The State of Music

O.A.R. tix at UMass supposedly went on sale today at 10:00. I say supposedly because the links at the UMass and O.A.R. sites seem to be dead. My youngest is a huge O.A.R. fan, and wants to go. She asked me last night if I thought they’d sell out, mentioning a Justin Timberlake concert that sold out in some ridiculous amount of time of fifteen minutes or so. I first assured her that I don’t think O.A.R. would sell out like JT II. Then I mentioned that the good seats are probably grabbed anyway by radio stations and corporations and all that. You know how it works: the concert’s sold out, and the day before a radio station gives out tickets in the first row to the nth caller.

Power to the people, I say.

Spin has a decent special issue on the State of Music. Well, Spin has maybe three good pages laying out what’s been going on in the music world, and frankly, anyone with half a brain can sum it up in one word: digital. And it’s not just in music it’s in film, software, news outlets, everything. In music, though, the rich guys in suits were so busy counting their money they never saw it coming. Proves you don’t have to be smart to be rich. Now they’re screaming foul but the world changed underneath them. The old business model is long gone. Long…gone. The money’s not in selling CDs or even digital downloads. I don’t even want to say the money’s in concerts, although right now it is, but even that’s gonna change. Let’s say the money is going towards events. Wanna make your mark and your cash, get your song played on Grey’s Anatomy.

Anyway, what got me on this tear is my daughter wanting to go to a concert, and you got to figure the next step music execs will take is to recoup their losses in concert tickets. That’s how they think. Again, that’s the old business model. When one revenue channel dries up, try to get it back through another existing one. But they’ll do what Major League Baseball is in the middle of doing, namely, pricing themselves right out of the market and losing their base forever.

They gotta make music cheap and accessible, if they want to keep the young fan base.

When I was even younger than my daughter this was the state of the music industry: I was growing up poor in working-class Cincinnati. (I could never understand people who said when they were young they were poor but didn’t know it. What? Were you stupid? How could you not know? Didn’t you see the beat-to-s**t car your family drove, then look at your friends’ cars and see the difference?) We’d hitchhike to Cincinnati Gardens, a brick box that, when it wasn’t hosting concerts, was the home to Oscar Robertson and the Royals basketball team, some hockey farm team of the Buffalo Sabres, and the circus when it came to town. We’d panhandle for ticket money (spare change, man, got any spare change?) Can you imagine having to beg for ticket money today? With the cost of a ticket today you’d have to start months ahead to raise the cash. I don’t remember but I wouldn’t be surprised if tickets cost maybe eight or ten bucks tops. Neil Young and Linda Ronstadt, the Who, Ten Years After, John Mayall, Alice Cooper, Emerson Lake and Palmer left their mark forever.