CMU School of Drama


Friday, November 04, 2011

Live Nation says concerts business is stabilized

latimes.com: The live music business, which last year faced a crisis of audience apathy that resulted in empty seats and canceled engagements, has stabilized this year and is expected to remain healthy into 2012, said Michael Rapino, chief executive of Live Nation Entertainment Inc., the nation's largest concert promoter and ticketing company.“Live events are a strong … consumer proposition, despite the tough economic times,” Rapino told analysts during a discussion of the company’s third-quarter results Thursday.

6 comments:

tspeegle said...

This could be a good sign that our economy is back on the rise. The public loves to see a concert. But the first thing that gets cut out of a family budget is entertainment expenses. Families for the last five years have probably seen less concerts, theatre and movies.
Live Nation lowering ticket prices certainly helps the increase of ticket sales. Companies started to panic when our economy started to plummet. All of a sudden products become more expensive. Does that make any sense? The public couldn’t afford the original price of the product so they stopped buying, but then the company starts to struggle, so they raise their prices?
With lower ticket prices and the stability of the economy, people will start to come back to entertainment, but it will take time.

Robert said...

This is great that the live concert business is getting better but they only talked with Live nation which is a large company that has its hand in many different type of events. I would have liked to of heard from many different companies about how they are doing and what their outlook is on the coming year and what type of plan they have for the next few years to get peoples business back. I know that many people are not going to as many shows due to the down turn in the economy but I have heard that the economy is on the up and should be getting better in the coming years. I hope things will be better when it is time of me to get a job once I get out of school.

ranerenshaw said...

very reassuring to hear this from the field i am looking to go make a living in after a few years from now. of course my mentality is that as long as you are good enough, you will have jobs. either way, due to live nations report i can assume that within a few years the live entertainment industry will be back on the rise and thriving... just in time for me to graduate..how convenient.
but again, very reassuring to hear about this opposed to the gloom and doom of budget cuts.

Meg DC said...

This is good news, especially since concerts provide work for so many people who may not have had the education or fortune to have training that we have here at Carnegie Mellon. Of course management and who-not will have had a degree of education, a lot of roadies and the guys who build the decking, truss, and sets are guys who might otherwise have been grease monkeys or working in fast food. I know this summer I worked in concerts and a lot of brilliant guys who never had opportunity are able to come in as manual labor and pick up skills. The entertainment industry is funny like that, it gets jobs to people with backgrounds across the boards so when a sector stabilizes it is good news indeed!

Ethan Weil said...

My sympathy for Live Nation is severely limited.
To frame this as the trials and tribulations of a volatile industry is to underestimate the intelligence of the reading public. As a near-monopoly on many market sectors, Live Nation has very strong control over the nature of the market at any given time. It seems to me that their troubles last year weren't due to an uninterested public changing their venue preference, but rather due to a regime where fans have to pay outrageous prices months in advance to see bands they like play. And that's only if you can get a ticket. Often, for reasons that still seem suspiciously opaque, shows sell out in the first few hours that they are on sale, and the only way to get a ticket is though an online reseller, which charges markups on the order of 25%. Essentially unless you camp the sale time, you have to buy a ticket from a scalper, through another scalper paying 150% - 200% of the already outrageously priced ticket. I'm not here to say that we shouldn't have to pay to go see a show, but when $1.79 Billion per quarter is an unsurprising profit, it's hard for me to see how this is the real cost of the concert.

AbigailNover said...

This is great to read. There's no doubt that live entertainment is on a huge rise. More bands are taking bigger, longer tours as it's easier to make more money that way rather than through albums. As a culture, I think that we're becoming more interested in concerts than we have been for the past decade. This is a good reflection on (hopefully) our economy and also a renewed interest in live entertainment.