Cruising Ahead Or Navel-Gazing?

For the second year in succession the live music industry goes into the International Live Music Conference with the global economy under pressure.

Once again, the 1,000 or so delegates will hear diametrically opposed views of where the business stands. The media is full of such staggering numbers and statistics that there are few people who haven’t become barrack-room economists.

The ILMC upper-deck bar will probably be equally divided between those holding a glass that’s half-empty and those holding one that’s half-full.

The half-full brigade can point to Pollstar’s 2009 year-end figures that show US concert revenues jumped nearly 10 percent to $4.6 billion, which is certainly a healthy sign.

U2, which will continue to tour in 2010, recorded record-breaking sales. It may be the Irish rock act could swell the figures again, but it’s hard to see how repairing the global economic mess, which may not yet have trickled down to many youngsters, won’t impact the concert-going public.

The new Live Nation Entertainment Inc. has already said it expects profits to be flat in 2010.

The UK officially pulled out of recession in January, although the 0.1 percent growth in the last quarter of 2009 was lower than the 0.4 percent the government and Bank Of England expected.

The UK has a deficit of at least £178 billion and it needs to start balancing the books. It will have to make cuts in public expenditure, raise taxes, or painlessly pay it back out of the extra income produced by a sustained period of growth.

There are what the economists call the “green shoots of recovery,” but it’s hard to imagine they’ll grow at the rate that UK chancellor Alistair Darling needs to see.
It would be like looking through your Royal Garden cabin porthole and seeing Darling and his surfboard dumped beneath a wave, only to see him miraculously riding on the crest of the next one.

With a UK election due in less than three months, whoever wins may have to make the sort of fiscal moves that will be very unpopular with the voters. In five years time the UK is likely to have another very unpopular government. It may not be a bad election to lose.

As far as the music business is concerned, the winner will – one way or another – deal with Internet piracy, the licensing of small venues and probably whatever secondary ticketing scandals surround the 2012 Olympics in London. This year’s ILMC will probably touch on all of them at some point.

The Emerging Markets panel March 13, or the “Submerging Markets” as this year’s reunion has been tagged, could be worth a visit. Apart from Greece needing a financial rescue from Europe, there are several other weak economies in the region.

However, the Balkans and southeast Europe have more major shows than previous years. At the end of last year Live Nation central and eastern Europe vice president Tim Dowdall announced his territory – which includes Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria and a half-dozen of the neighbouring countries – sold a record-breaking 1.35 million tickets in 2009.

In 2010, the Balkan promoters alone – LN and its opposition – will need to sell close to that to sustain the number of major shows and festivals in the area. It’s doubtful if Live Nation expects to sell as many as the 1.35 million tickets it sold last year, and some market watchers fear there may be a repeat of the sort of implosion that shook the Croatian market in 2004, when multiple major shows were canceled or moved to smaller rooms.

Before fixing on the cruise theme, the ILMC organisers may have thought about sending delegates on a trip on the Orient Express – or would journeys southeast of Vienna be considered too risky?

Among the other items on the agenda that catch the eye is Ed Bicknell interviewing Michael Eavis at the breakfast meeting March 14. The ILMC agenda describes the Glastonbury founder as a “dairy farmer from England’s West Country.”

Glastonbury has won Pollstar’s International Festival Of The Year five times in the last six years. The only time it missed was 2006 because the event wasn’t staged, one of the occasional breaks that Farmer Eavis refers to as “a fallow year.”

The BBC has just secured the rights to screen Glastonbury worldwide, as its commercial arms drives to sell more of its music programme overseas. This year’s festival features U2, Muse and Stevie Wonder.

Festival Republic chief Melvin Benn, who runs the UK’s Reading, Leeds and Latitude festivals and also works on staging Glastonbury, will host a panel. On March 13 he will chair The Steering Committee Meeting, which will deal with the way politics impacts the music business.

Given the industry’s worth in both cultural and trade export terms, Benn may well take a look at what the industry’s getting back from the politicians.

Much of the talk in the panel rooms and the bars will likely focus on the merger. yes, that merger, the one between Live Nation and Ticketmaster.

It’s been approved with provisions in the US, but the UK decision to approve it needs a second look after German ticket giant CTS Eventim successfully appealed it. The Competition Commission will review the matter and make a ruling before May 11.

After a day of industry organisation meetings, the 22nd ILMC sets sail at 3 p.m. March 12. As always, it opens with Carl Leighton Pope’s splendidly irreverent take on the live music industry’s current issues. Remember to be early enough to get a seat and hear what he makes of all this.