Latest / The Price of Music / Is merch getting unaffordable?; Bands cancelling gigs due to low ticket sales; Are we in a "Pop Slump"?; Music in space; Do you have irrational hate for a specific artist?; and Celine Dion is back?!

Transcript

Is merch getting unaffordable?; Bands cancelling gigs due to low ticket sales; Are we in a "Pop Slump"?; Music in space; Do you have irrational hate for a specific artist?; and Celine Dion is back?! · The Price of Music

• 0:03
  Hello and welcome to The Price of Music brought to you by Music
• 0:06
  Ally, the show that both looks at the finances of the music
• 0:08
  industry while also bring you some of the stories and a bit of
• 0:12
  comment from the past week in the pop business.
• 0:15
  He's Stuart Dredge. I'm Steve Lamac.
• 0:17
  Let's start with a financial fact that you can amaze your
• 0:20
  friends or colleagues with. This is Stuart's big number for
• 0:24
  this week, which is Stuart's somewhere.
• 0:27
  It's actually it's breaking news.
• 0:29
  Is this? It is.
• 0:30
  It's a really big number as well, too exciting for two
• 0:33
  reasons, $63.5 billion. And this is how much a company
• 0:38
  called Pershing Square wants to pay to buy Universal Music
• 0:41
  Group. Really.
• 0:44
  So this has this come out of the blue?
• 0:47
  Was there were were there any whispers that people were
• 0:50
  interested in taking on UMG? Not really.
• 0:53
  I mean, it's there's some history.
• 0:55
  So this Pershing Square is a big hedge fund owned by this
• 0:58
  billionaire called Blackman, and it is one of the the big
• 1:01
  shareholders in Universal Music already.
• 1:03
  So it's not like it's a stranger.
• 1:04
  But yeah, the story just came out the blue this morning
• 1:07
  saying, yeah, they want to buy it.
• 1:08
  And basically the reason they want to buy it is they think
• 1:10
  that the because Universal Music is a public company, so it's got
• 1:13
  a share price. And Pershing Square thinks the
• 1:16
  share price undervalues the company.
• 1:18
  And there was a statement saying we think they're great at
• 1:20
  signing and developing artists and making money, but they've
• 1:23
  got other problems related to kind of corporate stuff that
• 1:26
  means it's undervalued. So he wants to buy UMG, list it
• 1:31
  on the New York Stock Exchange. And here's the thing, they want
• 1:33
  to negotiate a quote, new employment contract and
• 1:36
  compensation arrangement for its boss, Sir Lucy and Grange, which
• 1:41
  sounds a bit ominous. Like if your if your boss says I
• 1:43
  want to negotiate a new employment contract and
• 1:45
  compensation with you, is that a big rise or is that?
• 1:49
  Not a rise, which we should for. For people who don't know,
• 1:51
  Lucian Grange has been in the music industry for what seems
• 1:54
  like 100 years, but he is one of the most powerful men in the
• 1:58
  music business and has been in post for a very long time
• 2:02
  steering the company. And how much he gets paid is
• 2:04
  obviously is a is a subject for media debate because he gets a
• 2:07
  lot of money and that's often a story.
• 2:09
  But like, so the the two things that really jump out.
• 2:11
  I mean, so Universal Media hasn't commented yet.
• 2:13
  I didn't check for them if they had a statement yet and they
• 2:15
  said not yet. So one thing that's interesting
• 2:18
  is this, this offer values UMGA lot more than it's worth on the
• 2:21
  stock market at the moment. So I think it's market cap, it's
• 2:24
  value, it's currently, I think it's about just over €31
• 2:27
  billion, which is around $36 billion.
• 2:32
  So I think it's like, I think it's about 78% more than it's
• 2:35
  currently worth is the offer. So they think it's worth a lot
• 2:39
  more than the thing. And I guess the second thing,
• 2:41
  and this is kind of where we bring football back into it to
• 2:43
  keep us both on firm ground. Like, you know, when hedge funds
• 2:47
  buy companies, there's always a question of like where is the
• 2:49
  money coming from? To what extent are they kind of
• 2:53
  buy themselves versus, you know, getting it from debt and loading
• 2:56
  the company nearby with debt that's going to bite them in the
• 2:58
  arse sometime. That's the financial term,
• 3:00
  obviously. So that's what we don't really
• 3:03
  know. Yes.
• 3:03
  Where is the money going to come from, from this?
• 3:05
  What will it mean for Universal Music?
• 3:07
  Will it have a load of debt settled on top of it or
• 3:09
  something else? But yeah, it's kind of, we've
• 3:13
  talked so much about Universal Music buying companies, but this
• 3:16
  is this is out of the blue. It's now, you know.
• 3:18
  So I think the next development, which might even happen by the
• 3:21
  time people listen to this, is Universal will say what it
• 3:24
  thinks of this offer. Is it interested in it?
