Concerts out there are hurting. Sure no artist is ever going to tell you this, but it is the truth. I get the calls everyday from promoters and agents looking for help selling shows big, medium and small. It’s a real issue out there right now. You may even go to a show and think it’s full, but in reality it’s not. That’s called “papering the house”, meaning giving tickets away in mass amounts just to have people in the room to make it look good, sell a T shirt or a beer. Now many have said sales are rough because “rock is dead”. However I do not believe that to be the case. In my view two words sums up the live music industry right now; OVER SATURATION. Simply put, bands are over touring to make up for the fact that almost nobody is making money on album sales. Used to be you toured to sell the album, which is where the money was made. Now it’s reverse. The album is almost the giveaway to promote a tour. But WAY too many bands are out there WAY too long, some hitting major markets three times in a year. I get they need to make money and don’t fault them, but it makes it less special when you can see a favorite band twice a year VS once every two. People simply can’t afford to pay to see all these shows and see a band so many times. As a result everyone is being more selective, and you are seeing more and more bands downsize venues, but still staying on the road. I also think peoples attention is in way too many places to make all these shows a priority. You can see in a second set lists online, audio, video, the mystique is gone. Of course the mega bands will always do okay, but don’t be fooled, the business is not what you think it is or what they project even for them. The days of a 50 city non stop US tour are rare. Bands find special events or festivals or co-headline because they can’t draw enough as a headline in arenas on their own, and those that can are charging way too much. Not sure where the solution lies but it’s something I see and hear about often. I truly do not think rock is dead, but I do think the touring world and peoples attention are so overwhelmed right now with too many options its hard to know what’s going on? Hope it works itself out because the live stage is where this music is best served, but it is an issue I hear about all the time behind the scenes. Look forward to reading your thoughts.
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It ain’t coming back. I hate to be a downer, but the writing is on the wall. This form of music will never be what it was in the 1970s through the early 2000s. Not even close. It’ll be as big as hard-bop is now – a small but devout audience. Music isn’t as important to today’s youth – aka the future market of rock ‘n roll, as it was in our era. Kids don’t care. The no longer define themselves by who they listen to. And in the old days, everyone listened to the same handful of stations. Nowadays audiences are fragmented. People don’t even listen to the radio. And classic rock stations play the same old stuff.
The creative era of rock ‘n roll is gone. Done. Every band I hear now in the hard rock/metal genre sounds like a bland pastiche of what came before. Rehashing 20 to 40 year old music doesn’t cut it anymore. Sorry but I’ve heard the original stuff and it’s better. Guys like Jimmy Page listened to more than just rock ‘n roll – Indian music, tradional acoustic stuff, other world music. And it showed in the stuff they wrote. But overall the same thing that is now happening in rock ‘n roll already happened in jazz and bluegrass. This isn’t a diss on rock ‘n roll, it’s just the truth about the lifespan of a musical genre.
Today’s musicians are barely true musicians – they are technicians. More adept as ever at playing their instruments, but they can’t compose or arrange. They haven’t grasped the concept of collaborating with others. You get a virtuoso with a bunch of back ups. Rock bands haven’t come close to approaching what Led Zeppelin, the Beatles or Queen did. We have a bunch of self-appointed guitar gods who haven’t accomplished anything other than get their sixteenth notes up to 216 bpm. I blame Mike Varney and his Shrapnel Label for that, but that’s another essay for another day. But it’s done. Keep it up Eddie, but guys like you and Bob Lefsetz are simply the Captain’s of a sinking ship. I’ll keep listening to the show anyways.
You nailed it brother!
I really think that you hit the nail on the head. Bands like Maiden, UFO, Deep Purple the Scorpions created music that made you want to get up and move. The hard rock and metal today does not do that
I remember one year going to a concert once every 3 weeks, so it seemed. Hardly any of my favorite bands tour anymore, or take forever to make there way through So Cal. Or maybe just a fraction of the band is playing. Or my favs are making shitty music. I saw Iron Maiden Aug of 2012, They are coming back in Sept 2013, though it’s the same show as last time. Been there already. Plus bands need to go deeper into their catalog. I’m tired of the same tunes.
