productions and tribute acts. Neither genre appears to be running out of steam, and it may simply be time to concede that these are evergreen genres, says Michael Durkan, executive producer of Irish touring shows including Gael Force, Dancemasters and An Eagle’s Wing, whose

companies have recently variously returned from the Netherlands and Eastern Europe.

“We don’t even understand it ourselves, but every time we think it is over, it just comes back and bites them all on the bum,” says Durkan. “I just think it’s the flavour of the Irish music – the singing and the dancing and the high energy.” For similar reasons, Kenneth Svoldgaard, director of Danish promoter CSB, can’t picture his ABBA: The Show tribute retiring for a long time yet, as it continues to play to 4-5,000-capacity venues around the world. “We went to Morocco last year and we have just been to Brazil for the first time,” he says. “We have also just confirmed Korea. We thought we would be able to do business there before, but it didn’t happen.”

If it all seems a long way from comedy, all the principles in the current market remain remarkably similar, as Svoldgaard points out. “The shows people really, really like are the ones where they know what it is and they know what they are getting,” he says. “We give people that, and that is why they are still buying tickets.”

Dreamboats and Petticoats Just as music promoters look to other areas for a different type of hit, so other entrepreneurial thinkers occasionally come into live entertainment from some other sector. Universal Music TV, the catalogue and special projects arm of the major label group, has helped to bankroll Dreamboats & Petticoats, a Bill Kenwright musical that has simultaneously toured and inhabited the West End since last summer.

In a reverse-engineered stroke of lateral thinking, the musical, a 1950s and early-1960s time capsule, was based on an already successful compilation album released by UMTV. What’s more, though it was written to order

by sitcom legends Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, its plot owes something to the childhood experiences of UMTV managing director Brian Berg, who first took the concept to Kenwright and acts as executive producer on Universal’s behalf.

“It focuses on that period post-Elvis, pre-Beatles, when there were all these fantastic pop songs that were classics of their time,” says Berg. “It is the first time a compilation album has effectively led to a musical. It really is arse-about-face, but we have sold 1.6 million copies of three compilations, and we are on our third national tour and our second West End stand.”

Above: Disney on Ice

Coldplay

They think it’s all over…

Almost two years since it began, Coldplay’s Viva la Vida tour wrapped up in South America last month. And as Greg Parmley discovers, the final leg proved to be one of the tour’s biggest challenges…

With 160 dates under their belts, Coldplay had nothing left to prove on the Viva la Vida tour. After nearly 18 months, the tour had officially wound up with two triumphant nights at Wembley Stadium in London, but with the album’s title taken from a painting by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and the continent having inspired parts of the 8 million-plus selling album, Latin America could not be ignored.

The band last played Latin America in February 2007 in support of previous album X&Y, performing multiple nights in 3,000-capacity theatres in Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, but this time around, those involved knew demand would be greater. The question was just by how much. “It’s a very difficult market to put a finger on, because you can never really tell where you stand “ Everyone felt that it was a no brainer to look at some sort of stadium tour; the question was just how ambitious we were going to be.”

– Steve Strange from just record sales,” says agent Steve Strange at X-ray Touring. “Everyone felt that it was a no brainer to look at some sort of stadium tour; the question was just how ambitious we were going to be. I worked very closely with Live Nation on this because they really know their

68

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

market. You have to work as a team – it’s the only way it works down there.”

With the Viva tour rattling around the globe, conversations between Strange, manager Dave Holmes and Live Nation’s Bruce Moran had been ongoing for 14 months, and the team had initially hoped to tack the Latin American run onto the end of the European stadium leg in summer 2009. But “everyone was wiped out or going to be wiped out,” says long-time tour manager Andy Franks.

“The band wanted a break so we put the dates back to the early part of this year when the weather was probably going to be better as well.”

The team settled on eight stadium shows across Argentina, Brazil, Columbia and Mexico: River Plate Stadium in Buenos Aires, Praça da Apoteose in Rio, Morumbi Stadium in Sao Paulo, Simón Bolívar Park in Bogota, two nights at Foro Sol in Mexico City and Estadio Tres de Marzo in Guadalajara before finishing at Estadio Universitario in Monterrey. Delaying the leg was a necessary choice, but as anyone with experience at top-flight touring knows, there’s no simple way to suspend a stadium tour for six months, and the gap between Wembley and Buenos Aires (26 Feb) threw up a heap of issues. “Logistical sense and reality don’t always fall into rock and roll,” Franks says. “Financially, we couldn’t retain the crew for that period.” One such casualty was production manager Craig Finlay, who was already booked for Lilith Fair in the US.