• 3:27
  Is it not? Is it resisting it?
• 3:28
  And then that would depend. That will kind of dictate what
• 3:30
  happens next. But yeah, big news.
• 3:33
  All right, here's three more talking points from the past
• 3:37
  week. A new report suggests that 2025
• 3:40
  saw a inadvertent commas a pop slump in the streaming charts,
• 3:46
  and that this is getting worse in 2026.
• 3:49
  What? What does pop slump actually
• 3:52
  mean? It's just something really
• 3:53
  awkward to say. Pop slump.
• 3:57
  So this is from a company called Chart Metric, which they do at
• 4:00
  Music Analytics. So if you're an artist, you can
• 4:02
  use them to kind of analyse your streams.
• 4:05
  But that means they have this huge pipeline of all the streams
• 4:08
  streaming data and occasionally put a report out on that.
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  And so this is all about how many new songs get into the top
• 4:14
  streaming charts. So songs released this year get
• 4:17
  into this year's streaming charts.
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  And so one of the findings was that in January this year,
• 4:22
  three, 3 1/2% of the songs in Spotify's global top 50 chart
• 4:26
  came out this year, which sounds that not, not that surprising
• 4:30
  because it's January, but a couple of years ago it was 9.4%.
• 4:35
  So, you know, it's nearly 1/3. And I took a bigger sample.
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  I think of the 197 tracks that were in Spotify's top 50 in the
• 4:43
  first three months of this year, 81 of them were current
• 4:46
  releases. So from this year, 116 were what
• 4:49
  it calls holdovers. And that's the kind of this
• 4:52
  report saying it's saying basically last year was a
• 4:54
  stagnant year. This is the quote stagnant year
• 4:56
  marked by holdover hits, which is something we talked about
• 5:00
  before. Isn't it like that things hang
• 5:01
  around a lot longer as? You see, when I saw this, I
• 5:06
  thought this was going, this was going to be a reference just to,
• 5:09
  you know, pop music as a as a genre.
• 5:12
  But what they're meaning is new music.
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  Then, is suffering something a slump.
• 5:17
  Popular music and music. And yeah.
• 5:18
  And they sort of say that it's it's quite dependent on big
• 5:21
  releases. So for example, last January was
• 5:23
  a big spike from Bad Bunny's new album because loads of its songs
• 5:25
  were in charts. And this March, apparently Harry
• 5:28
  Styles and BTS sort of swung things back towards me.
• 5:32
  But yeah. And it's, it's one of these
• 5:33
  where it's like that. There's there's two things
• 5:35
  happening. It's old tracks are hanging
• 5:37
  around a lot longer. The biggest, the biggest popular
• 5:40
  tracks. Hang on.
• 5:41
  But also, it's about things coming back.
• 5:43
  And I think one of the things they talk about is Zara
• 5:44
  Larsson's Lush Life, which came out in 2015 but then went viral
• 5:49
  last November. And it's now back in the top
• 5:51
  charts. So new music is kind of being
• 5:53
  squeezed by two things there. It's the biggest tracks not
• 5:56
  going down the charts and then just random old tracks popping
• 5:59
  up. And although this this, this
• 6:02
  report was kind of just saying these are the figures.
• 6:04
  It wasn't really giving an opinion, but this is kind of one
• 6:07
  of the things the music industry is discussing a lot.
• 6:09
  I think about that. How do we break new music when
• 6:11
  the old stuff is just kind of sitting there clogging up the
• 6:15
  charts? Yeah, yeah.
• 6:17
  And what they're most about, you know, I mean, as much as labels
• 6:20
  would like to launch new talent, at the same time, they're still
• 6:24
  making money from their catalog if they're using their catalog
• 6:27
  well, and it's hard, isn't it? We obviously in this day and
• 6:31
  age, you can't just delete a record it when when you used to
• 6:35
  when you used to get bored of one single a records company in
• 6:39
  the old days with physical products could just stop
• 6:41
  manufacturing it and then let's all move on because you can't
• 6:45
  buy the record anymore. That's not the case anymore.
• 6:48
  So it's harder to dictate what people like in a way.
• 6:53
  Well, yeah. And also, I mean, this is labels
• 6:56
  do still want to break new music, I think.
• 6:57
  But if you're the label and you're like, OK, Zara Larsson's
• 7:01
  old track is back in the charts because of a TikTok thing, we
• 7:05
  make money from that without spending as much money as we
• 7:08
  would on breaking a new artist. So there's kind of a almost an
• 7:11
  incentive where when this happens to go, OK, we're not
• 7:13
  really that. It's not that big a problem for
• 7:15
  us. You can just because the flow of
• 7:17
  old hits can carry on. So it's just like worry, I
• 7:19
  think. Does it?
• 7:19
  Does it make a little not want to?
