Modern Big Gigs

JayGee

stickyfiddle said:

Its funny- I've actually heard Wembley and the O2 sound sound pretty good (Coldplay and the Manics fwiw). 

IIRC you were at the Manics "All the hit singles" Christmas party extravaganza I went to. If there was a single show which contradicted the "big gigs are crap" hypothesis then that would be it. 

Quite how you manage to turn the O2 (and I've seen several acts there) into an intimate experience I don't know but they managed to pull it off....

Drew_TNBD

RE: Merch...

So you expect free or £5 downloads for albums, but still want t-shirts to be silly-cheap? Y'know even a single colour t-shirt can cost up to £4 per unit once you factor in *all* production and printing costs, the t-shirt itself, and shipping. So if the t-shirt is very basic (thus not that appealing to buy) and you sell it for £8, you're still not really doing that well; certainly not enough to offset the cost of hundreds of lost sales of the music itself.

The risk rises exponentially the more colours you add.

Anyone moaning about expensive merch really has not been paying attention to the music industry for the last 10 years.

ICBM

Drew_fx said:

So you expect free or £5 downloads for albums, but still want t-shirts to be silly-cheap? Y'know even a single colour t-shirt can cost up to £4 per unit once you factor in *all* production and printing costs, the t-shirt itself, and shipping. So if the t-shirt is very basic (thus not that appealing to buy) and you sell it for £8, you're still not really doing that well; certainly not enough to offset the cost of hundreds of lost sales of the music itself.

The risk rises exponentially the more colours you add.

Anyone moaning about expensive merch really has not been paying attention to the music industry for the last 10 years.

I understand all that, but £20 or more for a T-shirt is still taking the piss. It's a T-shirt. With printing on it. Very often they are only single-colour print too.

And don't even mention the programmes and other crap...

I know that expensive merchandise supports the cost of touring for a lot of bands (been there, done that, still have the actual *Crew* T-shirt ) but there comes a point where it's such an obvious rip-off that it probably becomes a diminishing-returns calculation - if you sell significantly less because they're overpriced you may actually make *less* money.

It's a long time since I bought a T-shirt at a gig, in fact not since the going rate was about a tenner. I *do* buy a lot of CDs at gigs, even though in some cases they appear slightly overpriced as well, but at least they last longer than the average T-shirt .

Phil_aka_Pip

I went to an outside performance by James Taylor at Blickling Hall. The event was ruined by a bunch of loudmouthed drunk &stoned australians who weren't there to listen to the music (frankly I don't know why that lot were alive at all ...)