Full Comment - The real reasons Taylor Swift isn't coming to Canada (for now)

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00:00:44.040 Ready for you.

00:00:51.640 Concerts.

00:00:52.260 They're truly one of the joys of summer in Canada.

00:00:54.820 You meet up with friends, you go to a stadium, maybe a festival, maybe an amphitheater down by the water.

00:01:00.000 And for a few hours, you get to forget about the world and join together with perfect strangers enjoying the bliss of live music.

00:01:08.280 Hello, I'm Brian Lilly, and this is the Full Comment Podcast.

00:01:11.820 The music industry has definitely changed over the last several years, decades even.

00:01:16.320 Before we get to our next guest who knows so much about this and more, I want to remind you,

00:01:21.160 I want to ask you, I want to beg you even, to hit that subscribe button and make sure you don't miss a single episode of Full Comment,

00:01:27.880 where, yes, we talk about the weighty issues of the world, but we also talk about those issues that give joy and meaning to life.

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00:01:38.960 My first major concert was a stadium show.

00:01:42.300 I saw David Bowie at Toronto's Exhibition Stadium with the opening act of Duran Duran.

00:01:47.620 The pre-opening act was a little-known Canadian act at the time called the Northern Pikes.

00:01:52.660 It was a great show, and my floor seats, just 30 rows back from the stage, cost me a grand total of $35 when I was just 15 years old.

00:02:01.860 Adjusted for inflation, that would amount to about $80 today.

00:02:05.520 The concert industry today isn't so much about giving fans a taste of the music as it is about giving the artist the good life, a good income.

00:02:14.640 As Milhouse once said to Bart Simpson, you've changed, man.

00:02:18.680 It used to be about the music.

00:02:21.460 I'm sure that's a sentiment that our next guest can relate to.

00:02:25.040 Eric Alper is a music publicist.

00:02:27.000 He's also the host of That Eric Alper Show on Sirius XM and probably the biggest music fan I've ever encountered.

00:02:33.760 Eric, thanks for the time today.

00:02:35.520 Thanks for having me, Brian.

00:02:37.240 Great to see you.

00:02:37.880 Good to see you again.

00:02:38.820 Now, would you agree with me?

00:02:41.280 Duran Duran and Bowie and Northern Pikes, how many layers of the ozone layer do you think would destroy that very night thanks to that show in the audience?

00:02:51.720 Due to the hairspray?

00:02:53.280 Yeah.

00:02:54.800 Peter Frampton played for Bowie.

00:02:57.740 Yeah.

00:02:58.000 He was the guitarist on that tour.

00:03:00.400 David Bowie literally saved Peter Frampton from Oblivion when after Frampton sold a gazillion albums of Frampton Comes Alive, his next album stiffed with only selling four million copies in America.

00:03:15.500 And nobody wanted to work with him until he was kind of lounging around doing a whole lot of nothing, really.

00:03:22.600 And David Bowie plucked him out of doing nothing because he was such a big fan of Humble Pie, the band that Frampton was in before going solo.

00:03:32.300 So here's David Bowie taking somebody that he's long admired and turning him into another superstar for the next couple of decades.

00:03:39.260 And when I tell people that that was the lineup, they always look at me like, what?

00:03:43.600 Duran Duran and David Duran Duran was the opening act?

00:03:46.460 Yeah, they were kind of on the way down, I guess you could say.

00:03:50.380 They were in a lull at that point.

00:03:52.160 They'd been huge in the early 80s.

00:03:53.680 And then by 87, it was, ooh, do I want to be seen with Duran Duran?

00:03:57.720 So it was an interesting and eclectic concert, to say the least.

00:04:02.940 Yeah, that was the Glass Spider Tour, right?

00:04:06.460 Was that the...

00:04:07.620 The Glass Spider Tour, yeah.

00:04:09.480 Yeah, yeah, okay.

00:04:11.200 Well, let me ask you, what was your first big concert?

00:04:14.760 Not like, you know, down at the local community hall or whatever.

00:04:18.460 What was your first big concert that you went to?

00:04:20.820 The first concert I saw was on December the 6th, 1981, and it was at Maple Leaf Gardens.

00:04:25.920 And it was Genesis, who was and still is my favorite band at the time.

00:04:31.160 I went with my sister.

00:04:32.620 I got an immense contact high because you can smoke inside the building at the time.

00:04:39.320 No idea what was happening to me.

00:04:41.780 But ever since then, I think I have been chasing that psychological high whenever I see concerts.

00:04:49.520 It's not necessarily that I'm the one sitting in the back with my arms folded going, this is as great as Genesis back in 81.

00:04:56.540 But that night was astonishing to me.

00:05:01.800 Not only did I get to see the bodies, right?

00:05:05.160 I got to see the band live, which is still why people spend thousands of dollars on tickets.

00:05:10.500 It's psychological.

00:05:11.820 It's all of that stuff.

00:05:12.600 But they want to see the body in front of them.

00:05:15.760 And also, I don't think I've ever witnessed that many people all in the same place at the time when I was 11 or 12 years old.

00:05:27.200 So that was wild to me.

00:05:29.460 And then ever since then, I think for about 10, 15 years, I think I might have seen at least a concert a week.

00:05:36.600 I was, you know, all the way down at Maple Leaf Gardens.

00:05:40.860 It was Kingswood Music Theater at Canada's Wonderland, Ontario Place.

00:05:46.220 It was, I mean, I remember one summer, I think I must have saw maybe 20 or 30 concerts one summer just by Ontario Place in the C&E Grand Thand alone.

00:05:54.380 Because it was cheap.

00:05:55.220 It was like $4, $3 for a show.

00:05:57.920 Yeah.

00:05:58.780 In my younger years, I went to more concerts than I can remember now.

00:06:02.840 And people say, well, have you seen that band?

00:06:04.440 And I have to sit there and say, I think so.

00:06:08.220 Especially when you consider the festivals and you'd see 15 acts in a day.