• 7:21
  You know, that's, that's the point, isn't it?
• 7:23
  That's, that's, that is the worry that all of a sudden
• 7:26
  they'll just go, well, we can just, we could just rinse this
• 7:29
  catalog for as long as we like for, as you say, less
• 7:32
  investment, but it's such a short term thing.
• 7:35
  But is that where the music industry is, is going now?
• 7:38
  It's, it's a short term. What's who's going to have the
• 7:42
  biggest share of the pie come the end of March rather than are
• 7:46
  we a company set up for the next 5-10 years?
• 7:49
  And what artists will be making us money in the future that we
• 7:53
  should be backing now? And this brings us back to
• 7:56
  something like Universal Music Group bought by a hedge fund
• 7:59
  because I think for what people have a lot of opinions on
• 8:01
  Universal and Solution Grange, but they're commit his
• 8:04
  commitment to kind of music and signing.
• 8:06
  And I thought that's how he came up, isn't it?
• 8:08
  He came up. But when a hedge fund owns you,
• 8:11
  there's an argument that someone might be like, well, hang on a
• 8:13
  minute, it's much more efficient to just focus on catalog who
• 8:16
  needs all this new artist. And so that's the backdrop to, I
• 8:19
  think some of the other bigger corporate moves going on too.
• 8:21
  Yeah. While while we're on the
• 8:24
  subjects of research studies, this, this is another one.
• 8:28
  This surprised me actually a little bit.
• 8:30
  But another study has found this week that just under half of
• 8:34
  music fans think that merchandise is becoming
• 8:37
  unaffordable. And 2/5 of the people who
• 8:40
  responded to this study, 2/5 of fans said they felt exploited by
• 8:47
  their favorite artists. Tell us, where has this come
• 8:50
  from? Yeah, this is a study by Media
• 8:52
  Research. They're quite respected, you
• 8:55
  know, research company and they will talk to 1000 American Music
• 8:59
  merch buyers. So it's people who do buy merch
• 9:03
  and yeah so there was like some positive though one finding was
• 9:05
  like they want more variety. They don't just want to buy
• 9:07
  T-shirts anymore. They want.
• 9:08
  And it didn't seem very ambitious.
• 9:10
  They want posters and key rings, but also jewellery quite popular
• 9:14
  and they want vinyl like they vinyl is bundled into merch
• 9:17
  here. But the next, yeah, next just
• 9:21
  and a half of them, yeah, said merch is becoming unaffordable,
• 9:23
  which So I thought it was interesting, that choice of
• 9:25
  words, unaffordable. It's not necessarily that it's
• 9:27
  just too expensive. It's about they can't afford it
• 9:31
  because they're spending so much on the tickets, on the stuff
• 9:33
  around the gigs and maybe I'll just so, so it's, it's like the
• 9:37
  price is going up. But it's not just that.
• 9:39
  It's about all the other things they're spending money on.
• 9:41
  So merch is being squeezed by the price of, I guess, you know,
• 9:45
  if we're talking at the top level, stadium level above, it's
• 9:48
  being squeezed by travel hotels, or if you're just wandering to
• 9:52
  the gig, it's being squeezed by beer or whatever else.
• 9:55
  Everything else that's going up in price, as you say, including
• 9:58
  very much the ticket itself to the gig.
• 10:00
  That's what's squeezing out merchandise.
• 10:03
  I think so. And we talked when we talked to
• 10:05
  when, when I went to the Blur gig at Wembley Stadium and I I
• 10:08
  saw the football shirt they were selling the night before.
• 10:10
  I was like, I'm having that tomorrow.
• 10:12
  And I got there and saw the price of it and was just like,
• 10:15
  no, I can't, I can't justify it. Which is not, not a gem of that
• 10:18
  band. But it was at that moment where
• 10:19
  I was like, I can't afford that. And I felt quite sad.
• 10:22
  But the other thing is, yeah, the other thing is that nearly
• 10:24
  2/5 of people surveyed, so they sometimes feel they're being
• 10:27
  exploited by their favorite artists.
• 10:29
  So it's not just AI can't afford this stuff.
• 10:32
  Isn't that sad? Sometimes this can tip over
• 10:34
  into, I think the artist is pushing it into sort of negative
• 10:38
  feeling, which is difficult, isn't it?
• 10:40
  We've talked about it's like, I think merch is really important
• 10:42
  now to so many artists. It's it's what could tip your
• 10:45
  tour into profit from a loss. Yeah.
• 10:48
  I mean, there's the the thing about this is what sort of
• 10:51
  demographic was the research based on?
• 10:53
  Because if I mean, this feels like the responses of somebody
• 10:56
  who goes to a bigger gig and then sees the quite steeply
• 11:02
  priced T-shirt or hoodie or something, just thinking, now
• 11:06
  that's taking the Mickey Now you know, we've, we've spent £150 to
• 11:10
  be here and you're trying to charge a £60 for a hoodie, then
• 11:14
  that is too, too much. I don't know.
