Activity

Buy High Sell Low:
The music industry has changed a lot since the late 90s where we first started to see an increase in mp3 sales, illegal downloads & the famous “burn & return” policy at HMV. At the time I owned a small independent record shop & record label in the plateau & we saw this first hand, as it happened. Seeing CD sales dip by 75% at our shop & label we were able to predict (fortunately for us) the end of the music industry as we knew it, and had the time to transition to promoting & producing shows before the crash. For a better part of the 2000’s we enjoyed success as concert promoters and patted ourselves on the backs for making the change when we did, being ahead of the curb & plugged into technology made it easy to predict, but there was one thing we did not account for, and it was the increase in musicians salaries…. When I speak to various successful business minded people they always re iterate that good business is always based around the cliche, buy low sell high, but right now I am doing the opposite. With no cd sales to bolster a musicians career the bulk of their revenue now would come from concerts, so as CD sales faded away, artist fees went up to compensate, the issue that this brings up is that we can’t just raise ticket prices to compensate, so as promoters we’re being forced to buy in at a premium, and sell at the ticket price that people are willing to pay, making our living off volume of shows, making less per show. but doing more shows annually. This is getting more & more difficult to maintain as a business model & what it inevitably does is force the promoter to cut corners in areas that we did not want to ever cut, local bands, sound, production, lighting, visuals, marketing are all under the chopping block, would love to get a conversation going about this….