(01-10-2020 04:24 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote: (01-10-2020 03:34 PM)quo vadis Wrote: (01-10-2020 03:04 PM)Wedge Wrote: (01-10-2020 02:13 PM)dbackjon Wrote: (01-10-2020 01:37 PM)Wedge Wrote: No, they've just found a different golden goose.
Take any P5 team you like, and compare
(A) 1979 football ticket and game-day revenue plus media revenue
with
(B) 2019 football ticket and game-day revenue plus media revenue
Pretty sure that (B) will be a much larger number for all of those programs.
So they shouldn't complain about attendance. They have traded ticket money for TV money.
Short term, great. Long term - TBD
Might as well make money from media as much as possible. The long term trend for many things is rapidly going away from "being there". Restaurants have fewer people dining in and more people taking food to go or getting delivery. Pizza chains close locations with dining rooms to focus on locations that are exclusively for take out and delivery. Even some pricey restaurants have remodeled to shrink the size of their dining rooms and focus the kitchen on efficiently processing orders placed online or over the phone for take out and delivery. Ask people in their teens and 20s, they don't want to sit in restaurants.
Watching the games on TV is the equivalent of going through a drive-thru or using DoorDash, rather than eating at the restaurant.
One exception seems to be music concerts. Major music acts seem to be able to sell out arenas and stadiums very readily these days.
It's not so much that major music acts sell out arenas and stadiums better today. The number of "current" acts that could sell out an NFL stadium or NBA arena is lower today than a few decades ago. The list of the top tours through the middle of 2019 shows a disproportionate number of musicians who became famous in the 1960s and 1970s (headed by Elton John):
https://www.pollstar.com/Chart/2019/07/2...rs_747.pdf
However, you might be perceive that there are more big music tours because there are simply more music acts touring more often today. That's a result of how the Internet fundamentally changed how musicians make money. Musicians make very little from albums and recorded music today compared to the pre-Internet era. Streaming on Spotify and other services provide some revenue, but nowhere near what the old LP and later CD delivery mechanisms provided. In contrast, musicians largely get to keep their concert revenue all to themselves (and you inherently can't "pirate" a concert on the Internet in the way that you can freely pirate music files), which means that there's a huge financial incentive for them to continue going on the road.
Up until the year 2000, musicians went on tour in order to promote their new album. Today, musicians release a new album in order to promote their tour. The financial calculus for the music industry has completed shifted over the past 20 years due to the Internet (and it honestly happened a LOT quicker than changes to the television industry).
That makes sense. I'd add two caveats. First, the number of acts that can sell out NFL stadiums has always been very small. There just aren't many of those, you have to be a real true mega-star to do that. An iconic legacy act like the Rolling Stones or else a super-hot contemporary artist like a Taylor Swift.
Second, I agree the model has changed. But I don't think bands 30 years ago made much money on record sales. Back then, the record company would keep the vast bulk of the money just like they do now. The transition from LPs and Cassettes and CDs to digital downloads and streaming hasn't changed that much. In 1985, a band could have a milion-selling album that made them rock stars and still be in debt to their record company. Back then, many rock stars were what rap artists today call "hood rich", they had the trappings of being rich but without the actual bottom line bank accounts. Their decadent life styles were fueled by loans and advances and other ephemeral money that kept coming as long as they kept making hits.
Heck, Paul McCartney has said that when he left the Beatles in 1970, he was worth about $7 million, which is about $45 million in today's money. That's all he had, despite the billion records the Beatles had sold during the 1960s, the merchandise, the concerts, etc. The whole music industry was set up to vacuum about 95% of the money from the artists.
What has changed, what has allowed even artists with just a few hits to become real millionaires these days, is the sources of money outside of the record-concert matrix. Thanks to social media, a rapper or pop star might only sell a million records, but if they have millions of Instagram or Twitter followers, or their latest video is watched 10 million times on Youtube, they can easily monetize that via branding and marketing, money the record company can't touch. They can cash in by being celebrities in ways that weren't possible before the social media revolution.
Plus, the artists wised up about the pricing of concert tickets. Kind of like media rights deals, which under-valued college football up until about 10 years ago, artists (as you say) back in the day toured basically to promote an album, the idea was to break even on the tour at best but to have a helluva good time via booze and babes doing it.
For example, I saw the Rolling Stones in 1981, still have the ticket stub, the price was $14. It was a good seat in a basketball arena. That translates in to $39 in today's money. Today, $39 will barely pay for parking at a Rolling Stones concert, they charge hundreds for their seats. I also bought a t-shirt at that 1981 show, it was $10, about $28 today. I saw the Stones this past summer and paid $100 for a sweatshirt.
Bill Wyman left the Stones in late 1992. To this day, he has still played on every USA top 40 hit the Stones ever had. They have released records pretty regularly since then, but haven't had a USA hit song since 1989. So basically, Wyman is on the vast, vast majority of records - LPs, cassettes, CDs, downloads, streaming - that the Stones have ever sold. And yet Charlie Watts said this past summer that Wyman missed the "really lucrative" part of the Stones career. That's because of all the high-priced legacy mega-tours they have gone on since then that apparently made the Stones far richer than all the records they sold between the 60s and the 90s, and all the concerts they played back then too.