A statistic that I probably could have ballparked solely from my
personal observations of this year's Coachella Music & Arts Festival: Year-to-year ticket sales were down by 30,000, with 150,000 people attending the three-day sweatfest, according to promotion company Goldenvoice. The last-minute addition of Prince to Saturday's bill reportedly helped swell that day's attendance to 60,000, and Goldenvoice founder Paul Tollett claimed that Roger Waters'
litter-filled set was one of the festival's "best ever," so I'm guessing that the tumbleweeds rolling through the Empire Polo Field on Friday (headlined by Jack Johnson) were not, in fact, desert mirages. All this number-crunching brings up the whole question of
sustainability in the festival market once again, since "oh, why don't we just book Prince one more time" is not a viable long-term plan if only for reasons of crippling cost. (Just ask the people who book the Super Bowl!) [
The Desert Sun]
Idolator
We all know the music biz is in trouble: Its health is generally measured by sales figures, with reports of the financial failures of major labels a close second. But for people working in the trenches, the industry's health is measured by one simple metric: whether or not people are getting fired. This is applicable broadly, too. Arguably the biz can absorb the various changes going on, and may be making more revenue from other sources even as sales decline. But if they're not making money, that will be reflected starkly in companies either closing completely or cutting large numbers of employees. To find out what the trend is on this score, I went through five years' worth of Billboard Bulletin stories looking for news of closings and staff cuts, and summarized my findings on a couple of charts:
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"Camp Rock, which stars the teen band the Jonas Brothers, scored big ratings in its debut on Friday night (June 20), attracting some 8.9 million viewers, making it cable's most-watched entertainment program of 2008. Those numbers are only about half of what the record-setting premiere of High School Musical 2 scored on Disney Channel last August (17.3 million)." [
