Take Your Whiskey Home

From today’s Atlanta Urinal-Constipation (get an anonymous login from Bugmenot):

Much of the rest of the summer tour business is as depressing as a Metallica therapy session.

“It’s bad — probably the worst I’ve seen in 15 years,” said veteran Atlanta producer Peter Conlon, who produces Music Midtown and promotes many of the Chastain Park shows.

According to Pollstar, the trade journal that tracks concerts, concert attendance was down about 2 percent through June 2004 compared with 2003.

It’s particularly bad at amphitheaters — down a whopping 35 percent. That’s sometimes attributed to ticket prices increasing so much that only well-off boomers can afford them, and that’s a crowd that doesn’t want to sit outdoors battling heat and bugs.

[snip]

”People aren’t buying tickets,” said Gary Bongiovanni, editor in chief of Pollstar. ”For whatever reason, ticket sales dried up around the middle of April — it was widespread across the industry.”

Remember the $90 Van Halen tickets I mentioned last week? That show’s been on sale since Saturday, and they haven’t even sold out the lowest level of Atlanta’s Philips Arena as of today. This is in a town where the same band–now coming off a six-year no-concert drought–has sold out almost every show they’ve ever played (an exception was the Gary Cherone tour in ’98).

Bad business to price yourselves out of the market, guys. Ain’t nobody down here going to pay $90 each plus TicketBastard fees for the rest of those seats.