The real reasons Taylor Swift isn't coming to Canada (for now)
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Summary
Concerts are truly one of the joys of summer in Canada. You meet up with friends, you go to a stadium, maybe a festival, maybe an amphitheater, and for a few hours you get to forget about the world and join together with perfect strangers enjoying the bliss of live music.
Transcript
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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.
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And for a few hours, you get to forget about the world and join together with perfect strangers enjoying the bliss of live music.
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Hello, I'm Brian Lilly, and this is the Full Comment Podcast.
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The music industry has definitely changed over the last several years, decades even.
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Before we get to our next guest who knows so much about this and more, I want to remind you,
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I saw David Bowie at Toronto's Exhibition Stadium with the opening act of Duran Duran.
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The pre-opening act was a little-known Canadian act at the time called the Northern Pikes.
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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.
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Adjusted for inflation, that would amount to about $80 today.
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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.
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As Milhouse once said to Bart Simpson, you've changed, man.
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I'm sure that's a sentiment that our next guest can relate to.
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He's also the host of That Eric Alper Show on Sirius XM and probably the biggest music fan I've ever encountered.
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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?
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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.
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And nobody wanted to work with him until he was kind of lounging around doing a whole lot of nothing, really.
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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.
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So here's David Bowie taking somebody that he's long admired and turning him into another superstar for the next couple of decades.
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And when I tell people that that was the lineup, they always look at me like, what?
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Duran Duran and David Duran Duran was the opening act?
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Yeah, they were kind of on the way down, I guess you could say.
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And then by 87, it was, ooh, do I want to be seen with Duran Duran?
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So it was an interesting and eclectic concert, to say the least.
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Well, let me ask you, what was your first big concert?
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Not like, you know, down at the local community hall or whatever.
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What was your first big concert that you went to?
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The first concert I saw was on December the 6th, 1981, and it was at Maple Leaf Gardens.
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And it was Genesis, who was and still is my favorite band at the time.
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I got an immense contact high because you can smoke inside the building at the time.
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But ever since then, I think I have been chasing that psychological high whenever I see concerts.
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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.
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I got to see the band live, which is still why people spend thousands of dollars on tickets.
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But they want to see the body in front of them.
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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.
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And then ever since then, I think for about 10, 15 years, I think I might have seen at least a concert a week.
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I was, you know, all the way down at Maple Leaf Gardens.
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It was Kingswood Music Theater at Canada's Wonderland, Ontario Place.
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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.
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In my younger years, I went to more concerts than I can remember now.
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Especially when you consider the festivals and you'd see 15 acts in a day.
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But that's okay, because those artists don't really remember that tour very much either.
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Before we get into talking about how this industry has changed and all of that, another question on your musical experience.
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So you said you've been chasing that high from seeing Genesis in 1981.
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Is there one or two that stand out for you the most?
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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.
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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.
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Maybe it's the first time that they're seeing this band.
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That's what I still love about this industry and why I love working 17 hours a day, seven days a week.
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It's that experience of sharing music and talking about it, whether it's in person or online.
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The experience of watching other people love what is so wonderful about music in the first place.
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But I have to say, though, I didn't really get Ed Sheeran.
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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.
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He had a couple of amazing special guests and people that I wasn't expecting.
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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?
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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.
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Those concerts, and I wished I'd gone to see Ed Sheeran, actually.
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I tried to get in to see him at History, which, for people that don't know, was a small club in Toronto.
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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.
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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.
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We thought they were ridiculous when I was spending $35 in 1987 to see Bowie.
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As I said, just that for inflation, it's $80 now.
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I was working a minimum wage job at a supermarket the summer I went to see Bowie.
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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?
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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.
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And concert tickets were always set, even then, by the artists.
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Just the artists had no idea of the sheer demand of how much they could actually get for their tickets.
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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.
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You get to $70,000, you pay off the venue and so forth, and you're walking out of there with maybe $50,000.
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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.
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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.
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I can sell t-shirts, I can sell hats, I can tell people to join the fan club, and so forth.
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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,
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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.
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In fact, Elton John ended off his tour with $910 million of grosses selling just over 8.5 million tickets sold.
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So you take a look at that and you think, wow, that's pretty amazing.
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But Elton John is not nearly making nearly as much money as he was when he was selling albums.
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Because really, except for Taylor Swift, nobody's really selling a lot of records.
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And Spotify, for the most part, are still stuck at the 0.0004 cents per stream.
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So every million streams that you get on Spotify, you're making about $4,000.
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Yeah, and that's split up by the record label, the publisher, the other musician, the producer, the engineer, the studio.