• 11:18
  The bigger artists are probably more confident in the fact
• 11:20
  they'll be able to sell the merchandise to somebody.
• 11:23
  Whereas as you go down, I don't think there's that resentment of
• 11:27
  artists when you get down to grassroots level because there
• 11:30
  is an understanding that, you know, T-shirts are reasonably
• 11:33
  fairly private. They're not, they're, they're
• 11:35
  not exploiting you and they're not trying to take the Mickey by
• 11:38
  selling you a, you know, a £40 T-shirt.
• 11:41
  They're just, they've made the T-shirt, they're covering their
• 11:43
  costs and they've left a bit of money as profit to pay for the
• 11:47
  petrol which has got them, which is what got them here in the
• 11:49
  first place. Yeah.
• 11:51
  So actually it's still away, I think, wasn't it in that it was
• 11:53
  they were saying that they're giving away T-shirts to people
• 11:55
  who have come up and nice to you at the merch store was there,
• 11:59
  But but yeah, so I think it is it is it like you say, it's
• 12:01
  nuanced and yeah, I think there's a difference here.
• 12:03
  But I think it's it's maybe a good thing to remind people of.
• 12:06
  It's a good way of putting a tenor in the pocket of your
• 12:08
  favorite artist, isn't it? And with the last of the things
• 12:12
  which we thought we'd share this week is this, which is is from
• 12:17
  Instagram. Who?
• 12:18
  Well, Instagram now reckons it's the home of music super fans,
• 12:22
  but I don't know what is what is that?
• 12:24
  What is behind this claim? What does that actually mean for
• 12:27
  fans and their favorite artists? And what?
• 12:29
  How have they come to this conclusion?
• 12:31
  Yeah. Well, the context for this is I
• 12:33
  think the last year or two, there's been a lot of talk about
• 12:35
  artists and super fans. But also, and part of that is
• 12:38
  the fact that the idea that the big social media apps aren't
• 12:41
  great for that relationship. Because if you're an artist and
• 12:43
  you're posting on an, on a social media app, your posts
• 12:46
  have got to get through their algorithm to reach your fans,
• 12:49
  even if they follow you. And you have to post all the
• 12:51
  time like a Guinea pig on a wheel to keep getting
• 12:53
  engagement. And you don't even get to have
• 12:55
  the data. You don't get their e-mail
• 12:56
  address or anything like that. So that's been a big, and I
• 12:59
  think this is Instagram going, I think we're going to try and
• 13:00
  push back on this. So they commissioned a big
• 13:03
  survey from Luminate, which is another big research company.
• 13:06
  And it's one of those studies that's like, of course it says,
• 13:08
  isn't it? Aren't you wonderful?
• 13:11
  It's it's like, you know, it's a piece of research designed to
• 13:14
  sort of back their case. But yeah, it's basically, I
• 13:17
  think it's 58% of music superfans use Instagram to
• 13:20
  engage with artists and music content.
• 13:22
  And it one of it's big points was that the artists who are
• 13:25
  most active on Instagram see strong that the quote is off
• 13:29
  platform streaming growth. So in other words, if you post
• 13:33
  regular on Instagram, you will get more streams on Spotify and
• 13:36
  Apple Music. And then there's a bit about how
• 13:39
  the subtext was, we're much better than TikTok because
• 13:42
  that's the big competition for your Instagram.
• 13:45
  And they were they reckon that Instagram users are over
• 13:47
  indexing for going to concerts and following artists and buying
• 13:50
  vinyl. So this is part of their
• 13:52
  argument to the music industry saying, look, we, we can be good
• 13:56
  for your artists. Keep posting, keep using our
• 13:58
  features. But it's against this backdrop
• 14:02
  of people kind of not everyone, but growing, people were talking
• 14:07
  out and saying, actually, I feel like I'm posting a lot.
• 14:09
  I'm not reaching the people who follow me.
• 14:11
  And I don't really get a direct relationship where I can tell
• 14:15
  them things when I want to. And that's not just an Instagram
• 14:18
  thing. I think it's every big social
• 14:19
  media platform and even streaming to some extent.
• 14:22
  I think a lot of artists have lost their kind of excitement
• 14:25
  around how, you know, hey, I've got a million followers on
• 14:28
  Platform X, but that doesn't mean anything if I can't
• 14:31
  actually reach them when I want to tell them stuff.
• 14:34
  OK, any other business for this, But here's something which I
• 14:38
  think is probably worth looking at because I noticed talking
• 14:42
  social media and those are a few posts over the last week about
• 14:47
  this, which is gigs that are being cancelled due to
• 14:51
  disappointing advance ticket sales.
