A still from the 3D film, Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: The Best of Both Worlds Concert, which opens Friday for a one-week theater run.
(Credit: Disney)It's not just screaming little tweens who are buzzing about Disney's Hannah Montana 3D concert film, which open in theaters Friday for a one-week run.
Having already sold out during popular show times in certain markets, Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: The Best of Both Worlds Concert, is no doubt making online ticket sellers happy, too.
For example, Fandango.com, the largest online movie ticket seller, is likely to mark January as one the most--if not the most--trafficked month in its eight-year history. "Most of the traffic is due to Hannah Montana," said Fandango spokesman Harry Medved, who added that it's the site's "biggest concert film ever" in terms of sales.
And that says something, especially because the film is only playing in about 700 already 3D-equipped theaters nationwide and is only screening for seven days.
For those readers (who, unlike me, as a mom) aren't privy to fads among Disney-controlled prepubescent girls, Hannah Montana is a pop sensation fueled by her TV persona a la Donny and Marie, The Partridge Family, The Monkees, or, my personal favorite, Shaun Cassidy (of Hardy Boys fame). The Hannah Montana hype, however, has hit modern-day levels of rabid consumerism, with merchandise ranging from video games to a clothing line.
Montana is actually Miley Cyrus, daughter of country star Billy Ray Cyrus. Her rise to fame began with the launch two years ago of Disney's Hannah Montana TV show, in which she hides her pop star identity in order to live a so-called normal teenage life in Malibu, Calif.
The wildly successful show led to the release of two Hannah Montana albums and a sold-out concert tour that set attendance records and triggered parents to reportedly pay some $500 per ticket.
Many people think the movie is a response to the concert--an attempt to give those who couldn't get tickets to the show a chance to see it. That, a Disney representative said, is a misconception. The film was planned long before the concert tour, which wraps up Thursday, the representative said. The unusually short one-week theater run, she added, is meant to make it more like a concert event.
The film was made using a custom-made 3D camera system developed by James Cameron and Vince Pace. In production notes, Pace described the system as having two eyes, in the form of two high-definition cameras, and a very powerful brain, in the form of a computer.
"James Cameron and I set out to change entertainment as we know it by designing the tools necessary to shoot a new form of 3D, one that is based more on experience than effect," he said.
U2 3D, of course, beat Hannah Montana to the punch. But in my 8-year-old daughter's eyes, Bono's got nothing on the Jonas Brothers, who are special guests in the Hannah Montana film.
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."
UPDATE: A few minutes after I first published this post, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band announced a tour for 2007. I've removed him from the running because (a.) he has no tourdates scheduled for 2008 and (b.) for this experiment in predictive markets to be interesting and valuable, I feel that it has to run for more than a few hours.
Although the recording industry's in the doldrums, the concert business has been pretty good of late.
The Rolling Stones just wrapped up its two-year-long Bigger Bang tour. The tour started in fall 2005, and a year later had eclipsed U2's Vertigo tour as the highest-grossing tour in history. The Police surprised everybody earlier this year by announcing a reunion tour after a 23-year hiatus and have already grossed more than $107 million on the first leg. That should put The Police in first place for 2007--if the Van Halen/David Lee Roth reunion tour doesn't knock them off. Other recent surprises included Roger Waters selling more than 1 million tickets worldwide and a partial reunion tour from Genesis. The Eagles are on tap for 2008.
Perhaps the wisdom of the crowd can predict who will announce the next big tour for 2008. Inkling Markets lets people set up predictive markets. It works like a stock market, with people bidding on the likelihood of a particular outcome--only there's no money at stake, just pride.
I was skeptical about how well it could work until I set up a market for last year's Super Bowl winner back in August 2006. The eventual winner, the Indianapolis Colts, led the market for the entire year, with the New England Patriots (second place in the AFC, and probably the second best team last year) and Chicago Bears (the NFC champions who played the Colts in the Super Bowl) placing 2nd and 3rd throughout the season. The only thing the market didn't predict was the New Orleans Saints' surprising second-place NFC finish, but none of the experts predicted that either.
So I've set up a market with 10 artists who've not yet announced 2008 tours. The safest bets would probably be AC/DC and Metallica, who are reportedly working on albums for release in 2008, with accompanying tours to follow.
Or you can take a risk and bid on a longshot. Will that long-rumored Led Zeppelin tour finally happen to commemorate its first downloadable release? Will Roger Waters and David Gilmour move beyond the four-song Pink Floyd show at Live 8? Will Michael Jackson surprise everybody by coming out of exile? Will David Byrne take a cue from Sting and reunite the Talking Heads? A Phish reunion? A Madonna tour?
The rules: for it to count as a "tour," the artist has to play at least six cities--no Vegas stands like Prince or one-off festival shows like Pink Floyd at Live 8. The first tour to be announced is the winner, but the auction will remain open until tickets for that first tour actually go on sale, in order to avoid any possibility of a Chinese Democracy-style flakeout.
In a move that further shapes its image as an MTV-like pop-culture hub as well as a social network, News Corp.'s MySpace.com has announced that it will be sponsoring a concert tour this fall.
Appropriately called the MySpace Music Tour, the series of shows will kick off October 16 in Seattle and will host more than 30 performances before winding down in Las Vegas around Thanksgiving.
The headlining acts for the tour will be two artists who have built up large followings on the social-networking site--geeky pop band Hellogoodbye and emo act Say Anything.
The tour will also include the Japanese punk band Polysics, which has been signed to the new MySpace Records label, as well as yet-to-be-announced guests.
In a statement from the company, Say Anything frontman Max Bemis is quoted as saying, "We are stoked as beans to be on the first MySpace tour with Hellogoodbye!! It's going to rock!"
MySpace users will be able to prepurchase tickets starting Friday. Those who are not MySpace members will have to wait until September 6.
The site has not released a full list of concert dates or venues, but those will presumably be available by the time sales open. Sales will be conducted through a branded community page on MySpace, which will also feature photo galleries, contests and band blogs.
UPDATE: MySpace has released a full list of tour cities. The Polysics will be opening for the shows through the Allentown show on Halloween:
10/16: Seattle, Wash.
10/17: Portland, Ore.
10/19: Magna, Utah
10/20: Denver
10/21: Wichita, Kan.
10/22: Milwaukee, Wis.
10/24: Chicago, Ill.
10/25: Detroit
10/26: Covington, Ky.
10/27: TBA
10/28: Atlantic City, N.J.
10/30: New York
10/31: Allentown, Pa.
11/1: Providence, R.I.
11/2: Gettysburg, Penn.
11/3: Emmitsburg, Md.
11/4: Raleigh, N.C.
11/6: Orlando, Fla.
11/7: Miami Beach, Fla.
11/9: Houston
11/10: Dallas
11/11: San Antonio
11/13: Tucson, Ariz.
11/14: Tempe, Ariz.
11/16: San Francisco
11/17: San Diego
11/18: Los Angeles
11/19: Los Angeles
11/20: Anaheim, Calif.
11/23: Las Vegas, Nev.
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