The Good;
According to many a status update new Irish band Little Green Cars got it spot on last night. They filled up Whelans on a night there was some stiff competition up the road in The Lower Deck! The full house was because Little Green Cars had a quality support act in We Cut Corners, tickets were just €6 and it was in Whelans with their regular nightclub crowd!
€10 for this gig is amazing value!
The Bad;
The folks in Whelans must be delighted that they have two sold out gigs in a row. Sunday sees Glen Hansard doing his thing for Haiti with friends. Just two years ago that gig would have been in Vicar Street! Four years ago it would have been The Olympia. I'm convinced that Glen & folks would have filled Whelans three or four times over for tomorrows gig. Why was Whelans the venue of choice? How much of the till money will be going to Haiti? Then on Monday there's the strange decision to house the Natalie Merchant concert in Whelans which was sold out 2/3 weeks ago. This is an example of under-estimating demand regardless of pricing!
We are just 5 weeks away from the http://www.choicemusicprize.com/ gig in Vicar Street on March 3rd. There was a tweet about the €27 ticket price which highlighted the consistent approach towards tickets prices as a good thing. However we don't know the line-up. Is €27 too much money to see 5 or 6 bands doing a couple a tunes in between long gaps and pauses?
The Ugly;
Vyvienne Long is doing a short tour of Ireland and London in support of her debut album. Tickets for all the gigs are either €18 or €20. I know she is a wonderful talent but she's only released an EP and a single or two. These ticket prices are far too high for me!
On Wednesday you can for just €5 go and see Nick Kelly and his exciting 'Gestation' project Upstairs in Whelans. Great value for a seasoned professional with a long history of amazing releases. However the rest of his monthly gigs are a whopping €17! Again this is blatantly over the top!
In summery I'd recommend any band or artist who is thinking about touring to think carefully about their gigs. Unless you can fill the place with a guest list larger than capacity for the venue forget about it. I'd be very surprised if say more than 50% of gigs make money from that event. People and organisers need to think very carefully about gigs of the future. Even HWCHs need to think about making their gigs free to attend with possibility of maybe charging a small fee to the bands for playing!
5 comments:
Ticket prices are so unpredictible. I live so close to the boarder, and the difference in ticket prices North and South is crazy. I saw Bell x1 last April in Belfast for £23 and gigs in the republic for the rest of the tour were 35 euros! Josh Ritter in Belfast last year was only £17, and kings of leon were £30 and 50 quid in Dublin I think. Crazy stuff. I'd love to know how much the bands actually get?
Are you gonna give Wheelan's a try tomorrow then?
Na, I don't think I'll bother about tomorrow night. Got a busy week of gigs coming up! Mondya in the glor sessions, weds in another sessions night and my own gig up in Slane!
I did read a speech a while back given by someone who representated a lot of bands, who basically said that 10 yeasr ago the money made by their artists came from the following places in order of importance
Sales, publishing , radio ,merchandise ,sponsorship , live and that now the order was
Publishing , live , merchandise , radio , sponsorship , sales.
Now this feels like it came from some reocrd company big wig which sees music as a unit. He was making the point that business will always exploit areas of growth thus cd prices coming down ticket prices going up. What is interesting is this applies just as much to the Nick kelly's of the world as it does to the U2s.Artists like Nick Kelly and Lloyd Cole etc now operate a bit outside the normal record company model. They raise money in different ways (lloyd cole is offering the chance to pre pay for an lp that hasnt yet been recorded to help pay for the recording) to make music to play live to make money to make music and so the cycle goes on. It only takes afew 1000 dedicated fans to make it work. The danger is that you get the balancing act wrong and it all becomes too much even for the dedicated. This is before the venues also realise that they are on to a good thing and start increasing the cost of putting onthe gig in the first place.
Hi there
Just recently had my attention drawn to this very interesting post, and thought I would contribute my own 10 cents-worth.
The first thing to say is that in retrospect, €17 clearly was too high a ticket price for my opening shows in the GESTATION series from the perspective of a significant number of potential audience members. From the €5 cut-price show in January onwards, I did everything I could to keep the ticket price down, including dispensing with all crew, drivers and merchandising staff. The last four shows were €10, €15 (for The Fat Lady Sings show, when I had to fly my three former band members in from overseas), €10 and €15 (which included a free CD).
That said, I would like to echo and amplify the points made by Friend of Rachel Worth - it's a precarious balancing act for artists operating at my level. The reason I initially agreed to the suggestion of a €17 ticket price was that it would give me some chance of not losing too much money on the series of shows. The costs of paying for musicians, rehearsals, crew, transport, postering and - for this project - recording and mixing, means that I never was in any danger of breaking even, let alone making money for these performances. In fact, though I'm still doing the final calculations, I reckon that I've LOST an average of well over €1200 per show. I'm not complaining about this - I went in with my eyes open, it's been a fantastic artistic project and I've got an amazing new record to show for it at the end of my 9 months - but the economics of playing live gigs at all is pretty terrifying at times for people like me.
To follow on from another point made by FoRW, and to state the obvious, it actually costs an artist at my level (or Lloyd's) astronomically MORE per unit cost to make a CD or play a gig than it costs the megabands. At the risk seeming arrogant or deluded, I do however feel that there is just as much artistic worth - perhaps more - in the work that artists at our level do, and it's important that we do somehow manage to continue to make music for public consumption.
This has never been about money for me, or for many thousands of other artists - but if the money side goes too badly wrong for us, we simply won't be able to get our work into the world at all.
I personally would have no problem paying just as much for a CD by Joe Chester, The Low Anthem or Jinx Lennon as I would for U2 or the Black Eyed Peas. Obviously, other factors come into ticket pricing - my live show doesn't feature 400 crew, a giant claw or quite as spectacular a light show - but I still have mouths to feed and bills to pay, and I put at least as much of my soul into every show I play as any stadium band does.
If my ticket pricing in the past has prevented fans from coming to see me play live, I'm genuinely sorry and will do my very best to keep the prices as low as I can in the future. But I would also like to say to all those who did dig deep to pay into any one of my nine GESTATION shows - or indeed buy one of my albums - that the positive impact of your payment on my ability to continue to make, release and perform my music is infinitely greater than if you'd spent the same amount on seeing or hearing Lady Gaga or Bruce Springsteen. And I really do appreciate it.
Thanks for letting me respond, and for the great work on this blog.
Very best
Nick Kelly (aka Alien Envoy)
Thank you Nick for your comment and explaining the process of the 'Gestation' project. I did not ice the reduction in ticket prices down to €10 which for me was great value. I was hoping to get to at least one of the gigs, in particular the Steafan Hanvey supported gig or the final one with Gemma Hayes supporting. I find Wednesday's as a very difficult night for me to attend any gig. The figure of over a grand loss for every gig is unreal. Puts the auld €17 into perspective!
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