00:06:13.340 But that's okay, because those artists don't really remember that tour very much either.

00:06:18.720 Before we get into talking about how this industry has changed and all of that, another question on your musical experience.

00:06:26.640 So you said you've been chasing that high from seeing Genesis in 1981.

00:06:30.380 And I don't think you mean the contact high.

00:06:32.620 But what's your favorite concert?

00:06:36.180 Is there one or two that stand out for you the most?

00:06:41.240 Yeah.

00:06:41.840 You know, I've seen so many concerts.

00:06:44.960 I've never really walked out of a show, whether it's a club show or whether it's a major concert, and be disappointed.

00:06:52.100 Because whenever I get bored or whenever it's somebody that I've seen a lot of times, I love to just people watch, knowing that there are people and fans that have saved up a lot of money to go and see this.

00:07:05.920 Maybe they've traveled from out of town.

00:07:07.580 Maybe it's their first concert ever.

00:07:09.480 Maybe it's the first time that they're seeing this band.

00:07:11.600 And that's what I love.

00:07:12.860 That's what I still love about this industry and why I love working 17 hours a day, seven days a week.

00:07:19.000 It's that experience of sharing music and talking about it, whether it's in person or online.

00:07:25.760 The experience of watching other people love what is so wonderful about music in the first place.

00:07:34.540 But I have to say, though, I didn't really get Ed Sheeran.

00:07:38.660 I understood where he was coming from.

00:07:40.600 I get the popularity.

00:07:41.960 I see his chart numbers.

00:07:43.440 I have the albums.

00:07:44.540 I've listened to it.

00:07:45.220 My wife and daughter are massive fans.

00:07:47.220 I finally got to see him a couple of weeks ago here in Toronto, and I walked out of there completely blindsided about how brilliant he was as a musician.

00:07:57.060 He showed off his foot pedals.

00:07:59.020 He had a couple of amazing special guests and people that I wasn't expecting.

00:08:04.820 So I'm going to say Ed Sheeran recently was at the top of my list whenever people say, who do I need to see?

00:08:11.560 And it's like you got to go see Ed Sheeran.

00:08:13.580 And it's three and a half hours, three hours of just nonstop hits of so many different musical styles because that's what he's built his career on.

00:08:21.780 Those concerts, and I wished I'd gone to see Ed Sheeran, actually.

00:08:26.040 I tried to get in to see him at History, which, for people that don't know, was a small club in Toronto.

00:08:30.500 The guy played a club show for what do they hold, like 1,500, 2,000 people maybe, and then played Roger Center, pretty much sold out for two nights.

00:08:41.400 But those tickets at places like Roger Center, where I also saw David Bowie later with the dancer from La La La Human Steps, just him and her on stage, they used to be affordable.

00:08:55.460 We thought they were ridiculous when I was spending $35 in 1987 to see Bowie.

00:09:01.100 As I said, just that for inflation, it's $80 now.

00:09:05.120 You can't find a show for that ticket price.

00:09:09.400 So how can kids today afford that?

00:09:13.060 I was working a minimum wage job at a supermarket the summer I went to see Bowie.

00:09:17.200 How can kids today afford to go see a show when their favorite act costs hundreds, or in the case of one young lady that we'll talk about in a minute, Taylor Swift, thousands of dollars a ticket?

00:09:27.860 How can people afford this?

00:09:29.940 Is it sustainable?

00:09:31.120 Yeah, I think it's interesting when people talk about inflation, because, you know, I always keep seeing that somebody that had a regular full-time job could afford a home and having two kids and a car, and that was the way of life.

00:09:49.120 And now it's just simply not.

00:09:52.280 And concert tickets were always set, even then, by the artists.

00:09:57.920 Just the artists had no idea of the sheer demand of how much they could actually get for their tickets.

00:10:05.560 Even though that they understood the scalping market was there, they just didn't care about it, because they knew that they were going to walk out of there with $70,000 in their pocket at the time in the 70s and 80s, where you figure, you know, maybe 10,000 people, $7 a head.

00:10:21.220 You get to $70,000, you pay off the venue and so forth, and you're walking out of there with maybe $50,000.

00:10:26.860 That was really good money, considering if you were selling 10,000 tickets, you were probably also selling 50,000 copies in that city or this country in album sales that were $27.99 for a vinyl record or a CD at $20.

00:10:42.420 So there was always something to fall back on of, I'm not going to rely only on one aspect of the industry for my money.

00:10:51.220 There are so many other ways I can do it.

00:10:53.480 I can sell t-shirts, I can sell hats, I can tell people to join the fan club, and so forth.

00:10:59.260 Now, unless you're at the one-tenth of one percent of the top of the triangle, the top of the pyramid, you're a superstar artist like Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber or The Weeknd or Ariana Grande,

00:11:12.440 you're taking home or Elton John or many classic rock artists like Kansas and Styx and Kiss and Journey and Foreigner who are all on tour making hundreds of millions of dollars.

00:11:25.580 In fact, Elton John ended off his tour with $910 million of grosses selling just over 8.5 million tickets sold.

00:11:33.000 So you take a look at that and you think, wow, that's pretty amazing.

00:11:38.340 But Elton John is not nearly making nearly as much money as he was when he was selling albums.

00:11:45.140 Because really, except for Taylor Swift, nobody's really selling a lot of records.

00:11:50.060 Nobody's selling a lot of physical product.

00:11:51.780 And Spotify, for the most part, are still stuck at the 0.0004 cents per stream.

00:11:58.940 So every million streams that you get on Spotify, you're making about $4,000.

00:12:03.880 That goes to all the rights holders.

00:12:06.320 $4,000.

00:12:06.820 $4,000 for a million?

00:12:08.940 And that's split up by the record.

00:12:10.100 Yeah, and that's split up by the record label, the publisher, the other musician, the producer, the engineer, the studio.

00:12:15.580 All of those people need to get paid. 0.98

00:12:17.520 And then the musician and the songwriters are last.

