Wednesday-Night Mag

RUN FOR THE TURNSTILES

Wednesday-Night Mag has opened a new page on the CRTC

Lifted from the Globe & Mail Box-office greed
RUN FOR THE TURNSTILES
Show-goers get burned by summer as ticket prices go
through the roof. But fans seem only too willing
to pay $115 for theatre seats and $150 to see a
double bill featuring Bob Dylan and Paul Simon.
LEAH McLAREN
The Globe and Mail
Saturday, June 12, 1999

You're standing in a crowded and muddy field. Just a few feet ahead, a rock-'n'-roll legend sweats it out on stage, sprinkling your beaming face with saliva as he rips through a vintage tune. After months of anticipation, you are transfixed. You feel weightless, as though a great burden has been lifted. And it has: Your wallet is lighter.

Today, it seems the only cheap thing about summer is the weather. The season brings heat, holidays and high ticket prices. According to Billboard magazine, the average price of concert tickets for most major North American tours has doubled in the past 10 years -- far outpacing the modest rate of inflation.

Consider the state of summer entertainment in Canada. Ontario's Stratford Festival, a not-for-profit theatre company, has also doubled its ticket prices during the past decade. A midsummer musical at the festival now costs as much as $69. The Montreal-Paris production Notre Dame de Paris is currently charging Toronto audiences $115 for weekend seats. Movie admission in some Famous Players theatres recently hit the $10 mark. And prices for most Canadian concert tours this summer range from about $30 for younger-oriented acts, such as Britney Spears and the Vans Warped Tour, to about $70 for "heritage bands," such as Santana and Elton John.

When it comes to concerts, in fact, the sky seems to be the limit.Some heavy-hitters, both here and in the United States, are commanding much fatter fees for premium tickets. In Vancouver, folk devotees shucked out $150 to witness last night's double bill featuring Bob Dylan and Paul Simon. In Corner Brook, Nfld., and Charlottetown, people are paying $65 to see the Celtic dance show Lord of the Dance later this month. Fans of Whitney Houston are ponying up $150 to see the singer's Toronto concert at the end of June (the prime tickets sold out in a matter of hours). Enduring star Cher is charging her Toronto admirers $80 for an up-front seat. And that is a bargain compared with opera master Andrea Bocelli, who is demanding $500 for top seats at his coming U.S. arena tour. The Rolling Stones aren't far behind, charging up to $300 for the privilege of seeing Mick Jagger sweat.

For people like Tony Luccisano, 39-year-old Toronto accounts manager and rock music fan, the prices have gone out of reach. He said he stopped going to concerts when ticket prices became more expensive than the price of a CD. "The whole entertainment industry is out of control," he said, adding that he also stopped attending baseball games because of the expense. "I'd rather sit at home and listen to the Rolling Stones on my stereo."

Talk to entertainment industry insiders and they will explain that ticket prices jump in June, July and August for a range of reasons. They will tell you about the expense of outdoor shows, supply and demand, high entertainment taxes and crowd control. They will talk about buying in rather than selling out. But they will probably neglect to mention the central factor at work: greed.

This will hardly come as a shock. But what is surprising in this case is the source of the pricing pressure. Skyrocketing prices are not generally the result of corporate promoters and ticket vendors. In the big-venue concert industry, these days it is typically the artists who inflate ticket prices.

"Artists are getting greedy," singer Sarah McLachlan recently told Rolling Stone magazine.
"Let's face it, we all make a lot of money doing this, and at a certain point it becomes fairy money. It's not based in reality."

Gary Bongiovanni, editor-in-chief of Pollstar, a Fresno, Calif.-based magazine that tracks the concert industry, said today's prices represent a major attitude shift among artists. "Twenty years ago, no artist would have put a huge premium on their ticket price for fear of losing their counter-cultural-cool status," he said. "Today, artists' resistance to high ticket prices has completely evaporated. There's been a substantial jump in the number of acts who are willing to charge 60 to 70 dollars. A few years ago, you could have counted the bands who charged that much on one hand."

A Vancouver spokesman for the vendor TicketMaster confirms that artists are responsible for price hikes. "We just sell the tickets. If Shania Twain wants to charge $5 or $85, that's her choice."

