“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” – John Lydon

“They’re just a band.” – Scroobius Pip

If you’re remotely interested in live music (or just fucked off when you can’t get tickets for a show without paying double face value) then last night’s Dispatches programme was essential viewing (watch it on 4OD). It exposed the reality of ‘fan-to-fan’ ticket reselling websites like Viagogo and Seatwave; that they’re actually just online touting; regardless of any stated business model, they primarily cater to professional touts and promoters of major shows, such as SJM, LiveNation and Metropolis, who collude by allocating them batches of prime tickets, to make more money than face value.

Grim stuff, yet it was nothing one couldn’t expect or predict if one thinks about it for more than a few seconds.

However the investigation left out three points that I think could’ve been covered with equal vigour:

First, because Dispatches approached the issue solely from a consumer point of view, they failed to follow the money and investigate bands and their agents’ relationships with those promoters who’ve bumped up profits by re-selling. A fascinating (and potentially explosive) question is: do bands and their agents get a share of that extra profit, or not? Promoters and artists split profits of a sold out show, based (presumably) on number of seats times ticket price equals overall gross income. How is that calculated? Are the big artists being diddled, or are they complicit?

I ask because it will be terrific fun to watch, if it turns out promoters have ripped off some of the biggest names in music by reselling their tickets above the agreed sums, without passing on any of the profit. Unlike us humble punters, these bands have the resources and wherewithal to fight back, if they so choose. Or, if they’re complicit, they would make a much more effective target for consumer groups to attack, by publicly shaming the likes of Coldplay or Rihanna or Will Young, rather than the comparatively anonymous promoters.

Secondly, Dispatches should’ve investigated the perfectly legal and now almost universal, yet immensely damaging, exclusive closed pre-sales to owners of certain mobile phones or users of other services that have a relationship with the venue but no connection to the artist. By giving a specific group of people priority access to tickets, regardless of whether they’re a fan, surely the secondary market is being massively further nourished, while real fans are locked out in the cold. Arguably these pre-sales are actually worse for fans than plain touting, since they normalise the reselling process and turn otherwise normal ticket buyers into touts, for the bands they didn’t want to see but felt obliged to ‘take advantage of an offer’ on.

(I don’t mean pre-sales to artists’ own mailing lists or fan clubs, by the way, that would seem to me to be a perfectly logical and reasonable process.)

Finally, I would’ve loved to see Dispatches widen the investigation to look at the whole process of brand sponsorship of elements of the entertainment industry. If you’re an artist playing to 2,000+ people in the UK right now, it’s almost impossible to do that without becoming a tacit advertiser of O2. It’s not the Brixton Academy anymore, it’s the O2 Academy Brixton. Even smaller venues are increasingly branded. Yet did you know that if you purchase a t-shirt at a gig, the band aren’t getting all the money – the venues take as much as 25% of all income from merchandise, despite being supposedly ‘supported’ by a brand sponsor? Almost no bands are able to fight this – even the ‘guaranteed sellout’ bands who know they’ll fill a venue, make a venue and promoter a heap of money in drink sales as well as their share of ticket revenue, still are unable to work out individual deals to keep all the money from their merch sales. So one solution you increasingly find happening is artists and their management quietly supporting and supplying the ‘bootleg’ merch sellers outside the venue, to claw back some of that revenue…

and da-dah! …the system gets even more fucked and corrupted.

I have mixed feelings about this Dispatches. Although touting is fucking irritating and further snags up an already messy business, if punters weren’t so obsessed by certain hyped huge shows that they pay ridiculous amounts over the odds, it simply wouldn’t happen. Moaners seem to be calling for some kind of legislation to regulate an industry over and above other industries, simply on the basis of an annoyance factor. I hate it when otherwise-happy Capitalists do that, it’s one of the worst, nimby-est bits of liberalism. Last night on Twitter I called it a #sheeptax but nobody reacted (probably for the best!).

Anyway, there’s an economic case for saying it is proof that these shows are under-priced (ha! This isn’t something I actually believe, by the way) – a secondary market only exists while fans are willing to pay. So Madonna took a shit-load of heat recently (including from me) for saying her tickets should be £180, yet once you average the touted price with the official £60 face value Coldplay tickets, they actually came out at roughly the same figure. Many, many people paid £200+ to see Coldplay at the O2. Well, ultimately, do they really want my sympathy? Who’s the bigger fool?