• 14:54
  And we we have spoken about this before, but it's a problem that
• 14:57
  obviously hasn't gone away. And if you listen to what some
• 14:59
  people are saying, might just be getting worse.
• 15:01
  So the so this started with the band Smooth and Terrell.
• 15:05
  Do you say Smooth and Terrell? Smooth and Terrell, That's more.
• 15:08
  Terrell. Smooth and Terrell, but they
• 15:11
  announced the cancellation of a show in Cambridge, which is due
• 15:14
  to take place later this week. And it was.
• 15:17
  I mean, it's quite a long post, but I'll give you the salient
• 15:19
  points. It it reads, it's time to be
• 15:22
  honest here. Our industry is in trouble.
• 15:25
  It's a simple fact that people are skinned and can't afford to
• 15:29
  live. The venues and promoters are
• 15:31
  panicking and pulling shows if people don't buy tickets leading
• 15:36
  up to that show. It's frustrating and trust us
• 15:39
  when we say that we too are disappointed when this happens.
• 15:42
  But it really is out of our control and nobody is talking
• 15:46
  about the struggle and socialism, pretending everything
• 15:48
  is OK. But let me tell you, it's not
• 15:51
  OK. It's very real and they're not.
• 15:54
  They're not the only ones I saw Luke Hinson from the
• 15:56
  award-winning venue The Horn in Saint Albans also posted about
• 16:02
  advanced tickets recently and why it's important to buy a
• 16:05
  ticket up front and a few others have as well.
• 16:08
  So it is it is still an issue. The fact that you know that fans
• 16:11
  of gigs and obviously I think this is more at grassroots and
• 16:15
  theatre level than at stadium level, but in a lot of cases,
• 16:18
  you know, advanced ticket sales for gigs are just nowhere near
• 16:23
  what promoters are banking on I think.
• 16:26
  And that's where they become nervous.
• 16:29
  And it is leading to more and more gigs being pulled.
• 16:33
  Because I mean, we can look at it from both sides.
• 16:35
  If you're a promoter, say you have a 250 capacity venue and
• 16:41
  you've booked a group to play and say you're your break even
• 16:44
  figure if you're lucky is somewhere between 200 and 220 to
• 16:49
  make your money back. But if you've got a venue of
• 16:52
  which holds 250 people, two weeks before the gig you've sold
• 16:57
  30 advanced tickets, then you're going to get the fear, aren't
• 17:01
  you? So it's at that point where you
• 17:03
  have the choice. Do you pull the gig and refund
• 17:07
  the 30 tickets sold? Which is a hit, but it does mean
• 17:11
  that you won't have to pay all the staff on the night.
• 17:13
  Bar staff, maybe security staff. You don't have the staff costs.
• 17:17
  You also haven't had to open up the building so you haven't had
• 17:20
  to pay for lighting and heating and all the costs of running a a
• 17:24
  show which you know might be quite sparsely populated.
• 17:28
  So you could either pull the gig or do you gamble that people are
• 17:34
  planning to come, they just haven't bought a ticket yet and
• 17:38
  you might have a brilliant walk up on the night, but do you can
• 17:41
  you gamble on that when you're you're balancing obviously very
• 17:45
  fine margins? It's a really difficult call, I
• 17:47
  think, because, I mean, it's the, The thing is, there is,
• 17:50
  there is quite good, quite a lot of anecdotal evidence suggesting
• 17:54
  that people will still go to the gig.
• 17:56
  It's just they, they won't make up their minds until a day or
• 17:59
  two before the show takes place. I mean, my own live agent was
• 18:02
  telling me about one of his bands who for their London
• 18:06
  headliner, you know, and, and in, in, I don't know, years, you
• 18:10
  know, some years ago, pre COVID, that London headliner would have
• 18:14
  done 80% of tickets, you know, probably two or three weeks out
• 18:18
  from the actual gig. But in this case, they did about
• 18:22
  50% of their advance sales in the last three days or just
• 18:27
  leading up to, and then they had some walk up on the night.
• 18:30
  And so, so it was fine in the end, but they really, they, I
• 18:34
  mean, they really had to argue that this will be all right.
• 18:37
  We're sure people are going to come.
• 18:40
  But as I say, you can see why promoters, you know, get nervous
• 18:43
  about this and sitting there thinking, I mean, is it worth
• 18:47
  the stress and the financial risk to go ahead with a gig
• 18:50
  where advanced sales are so low, as I say, at a time and margins
• 18:55
  are so tight. And when many venues and
• 18:57
  independent promoters, of course, have just walking this,
• 19:00
  you know, fiscal tightrope and it's obviously as smooth.
• 19:04
  And Terrell pointed out it's also it's really frustrating on
• 19:08
  the other side of things for the artists because of all all the
• 19:11
  planning that goes into a tour or even A1 off gig if it's
• 19:15
  suddenly pulled. Because, I mean, you look at it
• 19:17
  from the artist point of view, you've probably already booked
• 19:20
  the day off work because a lot of bands at that level are still
• 19:23
  working. You book the day off work.
