Digital Noise: Music and Tech

Ticket scalping has been a hot topic in the music industry for years, causing a lot of uproar and complaints among music fans.

The sad fact of the matter is that lots of parties in the music industry try to sell secondhand tickets for a markup. Ticketmaster owns a premium resale service called TicketsNow. It also owns a resale exchange, TicketExchange, which lets any individual (including scalpers) buy or sell a ticket. Even artists and managers frequently take their allotments and sell them on broker sites for a markup, as The Wall Street Journal has reported.

Worst of all is the fan club scam, where fans pay for the right to get in line for presale tickets--but joining the club doesn't necessarily get you a ticket before the scalpers have snapped them all up, as Keith Urban fans in Nashville recently discovered.

I can't get too angry, though. I haven't bought a ticket from a scalper in years, and I've never gone through a ticket broker. I get good seats well after they go on sale and can usually get into sold-out shows. And they almost never cost me more than the original retail price.

It's not magic: it's Craigslist. I wait until a few days before the show, then run a search for the band I want to see. Inevitably, I find a few people who bought a ticket then had an irresolvable conflict. These are normal people--not scalpers, just fans like you and me--and they almost always settle for what they paid, or even less. If I'm not happy with the price, I move on--there always seem to be more sellers, especially the on day of the show.

You can't get tickets to this Friday's Pixies show through the official site for the venue, STG Presents, but there are plenty of tickets at fair prices on Craigslist.

This month alone, I've scored floor seats to Steely Dan well after they were gone from Ticketmaster's site, and a pit ticket to Friday's Pixies show, which is entirely sold out. I've had such good luck that I'm considering abandoning Ticketmaster and other ticket sellers completely. The seats are better, they're the same price or cheaper, and I'm usually helping a fellow fan out of a jam.

There are ticket brokers and other professionals gumming up the ads on Craigslist, but you can scope them out pretty quickly--they often list ticket prices as $1 (because they're actually selling lots of tickets at different prices) or have some other giveaway like an overly generic headline ("Great seats") or obviously inflated prices. Regular fans tend to list the exact seat number in the ad and a price that's pretty close to what they paid.

There will always be some demand for professional ticket brokers; people who want to impress an important business client with great seats don't want to wait until the last minute and risk striking out. And for some shows, fans would rather sacrifice a body part than sell their tickets--I'm thinking of the early shows on the 2007 reunion tour by The Police, for instance. But for many shows, Craigslist is a far better deal than the professional sites. Which makes me wonder how long they'll last.

I've always preferred prognostication to nostalgia, so rather than replay the best of 2007, I'll use these late December doldrums to make 10 predictions for the coming year. Some editors will warn you that this kind of list is suicide--it's too easy for everybody to look back a year later and see where you were wrong--but it hasn't hurt Cringely, so here goes. In no particular order.

DRM will die. The trendline is clear--Apple's been selling DRM-free tunes on iTunes since May, Amazon's DRM-free MP3 store has three of the four majors signed up, and eMusic has become the second-most-popular music download service (after iTunes) thanks in part to its longstanding insistence on selling DRM-free MP3s. A year from now, DRM will be irrelevant and hardly used in digital music. All four labels will agree sell their songs without DRM on Amazon. Nearly every iTunes audio (but not video) file will be DRM-free, and Apple will get rid of the "Plus" designation. Some music subscription services like Rhapsody and Microsoft's Zune Pass might retain DRM so that users can't cancel their subscriptions and keep the songs they've downloaded, but they'll be the last holdouts--and some of them might try eMusic's approach of limiting monthly downloads rather than limiting compatibility and usage with DRM.

3G iPhone and iTunes. A 3G iPhone is a fairly safe prediction, given that AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson already let it slip, but I think there'll still be a small surprise embedded in the announcement: iTunes 3G, a service that will come with the phone and give users anytime-anywhere downloads of any audio content in the iTunes Music Store. Impulse buying will go through the roof.

No Zune phone. Microsoft won't release an iPhone competitor this year--at least not one with hardware designed by Microsoft. The company might release some sort of software update or client application that allows Windows Mobile users to play songs from the Zune Marketplace and transfer them from the Zune PC client software to their phones, but even that probably won't happen until 2009. And it'll sink like a lead balloon against v3 of the iPhone, at which point Microsoft will bend to the inevitable and start building its own phone from scratch.

GarageBand will win a Grammy. Not the program itself, but somebody will make a record using Apple's Garage Band--which comes included with every Macintosh sold--as their primary recording and mixing tool, and that record will win a Grammy award. There's already been a critically acclaimed movie, Tarnation, made exclusively with iMovie, so now it's time for all those bedroom musicians to get into the do-it-yourself spotlight.

