Ticket prices affect bands in tough economy

On a warm night in sublimation printer Atlanta, the progressive bluegrass string band Trampled by Turtles quietly unloads its instruments from a modest, nondescript white touring van.
Just another night, just another town for the band from Duluth, Minnesota.
The band is opening sublimation printer for another group, the Hackensaw Boys, at the 300-person-capacity Smith's Olde Bar. The band members are hoping to draw a few new fans in what's been a challenging economic environment. After all, for lesser-known bands -- especially ones that play progressive bluegrass, far from the watchful eye of the American pop charts -- it's often word of mouth that inspires music fans to come out.
"In Minnesota and the West, where we've been touring for longer, we've started to do well on our own," said the Turtles' lead singer and guitarist, Dave Simonett. "But the Southeast is new, the Northeast is new, so either we open for people or play for a much smaller crowd. It's almost town by town."
One thing that helps build the crowd this night is the ticket price: $15.Atlanta is a good music town, and on any given night, there are sublimation printer plenty of options for concertgoing dollars. Knowing this, Smith's co-owner Dan Nolan says the venue has made a conscious effort to keep both ticket prices and service charges as low as possible, reminding customers that they can always just walk up to the bar on any night and buy a future ticket without any extra fees.
For fans who don't want to drive to pick up tickets ahead of time, Smith's uses an online ticketing distributor. But it's a local firm -- Ticket Alternative. And that, says Nolan, helps as well.
"We did Ticketmaster years and years and years ago, and they were just a behemoth. Their fees were too excessive -- their fees were sometimes higher than the tickets," says Nolan. "So, we had to let them go."
However, Ticketmaster -- and their proposed merger partner, Live Nation -- are still the dominant companies in the industry. The idea the two sublimation printer might form one company has raised hackles in the business, not least because of those fees.
On the same night as the Trampled by Turtles show at Smith's, popular indie rock band Modest Mouse takes the stage at a larger Atlanta venue, a 2,500-person converted church called The Tabernacle, which is owned sublimation printer by Live Nation. Tickets for the sold-out show are $32.50 each, plus an additional $12.20 in service fees for those who bought in advance and online -- in other words, the majority of patrons, since the Tabernacle box office is open only on show nights. (The venue also charges fees at the box office.)
Live Nation handles ticket distribution as well as venue management at the venue.
Robin Taylor of Inland Empire Touring has been booking Modest Mouse for the past 11 years and is rather pragmatic about the industry. "With a band as big as Modest Mouse, you have to have a company that sells advance tickets. It's nearly impossible to avoid Live Nation venues in a band's career," she says.
She's not unsympathetic to the fans' fee burden. "Bands can sublimation printer reduce their ticket price all they want," she says, "but the ticketing companies that sell advance tickets are still charging the same prices, which is a big bag of bummer!"
The Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger plan has drawn criticism. The Justice Department launched an investigation sublimation printer of the proposed merger in February, which came just days after a protest by fans and lawmakers over Ticketmaster's pricing arrangements for a Bruce Springsteen show. Springsteen himself accused Ticketmaster of "in effect 'scalping' " the tickets. Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff apologized to Springsteen after that incident.
Neither Live Nation nor Ticketmaster responded to requests by CNN for comment about ticket pricing issues. However, Azoff told a U.S. Senate subcommittee, "[The merger] will give us greater flexibility in how we promote, market and sell tickets to events. It will give us a pathway to alternative pricing and fee structures. And we sublimation printer will be better able to develop new and innovative products and services that enhance the fan experience and make all forms of entertainment more accessible to everyone."
In the shadow of a possible Ticketmaster-Live Nation merger, Ticket Alternative has created a comfortable niche for its business -- venues that hold 3,000 and fewer, generally selling tickets for between $10 and $25.
Ticket Alternative president Iain Bluett says he's not seeing any slowdown in 2009, boasting that his shows are doing well despite the hurting economy.
"When you're spending $150 on a concert ticket, you're going to that one show and maybe another. But when you're sublimation printer spending $10 to $25 on a concert ticket, you can afford to go to three or four shows for that same amount of money," he says.
The company tries to keep service charges down, he adds, adding $2 to a $10 ticket, for example. "We need to make sure that our fee, including the service charge, is still advantageous for the customer to buy ahead of time, rather that waiting to buy it day of show," says Bluett.
There are venues that try to balance both sides. Atlanta's sublimation printer Variety Playhouse, which holds about 1,000, offers two ways to purchase tickets: through Ticketmaster and through its ticket club or on-site box office. The latter methods do not always charge fees.
"We've been independent for almost 19 years," says owner Steve Harris. "For us, it's really about the music, and to be able to run the operation the way that we feel, instead of having to have it all dictated from some corporate office far away."
There were plenty of fans at Smith's who, despite seeing a smaller show on this particular night, said that they'll still go to larger venues, despite the fees. After all, that's where their bands are playing. It's not that sublimation printer they aren't irked by the high prices -- they are. However, most said they can only shrug it off.
But others say they've changed their concertgoing habits given the economy. Smith's customer Eric Sandusky says, "I would prefer to give my money to a cover charge rather than Ticketmaster. I used to go to Widespread Panic shows all the time, but there's no point paying 50 bucks. I'd rather see a new band. I'd rather sublimation printer pay 15 bucks for a show at Smith's."