• 19:24
  You might have booked, you know, the van in advance, throw in
• 19:29
  some extra rehearsals for the gig, you know, not to mention
• 19:32
  just the, you know, the bit about being excited about going,
• 19:35
  going out and playing live. But then unfortunately, if not
• 19:39
  enough people have committed upfront, the, the gig, as they
• 19:42
  say, is called off and it's not really anything within their
• 19:47
  control. And it does, I mean, it is, I
• 19:50
  think when we talked about this last time, we, we noticed that,
• 19:54
  you know, it's becoming a trend. And I think it's a trend which
• 19:57
  really took hold after COVID when people didn't want to risk
• 20:01
  buying a ticket because so many have been cancelled.
• 20:03
  And that's become part of the culture, I think.
• 20:06
  Maybe it's becoming more, maybe it's just become more of the
• 20:09
  norm, you know, with people thinking, I don't know, I might
• 20:12
  change my mind or I might not have enough money at that point
• 20:16
  in the months. And, and that's, that's as you
• 20:19
  know, that's LED us to where we are now with, with the artists
• 20:22
  in the middle of things. And if you're on a financial
• 20:25
  tip, obviously, if you're an established axe, you're probably
• 20:29
  quite likely to have a clause in your contract where the promoter
• 20:33
  or the venue will pay half or a proportion of your fee upfront,
• 20:39
  which you get to keep whether the gig goes ahead or not.
• 20:43
  It's right. Here's the, here's the deposit
• 20:45
  on your services. And so you do get some, but I'm
• 20:48
  not sure how far that applies as the gigs get smaller.
• 20:51
  I'm not sure you know whether that clause is in contracts for
• 20:55
  grassroots shows. I mean, I can only really add my
• 20:59
  own experience here because it's, this has happened to me
• 21:02
  what, a couple of Times Now. Once, once with a new club night
• 21:05
  I was booked to do. And then there was once where I
• 21:09
  was, I was booked to play a festival and the festival was
• 21:13
  cancelled, which was, which was annoying because the festival
• 21:18
  was in. So the festival's in Hampshire
• 21:22
  the day before I'm finishing a short run of I was doing my one
• 21:26
  man show at the Edinburgh Festival, so I had to.
• 21:28
  So the only way making it to Hampshire was to fly from
• 21:31
  Edinburgh to Southampton. So, so I booked the tickets for
• 21:35
  the flights for me and my mate Tom, part time tour manager Tom,
• 21:40
  so that we could fly directly to Southampton, then car to the
• 21:43
  festival. But the festival was cancelled.
• 21:47
  I mean, I'm, you know, you book flights upfront thinking, well,
• 21:51
  the cost might go up. I mean, I'm not usually that
• 21:53
  organized. But anyway.
• 21:54
  So book, book the flights. Then the festival is cancelled
• 21:57
  because of disappointing advanced ticket sales.
• 22:00
  And the organizers thought, well, rather than lose
• 22:02
  potentially this amount of money, we'll lose a smaller
• 22:06
  amount of money by pulling it. But so, so now we're flying to
• 22:10
  Southampton for no reason. So, so I looked up the cost of
• 22:14
  flights from Edinburgh to London and of course by that point
• 22:18
  they've gone up in price. So, so it ended up being
• 22:21
  cheaper. What we did in the end, we flew
• 22:23
  from, we flew from Edinburgh to Southampton for absolutely no
• 22:27
  reason and then caught the train home to London.
• 22:30
  And so we didn't lose as much money as we could have possibly
• 22:34
  done. And that's the artist.
• 22:36
  As I say, it's a really difficult position to be in, on
• 22:41
  both sides really. But the.
• 22:43
  Reputationally, isn't it? Because if you're an artist and
• 22:45
  your gig is cancelled due to low ticket sales, your worry is that
• 22:49
  other promoters will look at that and go, Oh yeah, they
• 22:51
  couldn't, they couldn't sell tickets for that thing.
• 22:53
  Maybe we shouldn't book them, but it wasn't their fault.
• 22:55
  They might have sold out the venue on the night.
• 22:57
  Yeah. You get you can always get tired
• 23:00
  with this brush. It's harsh.
• 23:01
  Yeah, absolutely. So the moral of the tale is if
• 23:04
  you can do book in advance. And I I appreciate it's not
• 23:08
  always easy, you know, planning ahead.
• 23:11
  It's it's it's, you know, it's unless I don't know what we do
• 23:16
  about this, I don't know whether you can discount six weeks out
• 23:20
  tickets if you buy them early. It's.
• 23:22
  For gigs as well as festivals maybe?