00:12:20.540 So let's pause here.

00:12:24.140 But then you take a look at it and you're like, you have to make money on the road.

00:12:27.060 So is this why and how the industry has changed so much because of the way we consume music now?

00:12:34.760 I forget what my music streaming plan is.

00:12:39.640 It's like $12.99 a month or something.

00:12:42.500 And I can listen to whatever.

00:12:44.120 And then that money is split up by what I listen to and what everybody else listens to.

00:12:49.760 But you're saying that whether it's Spotify or Google or iTunes, Apple Music now, I guess, that it's about that same level of payment?

00:13:04.300 Yeah, give or take about $500 or so between a million streams.

00:13:08.080 Right.

00:13:08.180 So when you're Drake or The Weeknd and you have a number of songs over $1 billion, that's pretty good.

00:13:16.100 That's $4 million worth of revenue that you get to kind of share when you're Taylor Swift and you have 11 songs over $1 billion.

00:13:25.120 That's pretty good.

00:13:26.340 But again, that's the 1%.

00:13:28.020 There was a statistic that I saw.

00:13:32.260 It was somewhere in the neighborhood of 96% of all songs on Spotify have less than 100 streams.

00:13:39.420 Because after you go and beg your family and your friends to listen to your music, most people don't have a publicist.

00:13:46.400 Most people don't have a manager or a record label or a marketing plan or Canadian music grant to help you promote.

00:13:52.120 So most people are making essentially four one hundredths of a penny because that's what they deserve to get.

00:13:58.980 Because that's how many people are listening to you.

00:14:02.840 So yeah, the music industry always divided the money based on the format that we were all listening to.

00:14:11.120 In the 1990s, when music consumerism was really at its peak, not only did you have cassettes still selling,

00:14:18.740 you had maybe CDs on year seven.

00:14:23.120 So every record store was fully stocked to the floor, to the ceiling with CDs at $27, $28, $29, $30.

00:14:31.200 And that generation of late 80s, early 90s, music bands were not only buying Nirvana and Michael Jackson

00:14:40.060 and grunge music and Britney Spears and NSYNC and Backstreet Boys.

00:14:44.880 They were also buying Pink Floyd and The Who and Janis Joplin and The Doors, albums that they didn't really spend any more money re-releasing

00:14:55.200 that was all purely profit to the music industry.

00:14:59.120 The average ticket was around $8 to $10.

00:15:01.900 The Eagles broke through with the $100 ticket a couple of years later, which shocked everybody.

00:15:09.120 But that was the Eagles.

00:15:10.420 They wanted to have the most money possible.

00:15:13.240 And they quickly realized that on the secondary market, they were not getting a penny.

00:15:17.940 That's where it really starts with the rebirth of Chicken Master, of Live Nation, of AEG,

00:15:23.440 working on behalf of the artists to try to get as much money as possible from the live show.

00:15:27.980 And I sold concert tickets for the first time recently because I couldn't go.

00:15:35.940 And that never happens.

00:15:38.780 And so I had to learn about the secondary market.

00:15:42.300 And to sell my tickets, because now they're digital, now they're on your phone,

00:15:46.640 to sell the tickets, I had to use the secondary market.

00:15:50.240 I had to go through Ticketmaster.

00:15:51.360 Well, they not only charged me a sale fee, they charged the person buying the tickets from me $49.95 per ticket to buy.

00:16:01.280 They set a minimum price.

00:16:03.320 It's just I had to cancel a couple of hours before the show.

00:16:07.300 So I thought, well, let's sell them cheap and quick.

00:16:09.800 Nope, you're not allowed.

00:16:11.240 They set a minimum price above the face value of the tickets.

00:16:15.940 Yeah, that's their way of stopping bots. 0.89

00:16:18.720 It's interesting.

00:16:19.900 People that want the government to do something about the secondary market

00:16:23.800 are usually the first ones to realize that if you do that,

00:16:29.040 they'll realize that most consumers want the protection to be able to do what they want with their ticket.

00:16:34.640 Why should concert tickets be the only thing on the planet that you are not allowed to resell?

00:16:40.180 Those prices of those fees of Ticketmaster, they go to the venue, they go back to the artist,

00:16:49.200 they go back to the promoter, and about 10% to 15% of that ticket fee actually goes to Ticketmaster

00:16:55.080 for allowing you to have the platform to resell it in the first place.

00:17:00.100 Make no mistake, Ticketmaster is a wonderful system that deals with almost 600 million tickets a year that they sell.

00:17:07.720 They get about 3.5 billion visits to their website.

00:17:11.560 And I'm not a Ticketmaster apologist whatsoever or Live Nation.

00:17:14.320 I get the frustration.

00:17:15.520 Believe me, I don't get free tickets to anything, so I pay for it.

00:17:18.740 And a lot of times, I'm shut out too.

00:17:21.100 But Ticketmaster is nothing more than a platform that the artist dictates to Live Nation or AEG,

00:17:28.240 the promoter that's bringing them to the city and Ticketmaster using their platform to sell.

00:17:34.880 The artists are dictating everything.

00:17:36.900 They get to decide, hey, I want to have bots allowed in. 0.63

00:17:40.620 I don't want to have bots allowed in.

00:17:42.600 I want to allow reselling.

00:17:44.460 And that's why a lot of these artists that are kind of giving permission,

00:17:51.500 even when you resell it on the secondary market, the artist is still getting money from that.

00:17:58.040 Well, at least the artist is getting money because for a long time, that wasn't the case.

00:18:02.000 That wasn't the case.

00:18:02.740 But at the same time, Ticketmaster is something that people have been complaining about for years.

00:18:08.720 I think it was for Bruce Springsteen in the 80s.

00:18:13.320 They brought out the wristband to try and stop scalpers from buying all the tickets.

00:18:17.420 And that became a thing.

00:18:18.680 We're dating ourselves, Eric, because we remember lining up at actual sales outlets to get tickets.