Mashups will go mainstream. Have mashups already jumped the shark? The controversy about The Grey Album, in which DJ Danger Mouse combined lyrics from Jay-Z's Black Album and The Beatles' untitled white album, is almost four years old. There was a burst of experimentation from big-time artists like David Bowie and Beck around the same time, but not much since 2005. Nonetheless, I predict that artists and even some labels will begin re-releasing their back catalogs as standalone instrumental and vocal tracks, and fans will recombine like crazy using programs like Garage Band and Splice. At least one mashup will get significant radio play, with the complete approval of the original artists. (Although you might say that Puff Daddy accomplished this 10 years ago.) They might even be incorporated into video games like Rock Band--imagine the challenge of having to sing Abba while the rest of the band plays Judas Priest. By the end of 2008, putting a mere song on your social-networking profile will seem hopelessly old-fashioned.

The campaign--don't call it "marketing"--that preceded Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero release will become the gold standard for building audience engagement for tours, albums, or new artists.

Year Zero will become the precedent. On the plane trip home from visiting family over Christmas, I read Eric Davis's analysis of Led Zeppelin's fourth album, part of the 33 1/3 book series. While a lot of it seemed like a stretch--as is the case with any highly intellectualized deconstruction of rock music--it did remind me of a certain sensation created by certain artists and albums, a sense that the listener is more than a mere consumer, but is in fact an active member in a secret club that only other members fully understand, a sort of musical Masonic society. Think of that Zeppelin album, the Grateful Dead, the Residents, or Secret Chiefs 3. In 2007, Trent Reznor, working with 42 Entertainment, took this kind of mystical clubbishness and updated it for the digital era. USB drives with leaked tracks from the upcoming Year Zero record were surreptitiously placed in bathroom stalls at concert venues. Phone numbers with frightening secret messages were encoded in bursts of static or out-of-phase audio signals. Cell phones were distributed to fans who figured out some of the clues; a phone call placed to those phones summoned them to a secret concert. In 2008, we'll see more of these kinds of musical events that use digital technology to break down the wall between audience and artist.

The world's best offline record store will go online. There's nothing else like Amoeba Records. Its three locations in Berkeley, San Francisco, and Los Angeles offer unsurpassed selection--including cellophane-packaged vinyl I've never seen anywhere else--and seem to be curated by music fans with amazing depth and breadth of knowledge. In 2007, Amoeba took its first tentative steps into digital distribution, releasing exclusive recordings from Gram Parsons and Brandi Shearer in both MP3 and CD formats. In 2008, I predict Amoeba will finally go online in a huge way, offering an unsurpassed quantity of MP3 downloads from every imaginable source: major labels (like Amazon MP3 and the other high-profile stores), independent labels (like eMusic), and do-it-yourselfers (like CDBaby). Look for the nascent Amoeba label to offer distribution on terms never before seen in the recording industry--more of a non-exclusive commission model like CD Baby than a typical all-inclusive marketing-recording-publishing-distribution deal like most labels have favored--and for several high-profile artists who've recently quit their labels to sign on.

The loudness wars will end. It's been repeated so many times, it's become a cliche: today's recordings are mastered too loud, eliminating dynamic range and making it hard to listen to a complete album. In 2008, artists and producers will finally begin to demand a return to proper mastering, and radio stations and record execs will be in no position to contradict them.

The concert business will follow the recorded music business down. It's a bad time to be a big rock concert promoter like Live Nation. According to a recent story in Pollstar, the concert business actually declined in 2007, despite high-profile reunion tours by The Police and Van Halen and David Lee Roth--two acts with so much internal strife that nobody expected to see them on stage again. I say the 15 percent drop in ticket revenues from 2006 to 2007 will be followed by the same or greater drop next year. Music fans are fed up with exorbitant ticket prices, false scarcity, and quasi-legal scalpers, and there are only so many more nostalgia acts to trot out. Where are the young bands that can sell out 20,000-seat arenas for the next 5, 10, 20 years? (And before you call me out on the Arctic Monkeys, let me just counter with Oasis. Huge in the U.K., briefly popular in the U.S., and irrelevant to all but the die-hardest of fans 10 years later.) In other words, the concert business is about to suffer from the main problem that's hurting the recording industry--not MP3s, not piracy, but lack of interest and investment in artists with long-term (as opposed to instant) commercial potential.

Led Zeppelin will play again, but not tour. Speaking of nostalgia, it won't be 1973, but the reunited Led Zeppelin will play a handful of shows in the U.S., focusing on a multi-night stand at New York's Madison Square Garden timed around Robert Plant's 60th birthday on August 20.

Both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal posted stories this weekend about ticket brokers.