• 23:24
  Yeah, I don't know whether that I think that makes things very
• 23:27
  complicated. And also, again, we've got to
• 23:28
  deal with the margins and what the ticket so little profit in
• 23:32
  putting on gigs. You know, even at theater level,
• 23:34
  it's quite, really tight. So, yeah, I know you might not
• 23:38
  want to book a ticket for something that you might not be
• 23:40
  able to go to that would be a waste of money.
• 23:42
  But where you can do get, do get a ticket up front.
• 23:48
  And this brings us, brings us to something which is, well, a
• 23:54
  slight bugbear of mine, as regular listeners will know,
• 23:57
  because I mean, as if, and I, I know I've got, I've got friends
• 24:01
  who are under 35 and they've got quite good musical taste.
• 24:05
  But across the board from all our stats, as if keeping
• 24:09
  Fleetwood Mac in the charts wasn't bad enough, now the Under
• 24:13
  35 have instigated a Céline Dion revival.
• 24:20
  Yeah, which is I'm torn because she seems like a good human
• 24:23
  who's quite self aware and funny.
• 24:25
  She's been through some tough times, but my teenage years were
• 24:28
  when her music was the enemy for me.
• 24:30
  You know, it was like when Brit pop was happening and I was
• 24:33
  like, yeah, super way those horrible ballads.
• 24:35
  But she's coming back. She's playing a bunch of gigs in
• 24:37
  Paris, I think, and she's she's not having any problems selling
• 24:40
  out that in advance, I should think.
• 24:42
  But this came, I got this press release just after those have
• 24:44
  been announced from it was from Spotify again.
• 24:46
  It likes putting stats out and it was saying, yeah, 30% of her
• 24:50
  Spotify streams come from 25 to 34 year olds.
• 24:55
  So these are people who at best were toddlers when their Titanic
• 24:57
  theme came out in 97. But this is part of a here's a
• 25:03
  here's another example that you might like more your young
• 25:05
  friends. So Gorillas have got the same
• 25:08
  thing. So this week they put some steps
• 25:11
  out about Gorillas debut album, which is 25 years old, which I
• 25:13
  don't want to think about that stat for a while because I feel
• 25:16
  incredibly old. And it's biggest year for
• 25:19
  streams ever was last year. So it had 333 million on Spotify
• 25:23
  alone last year and that was up 46% on the previous record,
• 25:28
  which was the previous year. So they had this quote saying
• 25:31
  it's it's less like a catalog title ageing gracefully and more
• 25:34
  like a new release building momentum.
• 25:36
  But the key thing is nearly 1/4 of its streams came from 18 to
• 25:39
  24 year olds who weren't even born when the album came out.
• 25:43
  So there you have it that that's the link between Céline Dion and
• 25:46
  Gorillas. But it is a trend.
• 25:48
  There's, there's some stuff that is just, it just builds and
• 25:50
  builds and builds every year. And again, goes back to I think
• 25:55
  about if you're a label looking at that, you're going right.
• 25:57
  Well, we could, we could just like sit here and watch the
• 25:59
  gorillas. Well, not gorillas.
• 26:00
  Not a good example. Watch the Céline Dion money come
• 26:02
  in rather than signing the next Céline Dion, whoever she is.
• 26:07
  Trying to say I'm still going through those teenage years.
• 26:10
  I mean, not actually because I'm a man, I'm a man of an age, but
• 26:16
  I have a teenage attitude. I think to some artists that
• 26:20
  will remain forever now you know, whether there's a reason
• 26:23
  behind it or not, I mean. Do you know you when I once, I
• 26:27
  once said I could listen to Smiths because I knew some
• 26:29
  people who were thinking you, you, you pointed in direction
• 26:31
  that half man, half biscuit. So oh, is it half a half
• 26:33
  biscuit? No.
• 26:34
  MJ Hibbett. That's one of The Smiths by MJ
• 26:37
  Hibbett, which is like. Don't don't, don't avoid
• 26:40
  something just because Dick has liked them was to paraphrase,
• 26:43
  but I my thing is what if your dad liked them?
• 26:46
  There's a whole era of artists, Michael Bolton, Céline Dion,
• 26:48
  Meat Loaf that my dad would play in the car going.
• 26:51
  This is great music, not like that blow rubbish.
• 26:53
  And I just, I really can't get past that, even when they turn
• 26:57
  out to be nice people. You.
• 26:59
  Know which Michael Bolton, brilliant chap, good good
• 27:02
  principles, just can't bear his music still and it's changed me
• 27:06
  screaming inside. I have changed my attitude, not
• 27:10
  necessarily to their music, but to the concept of Level 42,
• 27:13
  because Mark King is a nice, is a nice man, but otherwise I will
• 27:17
  hold on to it. And in an irrational hatred of
• 27:21
  somebody's music, you know, I've just get, I've just taken
• 27:25
  against somebody at some point. I'll hold on to that for years
• 27:28
  and years. I think we've just got time
• 27:31
  probably just to mention to mention a certain space mission.