Review: 'Watchmen' lacks imagination

"Visionary" director Zack Snyder, as the sublimation printer marketing would have it, has filmed Alan Moore's "unfilmable" graphic novel by treating the comic book panels as his storyboard and his Bible.
Doesn't it bother anyone that this is about as far from the definition of "visionary" as it's possible to get?
The visionary sees what sublimation printer others do not see. Snyder -- whose previous films were a remake ("Dawn of the Dead") and another scrupulously faithful comic book adaptation ("300") -- is more in the line of a fancy photocopier, duplicating other artists' imagery with a forger's intensity.
A visionary transforms the world. Snyder slavishly transcribes what's set down 5 inches in front of his face.
Alan Moore, who has refused to have his name on the movie (ditto its Moore-based predecessors, "V for Vendetta" and "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen") and who has declined all reimbursement to protest the entertainment industry's fundamental lack of respect for intellectual property, counts as a bona fide visionary.
His 1986 comic book is a landmark in the history of the form, a masterpiece of pop cultural angst, filtering Cold War nihilism and disillusionment through the inspired pulp idiom of mundane masked crimefighters and one genuine, possibly radioactive, superhero.
In Moore's alternative 1985, Nixon is still president, the U.S. having sublimation printer won in Vietnam. The Soviets are effectively neutered by America's not-so-secret weapon, Dr. Manhattan, a kind of quantum ghost in the machine capable of reconstituting matter (and nuclear warheads) at will. Moore's meta-comic switched back and forth in time with the same facility as Dr. Manhattan morphed between New Jersey and Mars, cutting between a doomsday conspiracy threatening to engulf the Earth and flashbacks relating the biographies of half-a-dozen "watchmen," a generation of intrepid masked avengers forced to hang up their capes and Spandex when public opinion turned on them in the late 1970s. (It's easy to discern the book's influence on subsequent films "The Incredibles" and "Mystery Men.")
With its parallel stories sublimation printer and virtuoso zooming and panning visual tropes, Moore and illustrator Dave Gibbons' "Watchmen" always felt cinematic. You could sense Martin Scorsese and "Taxi Driver's" Travis Bickle in Moore's squalid New York and vigilante anti-hero Rorschach, but proposed movies by Terry Gilliam and Paul Greengrass failed to materialize, foundering on the comic book's sophisticated narrative chicanery.
The solution proposed by Snyder and screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse is simply to ignore the problem and stick to the text. In fairness, this strategy has proved wildly popular in adaptations of the "Harry Potter" books, for instance, "Twilight" and "300." The fans seem to demand it -- just as there is sublimation printer now a common assumption that a longer, unexpurgated DVD edition is inherently superior to the shorter, tighter theatrical version.
"Watchmen" the movie provides ample evidence that more is more, but less might have been closer to Moore in spirit (that is, anarchic, witty and compelling). Clocking in at an exhausting 163 minutes even without some of the book's various subplots, the film forfeits momentum and suspense for a jerky succession of expository dialogue scenes, interspersed with occasional flashes of grotesque ultra-violence. It's all invariably filmed in Snyder's spasmodic, stop-go trademark style and accompanied sublimation printer by a jukebox score that ranges from Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen to Nena's "99 Luftballoons."
On the few occasions where the filmmakers do exercise their imaginations -- in a credit montage relating the glory days of the crimefighters Weegee-style, and in a neat improvement on Moore's climax -- the results are actually ingenious and sharp. iReport.com: Fan underwhelmed by "Watchmen"
But too many key scenes ring hollow, undermined by flat staging and tone-deaf treatment. One of them is the ridiculous sublimation printer moment when Dr. Manhattan's faith in humanity is restored by the revelation of ...
Well, see it for yourself, and then compare with the infinitely more nuanced passage in the graphic novel.
The considerable limitations of Swedish-Canadian actress Malin Akerman are cruelly exposed as Laurie, aka Silk Spectre II, and if Matthew Goode (playing Adrian Veidt) is the smartest man in the world, then we're really sublimation printer in trouble.
Jackie Earle Haley and his "Little Children" co-star Patrick Wilson fare better as, respectively, the angry reactionary Rorschach and mildly conflicted Dan Dreiberg, while it's hard to take your eyes off Billy Crudup's naked blue avatar, Dr. Manhattan -- for various reasons.
I guess an honest reproduction of a great comic book is better than the trivialization that often passes for adaptation, and in this case the material is so ingrained with audacious ideas the movie can't be counted a complete cop-out. But if sublimation printer it was really going to honor the original, "Watchmen" had to put the fear of God in us, to rekindle that prospect of imminent nuclear annihilation that haunted the Cold War world. And it had to remind us these rather sorry comic book characters were, as Moore insisted, more human than super.