Ticketmaster has sued a Pittsburgh-based company, RMG Technologies, for providing software that allegedly enables brokers to bypass Ticketmaster's online security provisions and snap up all the good tickets minutes after they go on sale. Brokers then turn around and sell these tickets for a hefty profit on sites like StubHub or Craigslist. Both stories quote Chris Kovach, a former broker who was originally named in Ticketmaster's suit, but settled with the company. He claims that he used RMG's software to buy hundreds of sets of tickets at a time.

This has been going on for years, and the Ticketmaster suit was filed back in April, but the press didn't get really angry until the brokers snapped up tickets for tween sensation Hannah Montana. ("I know I promised we'd go to the show, but daddy didn't expect to pay $1,000 for four tickets.")

I get annoyed at these guys as well, but that's the free market at work. Example: I have a friend who goes to maybe one concert a year. He doesn't go to club shows and hasn't bought a CD in 20 years, but once in a while an old band he likes comes through town, and he refuses to settle for anything less than floor seats. If they're marked up one or two hundred dollars, so be it--he'd rather blow his entire music budget on a once-in-a-lifetime concert experience. He won't pay even $30 to sit at the back of the arena.

As long as there's demand for $200, $300, or $1,000 tickets, then the real problem seems to be underpricing by artists and promoters. Ticketmaster certainly thinks so: the company has its own auction site, TicketExchange, and I suspect its suit against the brokers is driven by competitive concerns more than a desire to help the consumer.

If you object--don't buy. You can always hope that they release more tickets the day of the show, or that the brokers misjudged and that there'll be plenty of scalpers with cheap seats outside on the night of the show. (Happens to me all the time: most recently on Saturday at the "sold out" Widespread Panic show in Seattle.)

Or here's an idea: if you really like music and live in a decent-sized city, I can guarantee you there's at least one act playing tonight who you'd thoroughly enjoy, who'd be happy to have you in the audience, and and who won't charge you more than $30 (probably much less) for the privilege. OK, you might not have heard them before, but go with an open mind, bring a date, have a cocktail, and remember what the experience of live music's about--it's not about seeing your middle-aged heroes on a 100-foot television screen and listening to your neighbors scream "down in front."

I hate the whole experience of arena rock shows today: the security staff who assume you're a criminal, the overpriced food and drink, the "down in front" screamers who always seem to be seated behind me (it's a $100 rock concert, not your daughter's piano recital). Consequently, I don't go to many big shows--one or two a year.

So I was a little surprised when I first encountered the "fan club" charge when the Stones rolled through Seattle's Key Arena in October 2005. The ticket prices were painful enough--$200+ for floor seats--but that's what scalpers were getting (more, actually), and Mick was a student at the London School of Economics at one time, so he surely understands supply and demand.

But the $100 fan club membership felt like an added insult. I understand that longtime Rolling Stones fans who joined the club eons ago might have a right to better tickets than the unwashed masses. And the ticket-buying process honored these fans by giving early access to anybody who'd joined before the tour was announced. But then there was second tier of sales--anybody could become a one-year member of the club for "only" $100, and they'd get second crack. Public ticket sales were saved for last. In other words, if you wanted any chance at halfway decent seats, you have to pay the extra $100--it was like a ticket to buy a ticket. (They threw in some other stuff like access to online video of past shows, but I doubt anybody would have paid more than a couple bucks for these privileges.)

The Police also used the fan club charge for their reunion tour this year. They haven't been an active band in 23 years, so there's really no "fairness" involved, although members of the individual members' fan clubs did get an early shot. (And they actually gave first crack to people who'd previously joined a Best Buy frequent buyers' club--so much for the fans.) At least with the Police, in addition to assuring me seats (bad seats--the good ones were all gone by the time the "new fan" tickets went on sale), I got a $5 poster and the right to peruse online message boards where I could read decidedly mixed reviews of the show.

Today's Wall Street Journal has an article about fans scamming these fan clubs by selling the codes used for purchases on Craigslist and eBay. I'm not sorry. This kind of trading exposes fan club memberships for what they really are--a sleazy way to hide the true cost of tickets. Perhaps once the "fairness" argument's been debunked, artists and promoters will have to display the true ticket price. (Yeah, right. And maybe they'll get rid of all those "service fees" as well.)

For the record, the Stones were way better than I expected them to be--both loose and tight, and Mick Jagger's amazing even at his advanced age, although they played better setlists on other nights. The Police were surprisingly underrehearsed, but I appreciated the risks they were willing to take with their new arrangements of the hits we've all heard a million times, and their unwillingness to use backing tracks or extra musicians. Neither show gave me as much musicial fun as my iPod, which cost less than two tickets.