So yes, it’s an appalling practice. But if people resolved tomorrow that they wouldn’t pay above face value, even if that means sometimes missing a show they wanted to see, pouf! the trade vanishes in a cloud of smoke.

In the past few weeks I’ve written and deleted this a bunch of times but now I’d better force myself to finish and publish it because I keep flaming other people’s discussions on Facebook, so desperate am I to make the points. So.

I just had a killer idea for selling advance tickets to concerts online – a way of migrating ‘pay what you want’ across to the live music world, without having to do loads of gigs for £1.50. I think someone needs to build this app (or Eventbrite and other online sellers need to add it as an option). By the way, if this is already happening somewhere and I just missed it, I’ll happily stand corrected.

The ‘pay what you want’ model (popularised by Radiohead I guess) is now widely used by artists to sell downloads. It’s available as an option on Bandcamp for example; I tried it myself for 2010’s Christmas download and it worked beautifully. But to my knowledge nobody has set it up for gigging in a way that works: Eventbrite does have a ‘donation’ based ticketing option but it has two deal-breaking flaws: 1) they still charge a booking fee on the donation (!) and 2) if you reach capacity mainly from people who donated nothing, you can’t then prioritise those people who donated more. You get a room full of people who valued the experience at zero and turned away some folks who were willing to donate a chunk. So here’s a simple twist on the system that would make it beautiful:

Pay-what-you-like but the promoter can keep offering tickets after capacity has been reached. At close of sale (based either on a fixed point in time, or on a total amount of money donated), the highest offers (bids/donations) are the people who get the tickets and have their money taken.

The promoter can even set a cut-off point, so they want to earn a fixed amount and (once capacity has been reached) the system keeps prioritising higher offers (bids) until that amount is reached, then cuts off – which will still allow some lower bids access to the show. Meanwhile punters can keep checking back on a gig’s popularity and raise their bid / donation if they start worrying they won’t get it. It needs to be open to be fair, I guess.

*EDIT* and I guess it needs a reserve amount too, below which the gig doesn’t happen!? Hadn’t thought of that…

I bet this would be a relatively simple add-on for an advanced system like Eventbrite or The Big Cartel. (Not to even mention good old WeGotTickets, because they’ve got some catching up to do)

*EDIT* Luke Beesley (@LukeTotD) has found a catch: it makes life tricky for people who travel to gigs via public transport, since there’s an element of risk involved, yet you get much cheaper public transport bought in advance. And you’re more likely to want to donate *less* if you have to travel, because of the total cost involved. Yes, this is a problem.

I wonder if you could include in the model an option for a ‘secure it now’ price, for people who don’t like the risk. This would have the added bonus of encouraging gig prices upwards (from my point of view that’s a bonus since I fundamentally believe most non-‘heritage genre’ or ‘tribute’ small live music events are currently underpriced), while taking the risk out for those willing to pay a little more. It’d also be fun and perhaps, with a forum-style comment space under the ticket thing, create more of a community out of gig goers?

Am I now over-thinking it all? Comments welcome below, as always…

*BIG EDIT* Rhodri Marsden made a strong critique of the idea on ideological grounds on Facebook, and he’s agreed I can add our conversation in below:

Rhodri
I thought “Wow! that’s a good idea!”. And then I thought, no, it’s not. The reason it works for music is that there isn’t a finite number of products. If people want to pay more, then they can. That’s fine. But excluding people from gigs because people with more disposable income pushed ahead of them in the queue just seems a bit crap.

Gigs shouldn’t be about exclusivity. Certainly not in our world. Part of the reason it’s nice is cos everyone has paid a tenner to be there. Except the freeloaders, but I don’t believe in freeloading either and always pay even if I’m on the guest list. (I’m rambling now. I also appear to have become more left-wing in the last 3 minutes than I thought I was.)

Me
my starting position (which you may disagree with) is that most small gigs (discounting ‘heritage genre’, ‘tribute bands’ and ‘lineup of local hopefuls’) are currently underpriced. Secondly, surely this system is no more exclusive than setting a fixed price in the first place? I believe a key to the gig industry is the disconnect between what promoters and artists believe people will / can pay for live music and reality. The myth is: people won’t pay £10 for a evening of live music but they’ll pay £8.50 for the cinema. To counter your ‘exclusivity’ issue, you can still run the ‘auction’ but stick in a ‘buy it now’ price.

Rhodri
Oh right. Yes. For some reason in my head we were talking about a room full of people who’d paid £20 squeezing out those who could only afford a fiver. If it’s a roomful of people paying a tenner squeezing out those who are only paying a measly quid, somehow it becomes more palatable.