00:18:25.020 But you know what, because I worked at a Ticketmaster outlet.

00:18:29.320 You know what happened when people did that?

00:18:31.480 The scalpers started making deals with Ticketmaster box office staffers in order to pull 40 to 50 tickets,

00:18:37.780 even before they opened up the doors at 8 o'clock in the morning.

00:18:40.600 So scalping was always available.

00:18:43.160 Now the artist gets a say in how many tickets they're allowed to have on the reselling market.

00:18:50.820 You know, and the competition, there's more competition to sell tickets than ever before.

00:18:55.920 There's SeatGeek.

00:18:57.120 There's, you know, Ticketmaster is the biggest by far.

00:19:01.020 They're almost averaging about 65 to 70% of the North American market for major venues.

00:19:06.100 But there's still a lot of heavy-duty competition out there in case if the artist doesn't want to go through Ticketmaster.

00:19:12.780 It's just that Ticketmaster is so good at limiting their profit and ensuring that they're not overpaying for the artist

00:19:22.240 and doing things fair so that the artist wins, the consumer wins, and Ticketmaster gets a little bit of their cut.

00:19:28.840 Believe me, they're still making money, but they're only making money because concerts are back with a vengeance

00:19:33.680 where, you know, right now, in terms of the halfway point of 2023, concert tickets are almost up about 35% in North America.

00:19:44.100 And in most cases around the world, that number is pretty stable.

00:19:46.880 So there's more tickets being sold to more events and more artists are out on tour,

00:19:52.200 mostly because they haven't had a chance to go out on tour in over three years due to COVID and the isolation period.

00:19:57.700 I started going to concerts as soon as I could, so I guess the summer of 2021, and we were on an up-and-down ride.

00:20:07.060 But I can tell you that the venues that I go to are much more packed.

00:20:13.220 Is that part of what is driving the ticket prices higher, or is it this dynamic pricing model that we're hearing about now

00:20:20.900 that's annoying a lot of fans, generating outrage from politicians?

00:20:24.760 First off, tell me about the dynamic pricing model.

00:20:29.420 How does that work in life?

00:20:31.800 Yeah, so dynamic pricing is the ability for the artist to dictate to the promoter,

00:20:36.380 whether it's Live Nation or AEG, to allow X amount of tickets to be sold using dynamic pricing.

00:20:43.920 And what that is, is that those are tickets that fluctuate based on the demand specifically for that seat.

00:20:50.200 Live Nation and AEG and the artist and Ticketmaster have a wealth of data at their disposal.

00:20:56.980 They take a look at the last tour and how many tickets were sold.

00:21:00.560 They took a look at the secondary market to see how much tickets were sold in terms of scalping

00:21:05.220 and how many dates that artist is going to be playing, how far apart.

00:21:09.700 And they kind of come up with a number to say we can have three tiers of $500 and $200 and $100 seats

00:21:17.440 and we'll sell this amount at this amount and you'll walk home.

00:21:20.920 If we wipe everything clean and you sell out, you'll walk away with $22 million for these dates.

00:21:27.260 Dynamic pricing allows the artist to say, well, let's take these hundred tickets

00:21:32.040 and fluctuate them based on the demand specifically for those seats

00:21:37.380 instead of having somebody perhaps resell it on the secondary market.

00:21:41.000 But what's interesting is that we see this all the time with just as much anger.

00:21:46.020 If you try to buy an airline ticket going to New York three hours before your flight,

00:21:51.120 you're going to be paying a lot more than when you did six months ago.

00:21:54.020 I went to go buy a bag of lettuce not even two days ago and it was $8.99.

00:21:57.880 Three weeks ago, it was $3.99.

00:21:59.560 Tomorrow, it could be $7.99 for all I know.

00:22:02.860 So we're used to this dynamic pricing and don't even think twice about it except for,

00:22:07.260 wow, things are going up.

00:22:08.700 So dynamic pricing has come to the music industry and that aspect of it.

00:22:13.420 But that's just the way.

00:22:16.040 But again, the artist has every right to say, I don't want dynamic pricing.

00:22:20.240 I don't want to have reselling ability.

00:22:22.880 But it kind of impedes based on their profits and losses too if they don't do that.

00:22:26.780 So is it the artist trying to get more money?

00:22:30.440 Is it people coming back from COVID?

00:22:32.340 Is it a combination of the two?

00:22:34.840 These ticket prices that are $500 for Beyonce recently in Toronto?

00:22:41.360 Or you mentioned the Eagles.

00:22:43.780 Their ticket prices still ain't cheap.

00:22:46.340 Taylor Swift, we'll get to her again in a moment.

00:22:48.960 But what is it that's driving it?

00:22:51.480 Is it all these things coming together combined with inflation?

00:22:54.760 Pretty much.

00:22:56.580 It's really everything.

00:22:58.040 It's the lack of other revenue sources that the artist has.

00:23:03.180 I mean, certainly it's much better in some ways than it was back in the 70s and 80s

00:23:07.560 when it was incredibly uncool to sell out, to sell your song to advertisers

00:23:14.600 or put them in movies or films.

00:23:17.500 Certainly having TV and movie streaming services allows artists to put more and more potential

00:23:25.860 of their music on these 14 or 15 different platforms where they all need music.

00:23:31.600 So there's one aspect of it.

00:23:34.140 The other aspect of it is that I think the artists are getting really smart and woke up

00:23:40.240 all one day and said, how come the secondary market can sell my tickets for $4,000 for a

00:23:46.940 pair of tickets when I put them on sale for $100?

00:23:49.620 How come I'm not getting a piece of that?

00:23:51.440 That scalper did nothing to help get that profit.

00:23:57.460 I did.

00:23:57.940 And it's also based on demand.

00:24:01.080 It's based on the cost of transportation and staffing.

00:24:05.580 Inflation has certainly made the price of gas go up.

00:24:08.660 So the cost of travel, when you're somebody like Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran, you might be

00:24:12.820 bringing anywhere between 250 people and 800 people with you and your entourage to just

00:24:18.580 set up that show.