Coldplay “They didn’t just lose the production manager, they lost their stage manager, all their riggers and key people in all departments except for sound,” says replacement production manager Wob Roberts, who was drafted in late December and tasked with appointing replacement crew and assembling the production, even though the gear had long been returned to suppliers.

After some careful wrangling (including hiring staging, sound and lights locally) the whole production fitted into one chartered plane, while the 90-strong crew and band party filled up another. But as the first night approached, with a partly new crew, an unfamiliar production, and just four days to prepare due to a football match in River Plate Stadium beforehand, Franks admits to being more than a little worried. he says. “It had disaster written all over it, but on the night it was flawless – everything went perfectly,” he says.

“At that first shake down in Buenos Aires everyone clicked and got on together,” adds Roberts. “After that we had some really good shows.”

Speak to anyone on the Latin America tour and they’ll tell you that the schedule was ambitious; bouncing a stadium show around one of the world’s largest continents with just one day between shows was always going to be tight. “We had to get the nights in the right places,” says Strange, who worked with Live Nation and the production team on the routing, with all involved signing off on it. “If we had put the schedule back a day after Colombia for instance, we would have ended up playing the second Mexico City show on a Monday night and it wouldn’t have worked. You have to be a little pragmatic whenever you go into these things.”

The first test of the timetable came at 4.30am the morning after the first show when an earthquake measuring 8.8 on the Richter scale occurred off the coast of Chile, its impact felt on the opposite coast. “We’d specifically chartered a Lan Chile 767 freight plane because if one went technical there were spares available,” says Roberts. “But then the quake happened and while there were six on the ground in Santiago, the airport was shut.” Instead of flying at 8am, it took 12 hours to source a replacement plane from Brazil. Rather than load in the night before as planned, allowing lights to be focussed in darkness, the crew found themselves loading in at 6am on the day of the Sao Paolo show.

“Doing multiple cities within a country and having just one day off can work because you can truck the gear, but if you’re flying between countries, ideally you need a day to fly the gear and do the customs clearance,” Roberts says. “But the fact that that happened set the tone for the tour – it proved to us that we could theoretically load in

on the day of the show.”

“None of us could have expected an earthquakesized problem to enter into the equation,” adds Strange.

It’s testament to the crew that the dates were pulled off, with the whole ensemble surviving the fallout from the earthquake, notoriously over-zealous customs checks in Colombia and even a confetti canon failure in Brazil, which saw Live Nation’s Bruce Moran and Shanti Wargo happily conscripted for duty. Indeed, Moran says that the enthusiasm “ ... when you get 50,000 Argentineans going mad there isn’t a sound like it.”

– Andy Franks

and professionalism he encountered on the tour – directed from the top down – made the tour a career highlight.

“The whole team – Dave Holmes, Steve Strange, Andy Franks, Wob and the others – is exceptional and never before have I had the pleasure of such regular interaction with the artist,” he says. “Chris Martin was especially thoughtful.”

Considering that just three years ago Coldplay was touring theatres in Latin America, the success of the tour is astonishing. “It did incredible business,” Strange says.

“Our ticket price was relatively cheap in comparison to some other shows that were out there and I think it paid off.” Using local sponsors to supplement the income on each date, as well as up to seven price points for seats, the eight shows sold a total of 347,000 tickets, grossing $24.8million (€18.2m). And as far as audience response goes, no band could wish for a better farewell leg.

“Our last shows had been two nights at Wembley with 80,000 people and that was loud, but when you get 50,000 Argentineans going mad there isn’t a sound like it,” Franks says. “Then you get to Brazil and it’s even louder. Then you go to Bogota where there are 30,000 and they were the loudest crowd I’ve heard, then we go to Mexico and there are 50,000 there and it’s absolutely fucking bonkers. Every gig was better and better. It was phenomenal.”

Moran, who has promoted concerts in Latin America for 18 years, says that Coldplay’s eight shows are part of a growing trend for bands to spend longer in the region.

“It’s a fair number,” he says, adding that there’s still more potential out there. “We might have been able to play two shows at River Plate Stadium, there were markets they didn’t play, and we could fill a larger stadium in Rio,” he says. “The whole thing was an awful lot of fun and we could certainly play even more shows next time.