Me
In many places in the country a glass of wine in a bar costs almost £5. I’m not feeling bad about people only prepared (able) to pay that, perhaps (sometimes) getting edged out. But fundamentally, folks would set their own levels.

Rhodri
But doesn’t supply & demand economics set gig pricing levels in any case? Popular gigs cost more money, less popular gigs don’t. I don’t think there’s going to be a rush of people (say) desperate to pay £15 to watch something at the Buffalo Bar.

Today I’m sifting through piles of old songwriting notebooks, piecing together best bits of lyrics, looking for new songs and ways to complete nearly-done songs. The main job is juggling all these incomplete bits til they become ‘finished’ (whatever that means). For me it’s the toughest part of songwriting: in my opinion it’s not (mostly) ‘art’ because the art already happened when we had the ideas in the first place, so it’s more ‘craft’ – the bit that takes effort and experience. And it’s boring. And you come out with far less than you go in with.

Not moaning though, it’s not like an actual job or anything.

Anyway, I just uncovered the original first verse of ‘Elephant In The Room’ from Love Is Not Rescue and I like it as an example of how far a lyric might need to travel. So, shared with a red face, I swear my first written version was this:

I forgot how to ride a bike
I forgot how to swim
Put me in the Guinness Book of Records for being the most forgetful
Oh, I forgot, y’already put me in.

fml. 🙂

 

 

Wishing you a magnificent year ahead; I hope you find 2012 more exciting and more prosperous (in the broader sense of the word) than current news cycles might suggest.

In lieu of any real news yet, here are 10 new T-T-ish things for you to check out, if you want…

Earlier in 2011 I sang and played piano on She Makes War’s brilliant new album Little Battles.

I’m very proud to say I performed the role of Grandfather in MJ Hibbett’s new rock musical Dinosaur Planet which is out this month via Artists Against Success.

MY FAVOURITE ALBUMS OF 2011

I think it’s been a fantastic year for LPs. Even if fewer punters want to listen to whole records, still the classiest talents want to make them. How did Decemberists, Sam Duckworth, She Makes War, The Horrors, MJ Hibbett, Standard Fare, EMA, Grace Petrie, tUnE-yArDs, Metronomy and Matt Creer not even make it into my Top 10? All made superb records in 2011. But oh no they di’in’t, my 10 favourites are…

1 PJ Harvey – Let England Shake

2 Scroobius Pip – Distraction Pieces

3 Laura Marling – A Creature I Don’t Know

4 The War On Drugs – Slave Ambient

5 Nicola Roberts – Cinderella’s Eyes

6 British Sea Power – Valhalla Dancehall

7 Something Beginning With L – Beautiful Ground

8 Fucked Up – David Comes To Life

9 Frank Turner – England Keep My Bones

10 Tom Williams & The Boat – Too Slow

SONGS

The Muppets – ‘Am I A Man Or Am I A Muppet?’

Standard Fare – ‘Darth Vadar’

Joanna Neary – ‘Youth Club’ closing song

Franz Nicolay – ‘Do The Stuggle’

Jim Bob – ‘Mr Blue Sky’

James Blake – ‘A Case Of You’

This Is The Kit – ‘Easy Pickings’

tUnE-yArDs – ‘Bizzness’

The Singing Adams – ‘The Old Days’

Hugh Laurie – ‘Swanee River’

Second annual honourable mention for Jon Boden’s Folk Song A Day project, which in June successfully completed a new recording of a traditional tune every day for a year. Inspiring and brilliant. Also excellent was Darren Hayman’s January Songs, where he wrote and shared a new song each day for a month. Insightful into process.

FAVOURITE GIGS OF THE YEAR (AUDIENCE)

Carter USM, Tim Ten Yen at Edenfest, Mr Spoons’ garden, south-east London

Clowns at The Hydrant, Brighton

ONSIND and others at Book Yer Ane Fest 5, Dexter’s, Dundee

Robyn at The Roundhouse, London

Jim Jones Revue at Blissfields 2011

Midwinter Picnic 3 at West Hill Hall, Brighton

Tom Williams & The Boat, My First Tooth, She Makes War, The Borderline

The Singing Adams at The Basement, Brighton

Frank Turner, Emily Barker & The Red Clay Halo, Franz Nicolay at Newport Centre

Dive Dive at The Frog & Fiddle, Cheltenham

FAVOURITE GIGS OF THE YEAR (PLAYED)