00:24:19.800 That's everybody from the roadies to the lighting to the catering and on and on.

00:24:25.500 The venues also have a very, very big stake in all of this to sell out.

00:24:29.980 They not only get a percentage of the profits of those tickets, but when you're a place like

00:24:36.720 the Rogers Center in Toronto, you have to have staff, you have to have catering, you have

00:24:42.480 to have people selling the beer and the alcohol and parking and security and all of that stuff.

00:24:47.240 And those things are much more expensive per hour to put out than maybe 10 years ago.

00:24:53.520 So everything is much more expensive, but you're right.

00:24:56.600 Concert tickets are a little bit more, but it's just because the artist wants more money.

00:25:00.940 All right.

00:25:01.800 And there's nothing wrong with that.

00:25:03.700 Like, let me, you know, like I think, you know, we're a long way from Billy Braggs

00:25:07.540 threatening his record label that he would name his next LP £8.99 if they try to put

00:25:14.160 the price too high.

00:25:15.000 Tom Petty battled his record label MCA back in the late 1970s when his first album was

00:25:24.740 such a success.

00:25:25.880 They wanted to raise his next album's price retail by $1 and it was a hard promises album

00:25:33.220 and he didn't want a £9.99 price point at retail.

00:25:39.220 He wanted it to be £8.98.

00:25:42.460 He actually physically declared bankruptcy so that his record label couldn't sue him in

00:25:49.700 order for him to be forced to put out his music the way that he wanted to.

00:25:54.480 The album came out eventually.

00:25:56.440 It was £8.98.

00:25:57.640 But yeah, you know, the artist certainly has much more power because they know that they

00:26:02.100 don't really, I mean, look, when you're Taylor Swift, absolutely you need the record label

00:26:06.200 in the management, but for most artists these days, they could just post on Instagram and

00:26:10.820 reach people 10 times better than they can having a record label distributor do it for

00:26:15.320 you.

00:26:16.160 We'll talk about Taylor Swift when we come back in a moment in a tweet from a certain

00:26:19.660 well-known politician in Canada and ask, I'll ask Eric Halper, do we have a problem with

00:26:26.080 not enough stadium space in Canada?

00:26:28.200 Is that why she's not coming?

00:26:29.460 Talk about that when we come back.

00:26:30.940 She's the biggest superstar in the world. 0.98

00:26:34.380 Once upon a time, maybe Justin Trudeau could have said that about himself in the political

00:26:38.940 world.

00:26:39.920 His star is faded.

00:26:41.060 Taylor Swift continues to rise.

00:26:43.300 So the fact that he tweeted at the global superstar recently and her decision not to announce

00:26:49.200 any Canadian tour dates caught some people by surprise.

00:26:52.880 He got some praise.

00:26:53.840 He got some slagging for it, but he just simply said, it's me.

00:26:58.660 Hi, I know places in Canada that would love to have you.

00:27:02.560 So don't make it another cruel summer.

00:27:04.440 We hope to see you soon.

00:27:07.100 The fact that Justin Trudeau and before him, conservative MP Matt Jenneru have tried to

00:27:13.160 get Taylor Swift to come to Canada hasn't really helped.

00:27:16.680 She has announced a world tour that includes dates across North America, across South America,

00:27:23.760 across Europe.

00:27:24.640 She's playing three sold out nights in Edinburgh, Scotland, in a country that has less people

00:27:31.680 than the Toronto area alone.

00:27:34.240 So why?

00:27:35.520 Why isn't she coming here when Canadian markets can attract some of the other biggest names 1.00

00:27:41.640 in the world?

00:27:42.100 Is she just too big for Canada?

00:27:44.500 Eric, what do you think?

00:27:46.920 I think it's a number of reasons.

00:27:48.780 The fact that we simply are a massive country in terms of landmass with not a lot of people

00:27:56.300 is reason number one.

00:27:58.280 The entire population of Canada fits into the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey, and

00:28:02.880 Boston.

00:28:03.220 And it's still lower than the population of California.

00:28:06.620 So when you're looking at a map of Canada and you're looking at the size of the venues,

00:28:11.380 it's a very easy decision sometimes, fan getting mad tough.

00:28:19.400 It's very easy to say, I can spend this amount of money to play Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa,

00:28:25.680 Montreal, and maybe Halifax.

00:28:27.980 Bring in all these people, spend all this time, spend all this time traveling when I can

00:28:33.360 play another six shows in Los Angeles and make double the money and not have to worry about

00:28:38.300 perhaps a 35% loss in revenue because of the exchange rate.

00:28:43.260 I have to now worry about getting people passports.

00:28:45.900 I have to worry about visas.

00:28:47.300 I have to make sure that everybody on my team can actually enter the country.

00:28:51.440 And more importantly, she is getting pulled by every single country in the free world

00:28:58.900 in order to visit.

00:29:00.520 It's not like that she's never come here.

00:29:02.040 She came here five years ago.

00:29:03.740 People have to just calm down a little bit and realize that, you know, she is eventually

00:29:09.160 going to hit Canada.

00:29:10.520 Maybe my guess is going to be fall or winter 2024.

00:29:13.880 She's playing on average 11 to 15 months in advance for these dates, which is astonishing.

00:29:20.500 Growing up, you would never, it would be, it would be so egotistical for an artist in July

00:29:30.280 to think I'm still going to be just as popular next November in order to sell out 50,000 seats.

00:29:38.580 But these are what artists are doing now, which is incredibly wild to me.

00:29:43.460 So it's a lot of things.

00:29:44.500 It's the dollar.

00:29:45.400 It's the size.

00:29:46.300 It's the venues.

00:29:47.140 And it's the fact that, I don't know, maybe she's just mad that secretly she kind of bid

00:29:52.420 on the Ottawa Senators and didn't get that either.

00:29:55.400 She's probably the only celebrity we didn't hear wanted to bid on the Ottawa Senators. 0.99

00:30:00.920 Right.

