Well... Start burning your old cassettes for fire. Start recording/transferring your heavy metal parking lot memories to disc for your children's children. Take the flash drives you put them on and gently drop them in a time capsule that will be buried under the foundations of Madison Square Garden and The Fillmore out west. Start converting all of your VHS of any concert footage you may have to tiny digital formats..and then hide them in a hole in the foundation of your bomb shelter...because the live music apocalypse is upon us.
The Live Nation-Ticketmaster Merger Has been approved. A healthy tsunami of receipts and 360 deals will now bury the average concert go-er and music lover who has just barely made it thru a recession with deep bruises, forced disillusionment and deep, slow to bleed unemployment scars. The greed has seeped into the minds of the ticket makers and the ticket takers. The dirty angels who hold the mystery of dubious extra fees as a sealed document between their flaming talons will continue to laughingly hover over the weary weekend warriors.
The wealthy will get the seats. The scalpers will be the new cosa nostra...selling the 100 cheap seats off to the desperate street dealers, who in turn, will wave them in front of the last minute fanatic. Like a drug. But you have to be there....or you won't be able to tweet about it in the morning.
You and I will stay home, stealing music we can no longer realistically experience, and sharing generational stories of "shows" we attended back in the day, in a carefree realm of being in the audience...singing along with 10000 others.... when a music community meant something real, like a fireside chat with the radio turned off....with our children's children.
It already sucks ass trying to get tickets that are any good. I ended up paying close to $220/seat last year to see Dylan. I had never seen him before and who knows how much longer he will be playing anyway, right? BTW it was worth every dollar, but I was on the internet at exactly the time the tickets went on sale. The closest seat available was up on the lawn alreay where nosebleeds start! I could not believe it. I think the ticket brokers get in on the action early. What do you think?
ReplyDeleteThis sucks.
ReplyDeleteFor me, getting tickets for good shows these days has become a huge burden. The whole thing is ridiculous.
I paid around $150 (face value, not including fees/taxes) for not even average seats for the Eagles last fall. Sure it was still a good show, but man it put a damper on my bank account. :(
Thanks a lot, Irving.
SHIT!
ReplyDeleteDon't even ask me how much I have paid in the past...it makes me sick. But NOW, I will just accept the fact that I may not see another concert ever again. :(
This is sad to hear, but it is slowly happening every where in the Western world. F'instance, TCV sold out here in Sydney, Australia, in seconds flat. Within hours, some of those tickets were back up on the interwebs for double the price. I completely missed out, damn it all...
ReplyDelete