In 2011 I did 112 shows (solo, Hoodrats, Milne, activist stuff, short spots and a few public talks). This top 10 is just based on how much I enjoyed the time onstage – doesn’t mean much about the whole night, or audience quality, or even how well I played. It’s just that magic (hard to explain) ‘thing’ onstage:

1 Laurence, Jølle and Kenneth’s basement party, Copenhagen

2 The Hoodrats in Cheltenham, Swindon & Art Uncut gig, London

3 Falmouth University on their new Yamaha CF6 grand piano

4 Carter USM, me and Tim Ten Yen in Neil’s garden

5 Cambridge Portland, supported by MJ Hibbett and Anna Madeleine

6 The Church stage at Indietracks Festival

7 frantic Pecha Kucha talk about Twitter and post-Capitalism at Brighton Digital Festival

8 Edinburgh Fringe – pretty much the whole thing, especially the final two weeks

9 York, maybe Edinburgh and/or Reading on Franz Nicolay’s tour

10 Robin Ince’s late night show, Comedy Stage, End Of The Road Festival

Honorable mention to Matt Creer’s brilliant gig in a church in Douglas on the Isle Of Man, which was magic but for the absence of some Manxie friends. Also honourable mention to the Aberdeen Lost & Found show where (entirely coincidentally) the stage set was toilets, because they’d had a play on set in a public loo.

FAVOURITE TV OF THE YEAR

Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle

Game Of Thrones

The Shadow Line

Breaking Bad

Human Planet

Curb Your Enthusiasm

30 Rock

Bruce Parry’s Arctic

Rev

The 10 O’Clock Show

(I’m sure The Killing and The Slap would be in here but I haven’t watched them yet)

*EDIT* just realised (watching Adam Curtis on the Screenswipe review of 2011) that I forgot the magnificent series All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace. Stick that in at number #1 and drop the 10 O’Clock Show off the list. 🙂

FAVOURITE OTHER CULTURAL THINGS

1. Isy Suttie ‘Pearl & Dave’ at Edinburgh Fringe

2. Adam Curtis’ BBC archive blogs

3. collection of English and Scottish ballads Franz Nicolay found me in Buxton, published in 1868

4. Private Eye, a vintage year for Hislop & co.

5. Joanna Neary ‘Youth Club’ at Edinburgh Fringe and the Three And Ten, Brighton

6. Jason Burke – The 9/11 Wars (book)

7. Louis CK’s Beacon Theatre $5 special

8. debate about protest songs at Interrogate! Festival in Dartington Hall

9. Caitlin Moran – How To Be A Woman (book)

10. Slate’s Political Gabfest podcast, thanks to Franz Nicolay

11. Margaret Cho at Edinburgh Fringe and Brighton Comedy Festival

12. Boring 2011 (even though I only saw 2 hours)

13. Tom Price ‘Say When’ at Edinburgh Fringe

14. MJ Hibbett & Steve’s ‘Moon Horse’ at Edinburgh Fringe

15. Charlotte Young and Mark Dean Quinn’s Darwin show

16. Josie Long in various places

17. revisiting Chomsky vs Foucault

18. Crunch Festival in Hay-on-Wye

honorable mention: Jim Bob’s second novel is extraordinary and brilliant but I’ll list it when it’s published (2012 I believe).

HERO OF THE YEAR

Time Magazine named ‘the protester’ and I agree. Specifically, my heroes of the year are: UK Uncut, Anonymous, Art Uncut, @BendyGirl and The Hardest Hit, Josie Long and Neil Griffiths’ Arts Emergency campaign and the global Occupiers.

VILLAIN OF THE YEAR

Of course: government, bankers, corrupt media and the tax dodging corporates are ugly villains but I’ve got a personal one this year: celebrity conductor Charles Hazlewood. He briefly got involved with a project developing an orchestra for musicians with disabilities, which UK charity Drake Music had been working on for years. But when his participation didn’t work out and he walked away, suddenly he was developing his own near identical project with TV production company What Larks. I wrote about it in the Morning Star and Private Eye picked up the story – but mainstream press steered clear, with the Evening Standard even publishing a puff piece for his plans. I can’t imagine much worse than stealing ideas from a charity.

 

Thank you very much if you came out to see me over the past month, on Franz Nicolay’s UK tour, or one of the shows I stuck around it. I’ve had a brilliant, exhausting time and finishing so close to Christmas has left me even more excited than usual about domestic things like seeing my family and getting time off.