00:30:01.360 You look at the stadium capacity in Canada, I mentioned Murray Field in Edinburgh, that

00:30:08.780 has a capacity of 67,000 people before you put anybody on the field.

00:30:13.580 Yeah.

00:30:16.360 Commonwealth Stadium is the biggest in the country and it's 56,000.

00:30:20.400 Olympic Stadium is 56,000, but you've got to worry about concrete falling on you.

00:30:24.880 Rogers Centre is just over 40,000.

00:30:27.880 Those are big numbers.

00:30:29.460 Those are massive numbers.

00:30:30.500 But if you can sell out 67,000, 75,000, where are you going to go?

00:30:37.760 Yeah, absolutely.

00:30:38.760 And then it always, doesn't it always just come down to money?

00:30:42.860 She can play at Temple Stadium in Arizona and get 75,000 people there. 0.75

00:30:49.440 So, you know, when you're, again, when you're that big and she is probably the biggest artist

00:30:55.740 that I can remember that had this kind of a demand with probably Michael Jackson.

00:31:00.500 In terms of a solo artist.

00:31:02.640 And maybe before then, it might have been the Beatles.

00:31:05.820 I mean, she's got 11 albums right now on the Billboard 200 album chart.

00:31:09.880 Hold on.

00:31:11.200 Pause there.

00:31:11.820 You just brushed over that amazing statistic.

00:31:15.780 Yeah.

00:31:16.460 Just quickly.

00:31:17.180 Repeat that slowly.

00:31:18.860 How many albums on the Billboard 200 at once?

00:31:23.180 She's got 11 of her 12 albums right now are on the Billboard 200 album chart.

00:31:28.360 She's got four albums in the top 10.

00:31:32.000 Both those marks and those accomplishments, she becomes the first woman ever in music history

00:31:36.860 to accomplish this.

00:31:38.200 She now has 11 number one albums.

00:31:41.060 She now has 12 number one albums on the Billboard 200 album chart.

00:31:44.840 The most by any woman.

00:31:47.020 She just broke the record by Barbra Streisand. 0.99

00:31:48.980 She is now third all time behind Drake and the Beatles.

00:31:53.420 She simply is the biggest artist in the world.

00:31:55.880 There's nobody that even a smidgen comes close to it.

00:31:59.760 She had 22 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 last week.

00:32:03.740 She's got 22%.

00:32:05.260 One in every four, here's another statistic that'll blow your mind.

00:32:09.280 One in every four albums that were sold this month in July in North America and the UK

00:32:16.920 is a Taylor Swift album.

00:32:19.000 Wow.

00:32:19.720 One in four.

00:32:21.060 That's why she dubbed her tour, the Aeros tour.

00:32:24.300 All of her albums are reselling again.

00:32:26.320 Yeah.

00:32:26.460 And I want to ask you about that tour because she's not the only one doing it.

00:32:29.840 You said Ed Sheeran as well, these mammoth long tours.

00:32:32.840 But I mean, just those numbers you're describing put her in a class on her own.

00:32:37.120 But if you're talking album sales, is it because people aren't buying albums?

00:32:41.580 In many ways, we've gone back to the era of my parents' childhood.

00:32:45.220 They didn't buy albums.

00:32:46.100 They bought singles.

00:32:47.500 And maybe people aren't physically buying a 45 and then that little plastic thing you

00:32:53.000 put in the middle to make it work.

00:32:54.940 They're not buying that, but they're listening to singles on their streaming service.

00:32:59.540 Is that why she's so big and by herself or is it just in all fronts?

00:33:05.740 She's just massive.

00:33:06.960 I mean, she's really one of the best when it comes to engaging her fans.

00:33:10.400 I mean, all of her fans dubbed Swifties actually truly believe that Taylor Swift is her friend

00:33:17.000 and his friend.

00:33:18.520 And she just has this psychological hold on her fan through nothing bad.

00:33:23.960 She's not going to turn them into a cult, but she was just able to tap into social media

00:33:28.900 better, I think, than anybody else does.

00:33:30.680 About four or five years ago, Billboard changed the algorithm of their charts so that the different

00:33:41.300 formats of each of the albums count separately as a sale, meaning that if you were Taylor Swift

00:33:50.400 and you put out an album and four different retailers have four different copies with four

00:33:57.220 different track listings, say that there's a bonus track, one for Target, one for Walmart,

00:34:01.980 one for whatever independent record stores and one for only her website.

00:34:06.720 And a fan buys all four, usually it would only count as one album sale because it's the same album.

00:34:13.520 Billboard divided all that up, so now it counts as four.

00:34:16.400 Now you see Taylor Swift and BTS and Ed Sheeran and Drake and all of these superstar artists make

00:34:23.700 anywhere between 15 and 30 different versions of the album.

00:34:28.220 Taylor Swift's brand new record, Speak Now, Taylor's version, has seven to ten different colored

00:34:35.540 copies of the vinyl, and her fans, you better believe, are buying each one of them up to show

00:34:42.140 what a big fan they are, to talk about it online.

00:34:45.920 So they've got different track listings, but it also might be a green vinyl, let's say.

00:34:52.300 It might be a green vinyl.

00:34:53.180 It might be Taylor's.

00:34:55.220 I can't remember if it was Taylor Swift.

00:34:56.340 I think Taylor Swift's Midnight album, the one that she released last time, there were four

00:35:01.080 different back covers of photos, and if you bought all four of them and put them side

00:35:07.200 by side with one another, they actually turned into a giant poster-like photo.

00:35:13.880 And fans were showing each other on social media who was the biggest fan.

00:35:19.920 In some cases, you have to buy a certain album copy through their website in order to get an

00:35:26.860 advanced code for their tour.

00:35:29.620 Sometimes you have to be a member of the fan club, and with that fan club, you get a

00:35:32.860 copy of the vinyl record that you could only get when you're a fan club member.