I really hope we’ll see them back in a year and a half or two years’ time.”

Top right: Coldplay wave goodbye to Mexico City

Your Shout

“ What was your funniest or most memorable moment of ILMC 22?”

If you would like to send feedback, comments or suggestions for future Your Shout topics, please email: info@iq-mag.net

Noel Edwards – Ticket Factory

Two things made me nearly spit out my Tuborg and double up laughing. Don’t ask how the conversation got to this but Peter Monks’ impression of Chuggy eating broken glass has to be seen to be believed. Also the rumour that Wembley Arena had signed up a headline sponsor and was going to be branded the Greggs Arena!

Rebecca Kane – Alexandra Palace

Funniest moment of ILMC was being told that our closest competitor, best known for sports and music events, had a new venue sponsor. And the sponsor was Greggs the bakers! How very rock ‘n’ roll. An ILMC joke I suspect.

Martyn Passey – Live UK

The amazingly hot mustard at the silent disco quenched with surprising amounts of Dutch lager, a certain festival organiser showing us how to play rock ‘n’ roll table football, the lovely ladies in red, Mr Chugg with his war paint on, the South Korean band, the jamming sessions afterwards, realising that the gates of Kensington Tube Station would not open before 7.00am on Sunday no matter how long we stood and prayed they would, seeing a certain gentleman from across the water looking for a kebab house in Kensington High Street and wondering whether the seagulls would take off or do what most seagulls do.

70

I Q Ma g a z i n e Ma y 2 0 1 0

TOP SHOUT!

Jakub Danielka – O2 Arena, Prague

Nobody’s funnier than Michael Chugg. Anywhere, anytime...

Andy Lenthall – PSA

Afternoon Dive, what’s yer Poseidon.

Ed Grossman – MGR Media

Last year I saw Sacha Baron Cohen sitting on Eminem’s face. It confirmed what I and perhaps many others have suspected for a long time, which is that rap is the biggest piss take in the history of musical entertainment. I instantly went from hating to liking Eminem, a lot. And that even stretched to 50 Cent.

It’s a similar thing with Michael Eavis. For the past (almost) 40 years, I and probably many others, thought he was a pompous and even arrogant know-it-all hippy.

But he turns out to be a very knowledgeable, music loving, totally bonkers, loveable taskmaster with endearing and unique qualities. The man is a natural. People don’t know what they missed.

Jim Frayling – Wembley Stadium

Has to be Gary’s team talk for the UK team ahead of the penalty shoot-out [at the Match of the Year football]. Something about Ian Holloway, Crystal Palace in the play-offs and blasting the ball come what may. It didn’t work. We missed something like four out of five penalties. Why did we listen? Why?

OK, you had to be there... one day I’ll explain.

Dave Newton – We Got Tickets

The most memorable part of the weekend for me was hearing Michael Eavis talk about Glastonbury as if he was just having a few people around for dinner.

A person less-phased about the phenomenon that he accidentally created, I’ll never know.

Carl Leighton-Pope – LPO Agency

My favourite moment was my Talking Shop, when I realised that Michael Chugg and Harvey Goldsmith weren’t in the room. For once I felt very lonely.

Gillian Park – MGR Media

I know I won’t be alone in saying the funniest AND most memorable moment has to be the Michael Eavis interview. Not any particular part of it, just the whole thing, from asking someone if they were a farmer too (how many cows do you have?) to the look on Ed B i c k n e l l ’s face for

almost the entire interview.

Absolute genius!

David Garcia – Moderne Welt

The most memorable moment for me was watching all those young people at the panels ALMOST raising their hands to say something.

Guys, next year, please speak up – it’s important to hear what you have to say.

Roger Edwards – consultant

I have a number... Trade Directories, you are only as good as the content information returns – Flicking through the 2010 issue of The VIP Book I was amused to note being listed for a job I left ten years ago. Reading on I was surprised to note how many similar errors were listed ... more research needed boys!

And being told that Greggs the bakers had bought the naming rights to Wembley!

Never mind who ate all the pies! Who sold them all?!

Emiliano Tortoro – Grinding Halt

The most memorable moment of ILMC 22 for me was the table football tournament! I hope that next year there will be another, and congratulations to Rense, Mauro, Eva etc who made it such great fun!