But if the number of high-priced acts has grown, so too has the number of people willing and able to pay for the pleasure. Two decades ago, most pop music fans were young by virtue of the fact that the music itself was still new. Today, that huge generation of postwar kids weaned on the music of the sixties and seventies are middle-aged adults with, in many cases, high-paying jobs. Rock 'n' roll isn't just for cash-strapped kids any more.

However, Riley O'Connor, senior vice-president of Canada's Universal Concerts, is afraid of a backlash if ticket prices continue to rise. "There is a lot of pressure for artists to get the highest-earning dollar they can," said O'Connor. "After a while, the fans will start to resent it. Just look at what's gone on in sports over the past few years." (Since last year, the price of Toronto Blue Jays tickets has risen by 15 per cent.)

As a not-for-profit organization, the Stratford festival's main goal is to create art. But that doesn't stop management from charging almost $70 for a prime ticket. General Manager Antoni Cimolino said ticket prices simply reflect the cost of doing business. When you buy a theatre ticket at Stratford, he said, you are paying for much more than the star's fee. Your ticket for West Side Story, for instance, helps to pay the salaries of 30 actors and 28 musicians. And when you attend The Tempest you get to see William Hutt as well as his handpainted 17th-century-style costume.

But in recent years it has become much easier for the festival, which receives 5-per-cent of its funding from government sources, to jack up the fees. That's because more than 50 per cent of its ticket revenue comes from U.S. tourists, who have benefited from the growing strength of the U.S. dollar.

"We're in the export business," said Cimolino, "and for Americans our ticket prices have gone down, not up, in recent years"

In addition to greedy pop stars and a booming economy, U.S. concert prices are being nudged up by another powerful force -- one which will soon move into Canada. In slightly more than a year, the New York-based conglomerate SFX Entertainment has spent more than $1.5 billion (U.S.) acquiring partial or full interests in 82 venues and some of that country's largest concert promoters. The company, which controls just under 40 per cent of the U.S. concert market, is reportedly about to acquire the assets of the insolvent Livent, the Toronto-based theatre company. According to Bongiovanni, the industry buzz is that SFX will soon acquire Universal Concerts (owned by Montreal-based Seagram Co.), Canada's major concert promoter.

According to industry insiders, SFX has consolidated what had been a largely independent industry by booking and promoting entire tours on its own. And the company is rumoured to be pushing up ticket prices as a way of recouping hefty performance fees it pays to artists. It has been reported, for instance, that Dylan and Simon will split $525,000 (U.S.) a night. In exchange, SFX will promote their tour, booked primarily into company-owned buildings.

Canadian promoter Michael Cohl spearheaded the practice of luring artists with substantial up-front fees when he bought the rights to the Rolling Stones' 1994 Voodoo Lounge tour. SFX recently purchased Cohl's Toronto-based international tour company.

SFX and money-hungry artists have recently discovered what scalpers have known all along, that for certain fans, money is no object. For decades, front-row tickets have commanded hundreds of dollars on the secondary market, that is, from scalpers. "Those people sitting in the front row dictated the market long ago, so it's just a matter of supply and demand," Bongiovanni explained.

But just how much are people willing to pay? Rolling Stone reported that the Eagles (one of the first acts to break the $100 ticket-price ceiling) are considering a concert for the eve of the millennium. The rumoured ticket price? Fifteen hundred smackers.

"The Eagles will be holding that concert aboard the Mir Space Station, right?" asked Dave Bidini, lead singer of the rock band Rheostatics and author of On a Cold Road, a Canadian music memoir. Bidini and his band -- though certainly not the biggest draws on the continent -- are committed to keeping ticket prices cheap for their fans. But the Toronto-based musician has advice for flat-broke admirers of greedier artists.

"There's this wall downtown [in Toronto] that echoes the sound of all the outdoor concerts. Apparently, you can go there and hear the whole concert perfectly," he said. "So free rock 'n' roll does exist after all."

THE PHANTOM MENACE
$10
You may be paying the price for Star Wars, no matter what movie you choose to see instead. Just days before the May 19 release of Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, Famous Players raised their ticket prices at certain theatres by 50 cents to $10. This presummer manoeuvre caught cinema patrons at their most vulnerable. (Whatcha gonna do, not take your kids to see Star Wars?)

Famous Players smashed the psychologically significant $10 price ceiling at a time when cinema attendance in Canada had reached a 14-year peak. According to Statistics Canada, in 1996 the movie box office accounted for 11 per-cent of the $5.8 billion Canadians spent on entertainment. In 1996-97, cinema attendance reached a high of 91.8 million.