• 27:35
  Because I mean, if if you've been following the Artemis 2
• 27:39
  moon mission and you've been thinking, oh, I wonder if
• 27:42
  there's a music angle here that isn't dark side of the moon.
• 27:47
  Well, apparently it turns out there is.
• 27:50
  There is, yeah. So this is about an electronic
• 27:53
  music joke called, I think I'm saying it right, Defoe.
• 27:56
  And one of the astronauts on the mission, Christina Cook, is a
• 27:59
  fan of the band, fan of the group.
• 28:01
  So they've made this one hour radio show, just kind of got a
• 28:04
  theme about space and the Earth. And.
• 28:05
  And they're going to with a service called Dunk Radio.
• 28:08
  And they're going to beam it out and the astronauts will be
• 28:10
  listening in, which I imagine, like, I'm not sure the other
• 28:13
  astronauts are fans or not. She might be sitting there
• 28:15
  enjoying it. And they're going, what is this
• 28:17
  rubbish? I can't even leave the room.
• 28:18
  We're in a rocket. But it's yeah, it's it's like I
• 28:22
  was, I was writing the story, researching the previous
• 28:24
  examples of like, music in space because like Blur and Beagle 2.
• 28:27
  Do you remember that when they made the cool sign for the Mars
• 28:30
  Mars mission? Apparently NASA woke up the
• 28:33
  International Space Station crew with Elton John's Rocket Man in
• 28:36
  2011. I don't know if that's like a
• 28:39
  DNA woke up and were like, for heaven's sake, can.
• 28:42
  You also also please find a more literal song to play your
• 28:47
  astronauts. Oh wow, here we go.
• 28:50
  NASA also beamed The Beatles across the universe into deep
• 28:52
  space in 22,000 and eight and they premiered Reach for the
• 28:56
  Stars. Not the sub seven song but the
• 28:58
  Will I Am song from the Mars Rover.
• 29:01
  So the person I feel sorry for here is Babylon Zoo because they
• 29:04
  picked every space themed song title but not his yet.
• 29:09
  Maybe the next mission? And finally, for this week,
• 29:11
  guitar, synthesizers, drum machines, all musical
• 29:15
  instruments. Mayonnaise.
• 29:17
  Not so much. Or is it?
• 29:20
  Or is it? Yeah.
• 29:22
  So I was on the watch for April Fools last week because I write
• 29:24
  this Morning News bulletin. If I get caught by someone's
• 29:26
  musical it before I'm in trouble.
• 29:28
  And I saw this like this must be an April Fool.
• 29:30
  But it's not. It's a research study from
• 29:32
  Northumbria University on whether mayonnaise is an
• 29:35
  instrument, which I believe this began as some kind of online
• 29:38
  meme. It was probably on TikTok, so
• 29:42
  it's not an April Fool, but it is a marketing stunt because
• 29:44
  Hellman's the mayonnaise people, others are available,
• 29:48
  commissioned it with its ad agency.
• 29:50
  And they're basically running this study, getting experimental
• 29:52
  musicians to try and make music using mayonnaise.
• 29:55
  And they're going to publish a research study based on this.
• 29:58
  It's basically an advertising wheeze, but they've roped in the
• 30:01
  university. And the thing that got me was
• 30:03
  there's a credit section of the case study of this this
• 30:06
  campaign. And 54 people are listed in this
• 30:09
  case study as having been involved, like 54 people
• 30:12
  involved in pretending that mayonnaise is an instrument for
• 30:15
  a brand which, you know, labels may be reducing their rustas.
• 30:20
  People may lay off people, but there's still plenty of people
• 30:23
  in our land doing silly things with mayonnaise.
• 30:26
  We started with a huge story about potential UNG takeover and
• 30:30
  we've finished up mayonnaise. Thank you very much for
• 30:33
  listening this week. If you are enjoying the show,
• 30:37
  tell your friends, work colleagues, passing musicians,
• 30:40
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• 30:50
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• 30:55
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• 31:01
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• 31:05
  musical love with. You can gain access to to the
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• 31:18
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• 31:22
  love to. It's always nice receiving your
• 31:25
  correspondence, so drop us a line.
• 31:26
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• 31:30
  Any questions for us, anything that we might be able to dig
• 31:34
  into, uh, to shine some light on the music, the madness that is
• 31:38
  the music industry, uh, or if you'd like any guidance,
• 31:42
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• 31:45
  theaddressisthepriceofmusicpodcast@gmail.com. That's the price of music,
• 31:50
  podcast@gmail.com. Thanks again for listening back
• 31:55
  next week, we think with a record store Day special next
• 32:00
  week, quite possibly. Till then though, take care of
• 32:03
  yourselves. Goodbye.
• 32:05
  Goodbye.