this fucking USA music industry is unbelievable.
they're fighting napster with everything they have.
bcos napster might help you find a new band,
instead of the crap they're pumping out over
the radio. "they" is gonna be SFX.
apparently they even have pearl jam by the balls.
I mean check out
http://www.salon.com/business/feature/2000/07/25/sfx/index.html
... the impending buyout of SFX Entertainment,
the largest concert promoter and venue owner
in the U.S., by Clear Channel Communications,
the country's largest radio station owner.
In three short years, SFX has come to dominate the American
concert industry, applying corporate marketing strategies
to rock and other live entertainment on an unprecedented
scale. In the process, it has been squeezing out a diversity
of different players -- booking agents, promoters and radio
programmers -- those who once were the hidden forces behind
the concerts, responsible for marshaling the artists, the
venues and the radio play.
While SFX may be huge, Clear Channel is voluminous: In addition
to its radio holdings, the company owns 19 television stations,
more than half a million billboards, and a new domain address,
.cc, based in the Cocos-Keeling Islands, that it promotes with
a blanket ad campaign on its own radio stations.
The new Clear Channel-SFX combine promises an unprecedented
level of concentration in an industry that once thrived on the
creative tension between radio programmers, concert promoters
and artists. Clear Channel is taking over a company that has
already destroyed the unspoken system of relationships and
loyalties that long characterized the live music business.
In the new world of one-stop concert production, booking
agents have been castrated, already-successful bands are
offered fantastic sums in return for centralized control
and less well-known bands are left with fewer places to
hone their sound.
[ and about concerts ... ]
SFX's modus operandi from the outset has been to squash
competition from the independents by offering unprecedented
guarantees to artists -- a practice that has led to astro-
nomical ticket prices and rise in 'facility' fees, adding
as much as $4 to $5 to the price of a ticket at SFX venues
(on top of the $5.50 or so usually charged by Ticketmaster,
with which SFX has an exclusive relationship). This year
alone, the company locked up at least 20 national touring
acts with outright purchases -- including N'Sync, Ozzy
Osbourne, Tina Turner and Pearl Jam.
SFX has such a lock on concert venues that it is nearly impossible
to launch any national tour without dealing with the company in
one form or another. Its dominance of venues has been marked by
an epidemic of renaming, as one arena after another is christened
in honor of new corporate sponsors: Fleet Pavilion, Continental
Arena, Staples Center. In April the company unveiled its latest
addition to the legacy of rock 'n' roll: Pringles as the new
"official salty snack of SFX venues," featuring upturned potato
chip canisters cum conga drums for concertgoers anxious to try
their hand at percussion, courtesy of a multimillion-dollar
promotional deal with Procter & Gamble.
[ even Pearl Jam ??!! ]
The SFX-Clear Channel combination puts artists in a difficult bind.
Pearl Jam's ill-fated effort to defy Ticketmaster in the mid-'90s
-- which led to the cancellation of the band's tour, and a virtual
collapse of resistance to corporate dominance of the ticket industry
-- hangs like a specter over artists who might consider resisting the
new combine. Few musicians can afford to bite the hand of a company
that they must rely on for concert dates and radio play.
[ as an American I am forced to conclude: fuck the American Way ... ]