The ticket hike also comes as cinema companies wage a battle over our movie-going dollars. Call it Screen Wars. In order to compete with newcomer AMC, the former duopoly of Famous Players and Cineplex Odeon has begun building a fleet of high-tech, high-priced megaplexes. Last month alone, Famous Players opened $100 million worth of large-size theatres in such target areas as Edmonton, Vancouver and Toronto. By the end of this year they will have added 31 new theatres across the country as part of the $500 million-dollar expansion.

NOTRE DAME DE PARIS
$115
The success of Notre Dame de Paris proved that Canadian audiences will pay $115 to see a musical with a recorded soundtrack. Despite the empty orchestra pit, the $10 million Paris-Montreal production has already generated significant box office revenue in France and Quebec. The show opened at Toronto's Princess of Wales Theatre earlier this week. At Canada's two major summer drama festivals, Stratford and Shaw, admission is cheaper -- but not much cheaper. At the Stratford Festival, tickets peak at $69, while at Shaw prime seats are going for $70.

Stratford, a not-for-profit organization, adjusts its tickets prices each year according the ebb and flow of the entertainment marketplace. "We look at everything from ballet and opera to local festivals to get an understanding of what the audience will pay," said Antoni Cimolino, Stratford's general manager. "The entertainment industry just follows society. Like Shakespeare said, we're just 'holding a mirror up to nature' "

Over the past decade, Stratford ticket prices have nearly doubled.

BOB DYLAN & PAUL SIMON
$150
When singer Sarah McLachlan, speaking to Rolling Stone magazine, recently blamed greedy artists for the skyrocketing cost of concert tickets, she wasn't only talking about Paul Simon and Bob Dylan's current gravy train tour, which played to a sold-out Vancouver audience last night, with tickets running up to $150. She was being self-referential.

Prime ducats for her Lilith Fair festival, which kicks off on July 8th in Vancouver and will touch down in Toronto and Edmonton in August, ring in at $60.50 this summer. That's up $14.50 from the price of comparable seats last year. Even heftier admission fees are being spotted all over the summer show roster: Celine Dion, Cher, Elton John, Harry Connick Jr. and Tom Petty, all of whom will all appear in Canada in the next few months, are charging anywhere from $66 to $85.50 for premium tickets.

Gary Bongiovanni, editor of Pollstar, a magazine that monitors the con-cert industry, says it's the pop stars themselves -- not the venues or the promoters -- who are responsible for gouging fans. "Artists are the ones who ultimately decide," he told The Globe. "Ticket price simply reflects the size of the pay day the artist wants."

CHEAP SUMMER DATE IN TORONTO
Dinner: 1 appetizer, 2 pizzas and half litre wine at Terroni on Queen St. W. including tax and tip: $35

Theatre Tickets: two pay-what-you-can suggested donations for Dream In High Park's outdoor production of the musical, Rock 'n Roll: $20

A pitcher of domestic beer at your local pub: approximately $14

TTC: $4

Babysitting: drop your kids with friends (and return the favour next weekend)

Total: $73

THE $600 BOOMER DINNER-AND-A-SHOW DATE FOR TWO IN VANCOUVER:
Dinner: Lumiere - chef's tasting menu with accompanying flight of wines, plus cocktail, coffee and tip: $250.00
Concert tickets:.Two top-priced floor seats for the Paul Simon and Bob Dylan concert at G.M Place ordered by phone through Ticketmaster,: $315.25, including service and handling charges. Same tickets through ticket broker (the only place that was selling them last week): $400.00
Parking at GM Place: $10.00
Drinks at GM Place: $22.00 (two drinks per person at @$5.95 per drink)
Babysitting: $65.00 (6 1/2 hrs @$9 per hour, plus tip)

WHERE THE MONEY GOES
Approximate Canadian pop concert ticket-price breakdown:
50-65% Artist
10-20% Venue (House nut)
10% Average Ticketmaster service charge
7-17% Taxes - by province
5-10% Advertising
5% Approximate facility fees
2.5% Royalties
Breakdown of a $64 Stratford Festival ticket:
25% Actors
20% Sets and stagehands
15% Creative team - directors, designers and choreographers
14% Costumes and dressers
11% Wigs, jewellery and props
10% Musicians
3% Stage management
2% Royalties

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MediaJun99.htm Tuesday, June 15, 1999