In 1978, I was really put out at having to pay $8 to see the Eagles. Everyone knew that concert tickets were $5 and had been for years. Less than 50 years later, you could easily pay 100 times that much to see your favorite musical artist perform. And there's plenty of blame to go around. For one thing, there are lot more people now, wanting to see a limited number of touring artists. Even at the largest venues, an astonishing number of tickets are reserved for fan clubs, sponsors or their clients, and VIPs, which make retail tickets even more scarce than they appear. Then there are fees added. Then there's the infrastructure that allots tickets, which is expensive even when it works. Buying tickets online with a credit card opens up the system to all sorts of abuses that didn't work so well when you had to visit a box office to buy a paper ticket. Scalpers use the latest tech to bypass the safeguards that make ticket buying difficult for fans. The ease of making tons of money for nothing mean that scalpers are extremely hard to thwart. Read how the modern ticket-selling system works to hoover up your money at Vox.
Comments (2)
This argument has a "I think talkies are going to ruin pictures" quality to it. The internet cannot kill print media, that can only be done by stodgy old print workers that refuse to accept their medium is going to change.
Change, not die.
In my experience (I don't work in marketing, but do work with science magazines) magazine sales aren't doing as badly as people presume. Shares in the overall market have divided, from what I've been told, but this is far from 'print is dead'.
What successful magazines are realising is that the web is a tool that augments what they do, not competes with it.
Every new medium that has come into being has been heralded as the 'death' of something. The grammophome heralded the death of local choirs; cinema the death of live theatre; television the death of cinema etc. And while they all evolved from the impact of competing tech, none of it disappeared.
Print will be around for a while yet, even if will necessarily involve a digital component.
Until then I have my popup blocker though.
I now await the developments in the e-reading tech and those other comparable technologies. I see a bright future for magazines and newspapers in that field.