ILMC 37 Open Forum report: Beyond the headlines

ILMC’s annual state-of-the-nation opening session delved into the stadium boom, ticket pricing and the industry’s evolution following a huge year for live music.

Chaired by CAA’s Maria May, The Open Forum: Setting the Course brought together DF Concerts’ Geoff Ellis, Samantha Kirby Yoh of UTA, FKP Scorpio’s Folkert Koopmans and Ashish Hemrajani of India’s BookMyShow.

In her introduction, May noted it had been a “great year for some” but a “hard year for others”, and questioned whether the business needed to refresh its ideas.

“We’re seeing the massive disparity between the top end of the business and the lower end of the business needing much more support,” she said. “We’re seeing lots of ideas coming out with the levy on venues, and I feel like there’s a real need for innovation.”

However, UTA partner and co-head of global music Kirby Yoh reported positive results from the last 12 months.

“Ticket sales are doing good,” said Kirby Yoh. “I think that the headline shows are doing great. The number one thing for me is understanding the artist’s audience and then, in partnership with the local venues… understanding what is happening in each of the local markets and how we tap into the local media partners.”

“The business is as strong as it’s ever been and the appetite is there at all levels”

Kirby Yoh observed a shift in the tastes of the younger demographic.

“The audience is moving away from wanting the festival experience, and they want to actually go more to have the full two-hour-plus experience, seeing their favourite artists for £100, versus going to the festival for £500,” she said.

Glasgow-based DF chief Ellis said the business is “as strong as it’s ever been”, with the appetite for live music evident “at all levels”, and stressed the need for government support for grassroots venues.

“We have more shows this year than we did last year,” he said. “It’s not easier, because the costs are higher so the margins are tighter, but we’ve seen an appetite for ticket sales as strong as it’s ever been and lots of sold out shows, even in January with just local bands. So that appetite is there for grassroots artists, but also for the big artists as well.

“We’re seeing great sales for outdoor shows like Kendrick & SZA, which was a very high ticket price. The average ticket price isn’t huge. It’s significant, but it’s not huge. It can be £150 to buy a ticket on the floor but there’ll be tickets in the seats for £45/£55, so you’re getting that spread across the levels.”

“We’ve got to get better – and we are getting better – at pricing the house”

In response, May asked whether the industry is becoming “smarter” at pricing tickets.

“Artists want their tickets to be affordable for the mass market and that’s understandable,” said Ellis. “So we’ve got to get better – and we are getting better – at pricing the house. You’ve got an entry level ticket and a premium price ticket, so you might be paying £150 for the best seats but those people would go onto the secondary market otherwise – if you price the whole house at £75, you’re underpricing them and the artist should be getting that money.

“This secondary market shouldn’t exist, but it exists because we don’t always price it properly. You don’t price everybody out because you want the working class people to still go to live music – that’s where most of the audiences come from – but charge a premium for the small section of the house and that helps fund the cheaper tickets.”

FKP CEO Koopmans suggested that although ticket prices on headline shows were “reaching a ceiling”, there were still “enough people to pay those high ticket prices”, but raised concerns over the festival market.

“I think on festivals, there is a big problem,” he warned. “People don’t want to spend €250-300 for a festival ticket anymore. I think it’s also got to do with the change in the community, that during the pandemic… we kind of lost the generation.”

Koopmans said the situation facing grassroots venues in Germany was similar to that in the UK.

“It’s the same story,” he said. “There is hardly any subsidy from the government. You can’t make a penny playing a grassroots venue, and the venues itself are suffering. There are countries like Holland where the grassroots venues get [subsidies]. Therefore, you have a lot of shows and bands get a decent fee to play there. So from my point of view, that’s the way to go.”

“The Indian market’s going to go 10x in the next five years”

Moving onto emerging markets, Hemrajani, who is founder and CEO of Big Tree Entertainment Private Limited, which operates India’s leading online entertainment platform BookMyShow, referenced its recent successes including Coldplay’s record-breaking Ahmedabad concerts and Ed Sheeran’s six-city Indian tour.

“Ed Sheeran was unique, because as a top tier artist, we went really deep into the country,” explained Hemrajani. “It was heartening to see that we could do an end stage format produced by us. It wasn’t easy, but it was historic. The average ticket price was about $100.”

Hemrajani predicted the Indian market would balloon “10x in the next five years”, despite acknowledging shortcomings with its current infrastructure. And said its first fully-fledged arena was in the works for Mumbai.

“Arenas is very loose word in India because we have… mostly festival grounds,” he said. “‘We don’t have arenas in India. And we have a six-month window where we can do outdoor events, because our weather permits us to do events between October to April, or at best May.

“The need of the hour is actually to have indoor venues with real air conditioning and 18-20,000 capacities. We’re building an arena in Mumbai, which will be the first hard arena.

“Infrastructure continues to be a challenge, and we’re trying to solve that as you build more routing around Middle East and Southeast Asia, because the timing works. It’s the same time of the year, from October to March, April, when you can tour in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. I think anchoring around those markets is a good segue to actually building volume into that market.”

“Electronic music isn’t dead, but nightclubs have to adapt their model”

May brought up statistics showing decreasing alcohol consumption among young adults in the EU and US, plus a reduction in binge drinking in the UK, and queried whether venues in the UK needed to change their business models as a result.

“Clearly everybody needs to innovate and adapt. We’re always needing to do that as business,” offered Ellis. “You’ve just got to adapt constantly, because the market doesn’t stand still.

“The rise of country music is phenomenal, particularly in the UK. It’s always been big in Glasgow, but it’s exploded now. If any promoters out there are going, ‘I’m not going to do country music,’ they’re going to miss out big time, so we always have to evolve and adapt.

“Electronic music isn’t dead, but nightclubs have to adapt their model because, as we said, people aren’t coming in and drinking. Not everybody wants to be out until 3am anymore.”

Kirby Yoh pointed out that LCD Soundsystem had added a successful afterparty element to their New York residency.

“It is the continual that actually gets a whole new crowd that comes in later,” she said. “Secondly, they have also taken one of the bars at the back and made it an organic wine bar, bringing in local vendors. I know that’s harder, but it’s another way that has encouraged people to come back.”

On the subject of diversification, Koopmans said he was most excited by FKP’s expansion in the exhibitions world under its FKP Scorpio Entertainment (FKPE) umbrella.

“We invested quite a lot in that,” he said. We are building a [new exhibition] venue in Oberhausen. There’s a lot to be done in that area.”

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