For me, this was the most important thing I wrote in 2011. It was published in the Morning Star in November but their online archive has screwed up, so it’s not saved alongside my other MS pieces. Also (as usual) they edited quite heavily, so here is my original version.

The immorality of subjective opinions on art, when distributing public money

People are fighting tooth and nail to save UK arts funding, working every angle, in many different ways. Often locally with no thanks, they’re doing fantastic things with seemingly little arts establishment support, including from within some of the organisations most threatened. The pervading sense of pessimism is rampant and real, come from knowing that this government’s ideological intent is to ruin state supported culture for a long, long time.

Against that backdrop, I am coming to a difficult but strong realisation about one particular flawed goal of the Arts Council and other funding organisations divvying up taxpayers’ cash. And it may be an uncomfortable moment to make this argument but if we are ever to salvage something worthwhile from the wreckage it needs to be acknowledged:

The problem I have is with the key stated goal to support ‘great art’; in other words the part of the funding body’s remit that purports to decide whether the ‘art’ proposed by a project is ‘good’, or not.

This utterly subjective (at all times) element of assessing ‘quality’ is only one part of how they choose who gets our money but it is a load-bearing pillar, occupying the minds of everyone involved. Load-bearing and built on the cheap: I believe this goal of the Arts Council’s funding process to be immoral.

Art is subjective. We might not know for hundreds of years whether something we create today is ‘good’ or not. We will likely never truly know. The eternal imbalance of populism and deeper worth has not – and will not – be ‘solved’ and in fact we don’t want a solution because the conversation about it is half the ball game of artmaking in the first place. So there is not a piece of art or craft out there, that a smart person cannot either defend for its greatness, or destroy as being without value – and it’s very fun, except when public funds and lifelong artmaking livelihoods are at stake.

Yes, art is subjective. Regardless of training, experience or any other bullshit, nobody at the Arts Council – and nobody the Arts Council hires to make those decisions for them – knows any better than you or me.

To have a system where our public money is spent according to the subjective taste of whoever makes that funding decision is a drastic, soul-deep wrong and also a strategic disaster for a couple of reasons:

First, it forces the system to tend towards a reneging of the responsibility of making that decision. By which I mean that since, deep down, shamefully, they know it is wrong, they put phenomenal amounts of time and effort into building barriers between themselves and the decision-making process: channelling everything through buffer organisations who do the curating, or A&Ring, or hiring, for them. Thus: the execrable, inexorable rise to power of the professional form-filler. A monumental betrayal of artmakers and consumers alike. The construction industry of faux self-justifying gibberish.

Secondly, it kills the focus on the ways they should pick projects to support: assess the need of the audience; assess the need of the artist; and assess the commitment to practice and work ethic of the artist. Surely there’s enough in those three to keep these bastards occupied without them having to pronounce nebulous, world-ruining gibberish on quality?

Speaking at Norwich Sound & Vision Conference on a panel about public funding, a founder of the merseyside-based Generator organisation explains how he will pick a young band he thinks “could make it” (in an entirely commercial sense, regardless of creative value, though of course it’s going to boil down to whether he digs them, or worse, whether he likes their haircuts). He’ll then spend “only” £10,000 releasing a couple of singles by that band, to see if they can capture an audience in that time-frame. And if not, they’re dropped back in the pond. He’s salaried to behave like the worst kind of record industry executive with a credit card built from taxation. I am pro taxation but not for that kind of McDickery.

In Brighton, the vast city-wide White Night event is denied funding, while four individual pieces scheduled to take place within it are commissioned, so that the ACE can spin that it somehow supported the event that actually it shackled. And nobody can argue because everyone’s terrified of pissing off the local reps and ruining their own futures. Similarly, for Brighton Digital Festival (an event I’ve praised in these pages) there isn’t enough money for the steering committee to print a brochure, yet one contributing organisation scores £50,000 to put into a handful of specific ‘major’ commissions, including at least one that is already publicly funded just to exist.

This is the difference between having an opinion on a piece of culture and deciding that your opinion has more value than other people’s. But no, it does not. Because – sigh – art is subjective. The idea that these people spot ‘great’ art is objectively impossible to assess but over and over again, they patently fail. But that’s my opinion! Project after project is not worth the money it is given, compared to what that money could do, if they removed that subjective ‘great art’ goal from the equation.

It is not just wrong, or poor strategy, or a minor short-term mis-step: it is totally immoral.