Live Music & Brands

There’s an interesting article in the Guardian that suggests that while the music industry can’t compete with recorded content, live music is blossoming  in venues and a myriad of new festivals. On the other hand, brands trying to sponsor festivals are pushing fees up and making the whole thing feel a little too corporate:

"This year too many people have tried to put on festivals; they’ve seen how successful it can be," says Steve Lamacq, Radio 1 DJ. "The problem is, brands at the moment need a good headliner to make their event worthwhile, so bands are in a position to ask more than before. There is a younger audience coming through the live music scene who want the biggest bands they can see, but to do that you need a bigger brand to sponsor the event, and the bigger it gets, the more money bands can demand. How economical that is going to be if prices keep spiralling I don’t know."

…Sponsors are moving into a growing market. While recorded music struggles to compete with rapidly evolving technology and industry veterans lament the death of the single, live music is healthy. A paper titled Rockonomics, by Princeton economist Alan Krueger and graduate student Marie Connolly, found that only four of the top 35 earners in pop music make more money from recordings than live appearances.

…For diehard music fans, the increasing corporate presence in live music has sparked fears that bands themselves are becoming branded. "It can go to extremes when you are bombarded from every side," says Tom Fawcett, long-time live music promoter and editor of Artrocker music magazine. "I think it gets dangerous when a live event starts to get taken over by its sponsor, when the ads become bigger than the gig."

How the summer rock festivals became one big branded beer tent