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The Music Thread Strikes Back

Yeah I saw a few posts about that article in various groups. Live music has become hellisly expensive.

I remember seeing the chemical bros at the civic and baulking at £12.50 for the ticket. I think with the loss of revenue from CD sales, coupled with less venues for live acts and an increase in event companies running the few venues left we have a perfect storm.

Watching a gigg shouldn't cost the same as a weekend trip away to a European capital, music's getting lost on those that it should mean the most, to the youth.

It's like the whole vinyl thing, it's not new music being sold on vinyl, but old listeners buying older bands.

The 90s really were class for gigs, and the civic was a great venue, it's been shut for what, the best part of a decade? When it opens its going to be another faceless event company running it.
 
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Saw REM at the MK Bowl in '95, supported by Blur and enough others to basically make it a one day festival, for £25.
About 5 years ago the Proclaimers were playing locally. Kinda interested, I had a look and it was £50-£60 at a relatively small civic arena.
I didn't go...
 
Reading 97 was £79 for the entire weekend
 
Friend at uni saw Hendrix, Floyd, Move, Thin Lizzy, and a local band - for 15 shillings (that's 75p for you kids).
 
i think i saw silversun pickups in 2007 for £5 and then next time they toured it was £40 so it's not just a recent thing. i guess the venue makes a difference but it's an added reason i wouldn't typically do big venues. much prefer smaller and cheaper gigs. you probably have to catch bands in their earlier years.

on the vinyl, there is a lot of reissuing going on that is just cashing in (i'm susceptible to it as well) so i agree with newbridge to an extent, but probably 90% of what i buy is new stuff. as to who's buying it, i imagine it's certainly pricing out a lot of people.

i didn't know if it was a joke but saw lots of posts on twitter about vinyl delays because Adele had gazumped everyone in the queue for her last release. delays do seem to have increased from my experience including the odd cancellation. now i've seen posts of her records going cheap (£5). might be something photoshopped but if you like that sort of music and willing to search for it you might find a deal somewhere :)
 
just bought tickets for adam kays september tour. ticket was £45. £7.90 fees, then an additional £2.55 was added for admin fees.
Fees are now more than ticket prices for when I started going to gigs.
 
Thought this was an interesting article. I have saved virtually all of my concert tickets, and during a zoom call recently got a few old tickets out and saw that in the early 90's I paid around £6 for a gig in a venue the size of the civic, and £12.80 for the NEC (maiden in 1991 FWIW!)couple of years later, and more big gigs at the NEC were £16-£19, and the civic was around £8.50. In 1991 I saw zz top, bryan adams, paul rogers, thunder and little angels at the milton keynes bowl for £25. Civic gigs now would be £35-£60, NEC can range from £65 to over £200 (some big names charge ridiculous amounts), and even a 1 day festival is gonna be approaching £200 if the headliners are big.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/feb/07/how-live-music-joined-cost-of-living-crisis

there's a lot in the article that links to other discussions in the cost of living thread, and the season ticket discussion imo.
The reason live music has become so expensive, I think, is that artists no longer make any money from record sales. With streaming services basically paying peanuts to musicians for thousands or even hundreds of thousands of plays of a track, record sales are no longer a money maker. The only way musicians can earn a living is through playing live, which is why so many bands are getting back out touring years after they packed it in. When you pay for a live gig you are essentially paying for all the music by an artist on streaming platforms, vinyl and cd as well as the live performance.
 
Saw REM at the MK Bowl in '95, supported by Blur and enough others to basically make it a one day festival, for £25.
About 5 years ago the Proclaimers were playing locally. Kinda interested, I had a look and it was £50-£60 at a relatively small civic arena.
I didn't go...
I think I was at this as well, I was only about 10, my dad took me. Was my first proper gig. It was absolutely boiling and I was proper thirsty but everywhere had run out of soft drinks or water, my dad managed to find me some of those Capri suns but because of the heat they were red hot, for some reason he thought burying them in the ground for a bit would cool them down, it didn't.
 
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