Just saw Skynyrd and Bad Company co-headline a show with Blackstone Cherry at Pine Knob near Detroit. The place was packed. The very next night at Pine Knob, I saw Whitesnake single headline a show with Geoff Tate as a late addition. The Whitesnake show was half full. It seems to me the co- headlining and package tours are the way to go. Bands and fans can split their costs, etc. Also, a sold out show is alot more fun than a half empty one.
The people I know that are “fringe” fans of classic rock, love to go to the package shows but don’t neccesarily feel like making the drive to go see a single band.
In the same boat, Steve, with Maiden. Would love to see them again like I did last summer, but frankly even their reasonable ticket price coupled with all the incidentals that go along with traveling to a show just doesn’t make sense to me when I will be going to see what I’m sure is the exact same set list I saw last year. It is why while I love metal and always will, I also am glad at some point I gravitated to what I guess can be considered the complete opposite of metal and that is the jam scene, stuff like Govn’t Mule, Widespread Panic, the Allman Bros, Grateful Dead, Phish, etc, etc, where the whole point of the show is the unexpected and that is what keeps people coming back show after show, and hell, following the bands show to show. And as others have said, ticket prices just suck today. Concerts are not for the financially strapped, That is for sure.
I did the same thing. Once I started seeing the Grateful Dead it made me wonder why other bands couldn’t mix up their sets more. I give Aerosmith some credit – they do mix it up. With the light and stage shows of most hard rock bands, there’s very little room left for improv and mixing up the set.
John G…..I honestly believe there is a whole segment of music fans out there that don’t understand it CAN be done that way or frankly, they would be ANGRY if it was done that way. I tend to forget, and not at all trying to sound music snobbish or something about the topic, but there are a ton of fans that want to go into the show, hear the hits or the same 15 songs they saw one, two, three, four tours ago, and go home. Once you tap into stuff like the Dead and that philosophy of what a live show can be like when it comes to setlists, which you obviously did, it really does become a mind bottler of why hard rock/metal bands can’t do it unless it is simply the type of fan just doesn’t want it and the band knows it. Hopefully, the hybrid fan like us is growing that can accept the fact the next AC/DC tour is going to have them replacing about 5 songs that are worn into the ground and replaced with some deeper cuts. Hell, I’ll give Maiden credit. Much to my chagrin, they removed Hallowed Be Thy Name from the setlist last summer because they were worn out on it. I would have preferred to see Run to the Hills bite the dust.
And I hear ya on the stage set up and lights playing a problem in it, although I don’t completely agree with it. Brian Johnson has expressed that exact same sentiment in the past about why the setlists don’t change up for a tour and I get it with actual stage props, but not the lights unless a band is working with a minimal light show or not a very talented lighting tech.
Improvisation is a lost art with a lot of bands. Rush was one of the first bands I can think of that played every song note for note like the record. The Eagles were another. Same set night after night. In the old days, bands were so wasted – Aerosmith again comes to mind, that doing the same set probably was a matter of survival. Tyler couldn’t remember the lyrics to his biggest tunes! The jam band scene is still going good. Futhur is playing bigger places. Metal and hard rock are fighting for survival.
It all comes down to price. The more affordable the show, the more shows fans can see. Once seeing shows regularly becomes a habit again, sales will support more tours. Entertainment options are at historic highs, yet people are creatures of habit.
The big acts of today can easily ignore this approach but most of them won’t be around much longer. They’ll either fade away from waning interest (from short attention span casual music fans) or retire when they’re too old to tour. Once that happens, everyone else will have to adjust accordingly. Get them in the club or theater, remind them how badass live music is and we just might save rock and roll after all.