00:35:37.000 So there's so many different configurations now, and they all count towards that billboard

00:35:41.180 chart.

00:35:41.580 Even though that billboard might have lost its luster in the last couple of years, certainly,

00:35:46.380 but this is what it means to be a fan.

00:35:49.020 You want access.

00:35:50.160 You want to have everything.

00:35:51.680 You want to collect everything.

00:35:53.160 The Beatles were no different.

00:35:54.760 You know, the Beatles might have only made two and a half cents off of each single when

00:35:59.640 they were first striking a big in 1964, 65, but the amount of money that they made on

00:36:05.280 Beatles wigs and hats and shirts and dolls and all the rest of the merchandise.

00:36:10.480 Cans of beetle breath.

00:36:12.960 Pardon me?

00:36:13.500 You could buy cans of beetle breath.

00:36:15.960 Their breath in a can is what you were promised. 0.99

00:36:19.620 I know.

00:36:20.080 I know.

00:36:20.360 You know what?

00:36:20.820 That demand for your and my breath was, I think, stunted by the fact that they could

00:36:26.560 also buy Paul McCartney's breath.

00:36:28.800 But yes, but you know, this all just comes down to the whole, you know, division of where

00:36:35.020 money is coming from.

00:36:37.100 It's no wonder that Rihanna is a billionaire. 0.80

00:36:39.700 Taylor Swift is a billionaire.

00:36:41.220 Drake is probably a billionaire.

00:36:42.700 The Weeknd is a billionaire.

00:36:43.660 You would never have these people making this kind of money, even when adjusted for inflation,

00:36:48.060 simply because there's just more demand for people to spend money on their favorite artists.

00:36:52.000 Music is, has never been listened to as much by so many at the same time ever in history.

00:36:59.460 That's what music streaming has done.

00:37:01.280 And that led people down the path to buy concert tickets, buy the book, buy the autobiography,

00:37:06.340 buy the shirt, buy the hat, buy the vinyl record, buy the cassette, buy the CD version

00:37:10.620 of it.

00:37:11.020 It's just a multitude of ways now that artists can make money.

00:37:14.000 Well, I'm not quite the super music geek that you are, but I'm a pretty, you know,

00:37:19.260 pretty big music fan.

00:37:21.000 And when I was younger, even more so.

00:37:22.940 And so back then the artists didn't get the money, but you and I might have gone into independent

00:37:28.900 record stores and looked around for a while and then quietly asked, do you have any live

00:37:33.860 cassettes?

00:37:34.480 And the guy would, you know, look to make sure you weren't a cop and pull out a box of,

00:37:39.060 you know, bootleg live recordings of concerts and you had to know who to ask and how to get

00:37:44.900 them.

00:37:45.080 Now the artist sells them themselves and they make the money.

00:37:48.140 And so good on them.

00:37:49.440 Paul McCartney had a great line.

00:37:50.840 It was like, he said, every time that I tell a journalist that I don't mind Paul McCartney

00:37:56.320 bootlegs, my lawyer calls me up and says, yes, you do.

00:38:01.100 Well, the Grateful Dead, they didn't make a lot of money, but they made a living promoting

00:38:06.060 bootlegs, but there's a, you know, I'm sure it's not the only one, but there's a famous

00:38:10.160 concert venue I know of in Glasgow called the Barrowlands and an artist will play there

00:38:14.400 on Friday night and Saturday morning.

00:38:16.300 You can buy the concert downstairs in the market, um, uh, outside.

00:38:21.560 So it's, um, yeah, artists tried to do that.

00:38:24.360 There were a number of them, um, pre COVID, um, Pearl Jam was one of them.

00:38:29.700 Certainly, um, where within anywhere between a couple of hours and a couple of months, that

00:38:35.300 show would be available for sale on their website or, or in records or Pearl Jam once

00:38:40.700 had something like 110 albums, live albums available on their tour in the late 1990s,

00:38:46.180 early 2000s.

00:38:47.360 Um, but you know, it kind of, it kind of petered out a little bit or a lot, um, because fans

00:38:54.280 realized that they didn't really want the whole concert.

00:38:57.260 What they wanted was 30 seconds of their favorite song on their phone for free.

00:39:00.680 Uh, and you're someone who, this is the space you work in.

00:39:06.700 And I meant to say this earlier, but if you don't follow Eric Alpert on social media, you

00:39:11.600 should, because most of the time you're just putting fun out there into the world, Eric,

00:39:16.020 but you also do put out, um, you do put out tips for artists and, and one of them is about

00:39:22.120 using social media to grab people and, and create that connection, create that relationship.

00:39:27.000 Yeah, it's something that I, I preached even before I started working in this industry full

00:39:35.440 time back in the late 1990s was that when I was a kid and I got billboard magazine as a

00:39:42.040 subscription for my bar mitzvah, that's what I wanted.

00:39:45.640 And I read the stories of the managers and the record labels and the booking agents and

00:39:50.480 the artists. And it seemed that my fascination, even back then wasn't necessarily always about

00:39:57.840 the music that I was listening to within the grooves of that album. It was the stories that

00:40:02.960 connected me to the artists, what was happening behind the scenes, who I loved, what they were

00:40:08.580 going through, who produced this, who engineered this. And I, and I, it was, it was like my, my

00:40:14.060 star Wars. It was my science fiction, trying to figure out how to get into that world that I love

00:40:19.220 the stories. And it's still kept with me to this day that nobody really cares about this

00:40:25.200 artist song. Nobody cared about you as an independent artist, but the connection that

00:40:30.780 they can make to their fan base, anybody can like your social media posts, but to get them

00:40:36.500 to follow you, you have to believe in what the artist is doing and you have to believe who

00:40:41.600 they are as people who will, what they do in their spare time. And unfortunately that's

00:40:46.740 just the way that it is, especially when you and I, and a lot of our listeners grew up

00:40:50.740 not having a clue what Duran Duran did, except when we read about them in, in smash hits or

00:40:58.560 NME or melody maker. But the dream of thinking about what Led Zeppelin did during their off time,

00:41:05.900 who they were hanging out with, you know, um, what, what it was like being a Duran Duran

00:41:11.740 in, uh, uh, you know, a musician, um, what left up to our imagination. Now that's not the case.