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And then the musician and the songwriters are last.
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But then you take a look at it and you're like, you have to make money on the road.
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So is this why and how the industry has changed so much because of the way we consume music now?
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And then that money is split up by what I listen to and what everybody else listens to.
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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?
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Yeah, give or take about $500 or so between a million streams.
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So when you're Drake or The Weeknd and you have a number of songs over $1 billion, that's pretty good.
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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.
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It was somewhere in the neighborhood of 96% of all songs on Spotify have less than 100 streams.
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Because after you go and beg your family and your friends to listen to your music, most people don't have a publicist.
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Most people don't have a manager or a record label or a marketing plan or Canadian music grant to help you promote.
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So most people are making essentially four one hundredths of a penny because that's what they deserve to get.
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Because that's how many people are listening to you.
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So yeah, the music industry always divided the money based on the format that we were all listening to.
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In the 1990s, when music consumerism was really at its peak, not only did you have cassettes still selling,
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So every record store was fully stocked to the floor, to the ceiling with CDs at $27, $28, $29, $30.
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And that generation of late 80s, early 90s, music bands were not only buying Nirvana and Michael Jackson
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and grunge music and Britney Spears and NSYNC and Backstreet Boys.
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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
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that was all purely profit to the music industry.
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The Eagles broke through with the $100 ticket a couple of years later, which shocked everybody.
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And they quickly realized that on the secondary market, they were not getting a penny.
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That's where it really starts with the rebirth of Chicken Master, of Live Nation, of AEG,
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working on behalf of the artists to try to get as much money as possible from the live show.
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And I sold concert tickets for the first time recently because I couldn't go.
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And so I had to learn about the secondary market.
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And to sell my tickets, because now they're digital, now they're on your phone,
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to sell the tickets, I had to use the secondary market.
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Well, they not only charged me a sale fee, they charged the person buying the tickets from me $49.95 per ticket to buy.
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It's just I had to cancel a couple of hours before the show.
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So I thought, well, let's sell them cheap and quick.
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They set a minimum price above the face value of the tickets.
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People that want the government to do something about the secondary market
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are usually the first ones to realize that if you do that,
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they'll realize that most consumers want the protection to be able to do what they want with their ticket.
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Why should concert tickets be the only thing on the planet that you are not allowed to resell?
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Those prices of those fees of Ticketmaster, they go to the venue, they go back to the artist,
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they go back to the promoter, and about 10% to 15% of that ticket fee actually goes to Ticketmaster
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for allowing you to have the platform to resell it in the first place.
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Make no mistake, Ticketmaster is a wonderful system that deals with almost 600 million tickets a year that they sell.
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They get about 3.5 billion visits to their website.
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And I'm not a Ticketmaster apologist whatsoever or Live Nation.
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Believe me, I don't get free tickets to anything, so I pay for it.
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But Ticketmaster is nothing more than a platform that the artist dictates to Live Nation or AEG,
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the promoter that's bringing them to the city and Ticketmaster using their platform to sell.
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They get to decide, hey, I want to have bots allowed in.
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And that's why a lot of these artists that are kind of giving permission,
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even when you resell it on the secondary market, the artist is still getting money from that.
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Well, at least the artist is getting money because for a long time, that wasn't the case.
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But at the same time, Ticketmaster is something that people have been complaining about for years.
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I think it was for Bruce Springsteen in the 80s.
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They brought out the wristband to try and stop scalpers from buying all the tickets.
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We're dating ourselves, Eric, because we remember lining up at actual sales outlets to get tickets.
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But you know what, because I worked at a Ticketmaster outlet.
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The scalpers started making deals with Ticketmaster box office staffers in order to pull 40 to 50 tickets,
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even before they opened up the doors at 8 o'clock in the morning.
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Now the artist gets a say in how many tickets they're allowed to have on the reselling market.
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You know, and the competition, there's more competition to sell tickets than ever before.
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There's, you know, Ticketmaster is the biggest by far.
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They're almost averaging about 65 to 70% of the North American market for major venues.
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But there's still a lot of heavy-duty competition out there in case if the artist doesn't want to go through Ticketmaster.
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It's just that Ticketmaster is so good at limiting their profit and ensuring that they're not overpaying for the artist
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and doing things fair so that the artist wins, the consumer wins, and Ticketmaster gets a little bit of their cut.
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Believe me, they're still making money, but they're only making money because concerts are back with a vengeance
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where, you know, right now, in terms of the halfway point of 2023, concert tickets are almost up about 35% in North America.
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And in most cases around the world, that number is pretty stable.
