The
New York Post is reporting that while tickets for Madonna's upcoming shows at New York's Madison Square Garden and one show at the just-across-the-Hudson Izod Center have sold out, ticket sales at other venues in the States have been soft. The
Post's Brian Garrity pays particular attention to Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, which holds 43,000 people but has only sold 27,000 tickets to her November date there so far. (Spot checks of Ticketmaster pages for shows in Boston and Houston also showed that tickets were still available in those markets as well.) Sure, one could cite this as more evidence that the lousy economy is resulting in even those artists who can charge $575 for a VIP package not being as able to make the "earn your money on the road" strategy work as well as it has in the past. So with sales of her final Warner album,
Hard Candy, stalling in the mid-500k range and ticket sales to her road spectacles faltering in the U.S., what does this mean for Live Nation, which shelled out $120 million to have Madonna in its back pocket a few months back?
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Idolator
High gas prices bring the pain to Nashville acts big and small: "To illustrate the situation touring artists now face, [booking agent Keith] Case recalls a recent Ralph Stanley swing into Texas. 'It was just a straight run, not a lot of geography,' he explains. 'He went from home [in southwest Virginia], played three dates that were all closely routed in Texas. He came back and his [roundtrip] fuel bill was almost $2,000.'" [
Today's USA Today has a big piece on rock merch, talking about how $55 concert T-shirts are purchased by people who are "style-conscious and socially conscious" (oddly, the word "suckers" is not used), how being sold at Target hasn't hurt the alleged cool factor of Beatles and Rolling Stones shirts, and how the ever-annoying Katy Perry designed her merch in such a way that's inspired by (her apparent non-reading of) Lolita and "fruit motifs, especially strawberries and cherries." (Because eating them is, like, just like kissing a girl... plant!) It even finds some poor sucker to trot out the already-old-and-reliable "you can't download a T-shirt" notion! But perhaps the best part of the story is Edna Gudnersen's guide to "t-shirt etiquette," which seems to have been taken out of some sort of sidebar storage unit that was last replenished in 2004.
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