Re the music industry's cruel summer of underattended and cancelled concerts.

I posted this to someone else's blog in his comments section.  Reposting it here in its entirety:
As a concertgoer, I'd say that Irving Azoff and his Ticketmaster/Live Nation empire--with little room for other promoters excepting AEG--has been a big factor in this year's touring kerfluffles.



Ticket prices [at least the before-fees face value] are going to have to shrink to a range of $25-$75 to re-interest those who have been priced out of attendance over the last decade (and, yes, it has been a decade since SFX and then Clear Channel helped ignite today's forest fire of empty seats and gig cancellations).


TicketNation (a nice soubriquet) and many A-and-B-list artists also need to join together, face reality and voluntarily take cuts on the too-huge artist advances which have been paid in recent years.


Having written the above, the cynic in me believes that if the latest leg of the U2 360 tour had gone on as scheduled this summer, the number of articles in the US/European media about poor sales wouldn't have attracted as much attention.

So, if ticket prices do come down, we have Bono (and his untimely back injury) to thank.