00:41:19.740 So you've got to kind of spread and reveal as much as you possibly can for people to buy into

00:41:25.820 what you're selling, just like any other market.

00:41:29.400 You're going to continue to, to go to concerts this summer. I know that you love staying home.

00:41:34.680 What are your concert plans?

00:41:36.760 This is a really busy summer for me. I'm seeing, um, wait for it. I'm seeing Donny Osmond this

00:41:42.640 Saturday at Niagara. I did an interview with him for my radio show and he might've been,

00:41:48.180 he might've been the best guest I've ever had on my radio show. He was amazing. Um, talked a lot

00:41:56.460 about what it's like when you are really the biggest musician on the planet going from that to

00:42:02.280 absolutely nothing within a short period of six years and what that's like. So I'm seeing him.

00:42:08.020 I'm seeing Peter Gabriel, pink, the chicks Springsteen later on this year. So yeah,

00:42:15.040 I'm out there and I'm paying for it all. So I get it. I get it. I absolutely understand

00:42:20.320 trying to fight against the boss, but yeah, this summer, it seems to be like, I missed it.

00:42:24.680 I missed the fee. I missed the 15 seconds of excitement that happened when the lights go

00:42:31.480 down. And before the artist gets on stage, that's still the high I'm still chasing after all these

00:42:37.820 years back in 1981.

00:42:39.800 Got to ask you this just because we, we are both of a certain similar vintage. Uh, when you go to see

00:42:45.060 the oldies acts, like acts that weren't oldies when we were young and it hurts to think of them

00:42:51.020 oldies, like Mick Jagger at 35 years old. No. Well now, like I went to go see the cure recently

00:42:56.600 and yeah, they pay, they played none of their hit. Well, one hit up until the very end. And then

00:43:04.160 they put five hits in a second encore. And other than that, it was all their new music. And I was

00:43:10.080 like, you know, you're on an oldies tour now, Robert, like Robert Smith is about to turn 65 and

00:43:14.740 start drawing his British national pension. Uh, people want to hear your hits. What do you think

00:43:20.280 artists owe it to play their hits when they're on tours like that? Yeah. You know, I, I do as a

00:43:26.960 music band, but I got to tell you, I've talked to enough of these artists and worked with enough of

00:43:32.300 them to know that it's really hard for them to get up in the morning, knowing that they're going to be

00:43:39.980 doing the exact same show as they did 35 years ago. Mentally, it's a challenge. I don't care how much

00:43:46.320 money you get paid. These people are human and you want to make it exciting yourself. Going out on

00:43:52.220 tour may seem fun. You get to stay in luxurious hotels. You get to travel by bus or by plane,

00:43:59.300 eat food, um, and then go walk out and have 30,000 people adore you for doing whatever you do.

00:44:07.160 But as you get older though, and your bank account goes a little bit higher, you have, um, you're away

00:44:15.220 from your family, you're away from your kids. You like being home. Um, and it's a grind. Robert Smith

00:44:21.820 at 65 can't do the thing that he used to do at 30 or 20. And that's the case for a lot of artists who

00:44:28.220 kind of put their bodies through the ringer in the non-health conscious seventies and 80. So I get it.

00:44:34.460 I think that if you're spending, you know, $450 on a ticket, you want to hear the songs that made

00:44:39.620 them popular. Uh, and I think it's, it's always a balance for every artist before they go on tour

00:44:45.300 to devise a set list of what's going to please everybody. And some artists get the balance and

00:44:50.600 some don't, I didn't feel like the cure did. And, you know, as far as physically demanding,

00:44:54.320 I just recently saw over the last year, I've seen both Rod Stewart and Billy Joel. They're both up

00:44:58.920 there, both of them still fantastic performers, but you can tell they're not where they were

00:45:04.280 10 years ago. Oh, dude. I saw, I have spent the most money I've ever spent on a concert ticket,

00:45:12.580 uh, seeing, um, Genesis on their final tour. Uh, I've seen them about 20, 25 times. Um,

00:45:20.020 their final tour had Phil Collins sitting on a chair, not moving around and not playing drums.

00:45:26.160 I spent $3,500 for a pair of tickets I saved and I, I didn't regret it one second, but there were times

00:45:34.300 when I felt bad for them, not because this was their final tour, but mostly because age catches us

00:45:43.680 all eventually. And some make it to 70 in better shape than others. And it was sad in a way, but then

00:45:51.120 again, whenever I felt down on myself for thinking that at the show, I just looked around and saw

00:45:56.840 people literally crying that they got to see this man before they retired. So to each their own.

00:46:02.400 I would have loved to have seen Phil Collins and Genesis at that point. So, uh, Eric, I could talk

00:46:07.420 about music with you all day, but we both have to get on with jobs. Listeners have to get on with their

00:46:11.740 lives. Somebody has got to pay for these concert tickets. Exactly. We'll talk again soon. Thanks so much.

00:46:17.300 Thanks so much for having me, Brian. It was great to talk to you.

00:46:19.420 All right. The full comment is a post-media podcast. My name's Brian Lilly, your host.

00:46:24.080 This episode was produced by Andre Pru with theme music by Bryce Hall. Kevin Libin is the executive

00:46:29.380 producer. Again, remember, please subscribe to full comment on Apple podcasts, Google, Spotify,

00:46:35.200 Amazon music, listen through your Alexa enabled devices, everything you can do and leave us a

00:46:40.480 rating, a review. Tell your friends about us. Thanks for listening until next time. I'm Brian Lilly.

00:46:49.420 Bye.

00:46:50.300 Bye.

Full Comment - July 31, 2023

The real reasons Taylor Swift isn't coming to Canada (for now)

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