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So there's more tickets being sold to more events and more artists are out on tour,
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mostly because they haven't had a chance to go out on tour in over three years due to COVID and the isolation period.
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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.
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But I can tell you that the venues that I go to are much more packed.
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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?
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First off, tell me about the dynamic pricing model.
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Yeah, so dynamic pricing is the ability for the artist to dictate to the promoter,
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whether it's Live Nation or AEG, to allow X amount of tickets to be sold using dynamic pricing.
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And what that is, is that those are tickets that fluctuate based on the demand specifically for that seat.
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Live Nation and AEG and the artist and Ticketmaster have a wealth of data at their disposal.
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They take a look at the last tour and how many tickets were sold.
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They took a look at the secondary market to see how much tickets were sold in terms of scalping
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and how many dates that artist is going to be playing, how far apart.
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And they kind of come up with a number to say we can have three tiers of $500 and $200 and $100 seats
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and we'll sell this amount at this amount and you'll walk home.
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If we wipe everything clean and you sell out, you'll walk away with $22 million for these dates.
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Dynamic pricing allows the artist to say, well, let's take these hundred tickets
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and fluctuate them based on the demand specifically for those seats
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instead of having somebody perhaps resell it on the secondary market.
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But what's interesting is that we see this all the time with just as much anger.
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If you try to buy an airline ticket going to New York three hours before your flight,
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you're going to be paying a lot more than when you did six months ago.
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I went to go buy a bag of lettuce not even two days ago and it was $8.99.
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So we're used to this dynamic pricing and don't even think twice about it except for,
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So dynamic pricing has come to the music industry and that aspect of it.
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But again, the artist has every right to say, I don't want dynamic pricing.
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But it kind of impedes based on their profits and losses too if they don't do that.
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These ticket prices that are $500 for Beyonce recently in Toronto?
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Taylor Swift, we'll get to her again in a moment.
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Is it all these things coming together combined with inflation?
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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
00:23:17.500
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.
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The other aspect of it is that I think the artists are getting really smart and woke up
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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?
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That scalper did nothing to help get that profit.
00:24:01.080
It's based on the cost of transportation and staffing.
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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
00:24:19.800
That's everybody from the roadies to the lighting to the catering and on and on.
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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.
00:25:03.700
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
00:25:15.000
Tom Petty battled his record label MCA back in the late 1970s when his first album was
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.
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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.
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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
00:26:16.160
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
00:26:34.380
Once upon a time, maybe Justin Trudeau could have said that about himself in the political
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.
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He got some slagging for it, but he just simply said, it's me.
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Hi, I know places in Canada that would love to have you.
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,
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She's playing three sold out nights in Edinburgh, Scotland, in a country that has less people
00:27:35.520
Why isn't she coming here when Canadian markets can attract some of the other biggest names
00:27:48.780
The fact that we simply are a massive country in terms of landmass with not a lot of people
00:27:58.280
The entire population of Canada fits into the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey, and
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,
00:28:27.980
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.
00:28:47.300
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
00:29:03.740
People have to just calm down a little bit and realize that, you know, she is eventually
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.
00:29:47.140
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.
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.
00:30:16.360
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.
00:30:30.500
But if you can sell out 67,000, 75,000, where are you going to go?
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.
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.
00:31:02.640
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.
00:31:23.180
She's got 11 of her 12 albums right now are on the Billboard 200 album chart.
00:31:32.000
Both those marks and those accomplishments, she becomes the first woman ever in music history
00:31:41.060
She now has 12 number one albums on the Billboard 200 album chart.
00:31:48.980
She is now third all time behind Drake and the Beatles.
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.
00:32:05.260
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
00:32:21.060
That's why she dubbed her tour, the Aeros tour.
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.
00:32:47.500
And maybe people aren't physically buying a 45 and then that little plastic thing you
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?
00:33:06.960
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
00:33:18.520
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
00:33:30.680
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.
00:34:56.340
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
00:35:29.620
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
00:35:41.580
Even though that billboard might have lost its luster in the last couple of years, certainly,
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.
00:36:15.960
Their breath in a can is what you were promised.
00:36:20.820
That demand for your and my breath was, I think, stunted by the fact that they could
00:36:28.800
But yes, but you know, this all just comes down to the whole, you know, division of where
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.
00:37:01.280
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
00:37:11.020
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,
00:37:22.940
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
00:37:34.480
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
00:37:45.080
Now the artist sells them themselves and they make the money.
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
00:38:16.300
You can buy the concert downstairs in the market, um, uh, outside.
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,
00:38:47.360
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.
00:41:36.760
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
00:42:39.800
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.