KOAR News
Posted October 21, 2007 — in Music News
Ticket Prices skyrocketing: Do you remember when you called Ticketmaster hoping to get 7 tickets to you’re favorite concert? I wanted to purchase tickets for all of my friends to share the experience, hoping they would pay me back. I remember being up in arms when ticketmaster told me it was a 4 ticket maximum. Those days are done. Brokers are now sneaking around security measures and using AUTOMATED BOTS to purchase thousands tickets and selling them for insane prices. Tickets for Hannah Montana cost $36.00 at face-value and scalpers offered top seats for as high as $4,000. What is even more ridiculous is that the authorities are doing next to nothing to prevent this illegal trade. The technological trend is on a downward spiral, meaning its causing more harm than good.
CMJ 2007: KOAR always enjoys thrusting our ADD into high gear by hopping from club to club and party to party during the fall CMJ music conference. We get to catch 20 seconds of hundreds of bands. In most cases, 20 seconds is enough. I believe this quote from Idolator sums it up: 75% of the bands we saw this week couldn’t really write a song with a million-dollar recording contract to their heads–hardly a big surprise in the world of “indie” music–but some bands pulled off the atmospheric shtick better than others…..
Houston, TX based alternative rock band Thee Armada have signed to Foundation Records which is distributed by Universal. Their new record will be produced by Brian McTernan (Circa Survive, Thrice) and mixed by David Bendeth (Paramore). Legal rep is Ben McLane.
Free Can’t Satisfy the Thief: According to calculations by Los Angeles company Big Champagne, The new Radiohead album is being downloaded at a higher rate illegally than legally. On the day of the album’s “release,” 240,000 users illegally downloaded the album, and the following days averaged 100,000 more per, ultimately resulting in over 500,000 illegal downloads of a possibly free legal download. (RollingStone)
Thee Armada entered our Top Unsigned list back in May. I announced this signing about a month ago on my site.
These guys work really hard and have some catchy music. Glad to see they are getting some press on other sites.
Comment by Tim Towner — October 22, 2007 @ 6:03 am
The big champaign stats are interesting, its incredible that people go and steal it on limewire that is considerably less quality than on the radiohead site itself. Free isn’t even a bargain which is another valuable learning lesson.
Comment by tina — October 22, 2007 @ 8:41 am
The brokers using automated bots to purchase hundreds of thousands of tickets has really crippled the big concert business. What is even more frightening is that many artists are in BED with these slimy brokers and split profits from price gouging.
Comment by lilly — October 22, 2007 @ 8:46 am
ticketmaster could prevent automated bots with improved security measures, but they really don’t care because its not cutting into their profits and they are getting tickets off there plate. Even with thousands of costumer complaints ticketmaster washes the blood from their hand from illegal scalping.
Comment by davey — October 22, 2007 @ 8:59 am
The people who ‘illegally’ downloaded the Radiohead album weren’t going to pay for it anyway, so it’s not like the band lost money..
Comment by Stu Gots — October 22, 2007 @ 4:32 pm
i think (mainly from personal experience and talking to friends) that many people found the queue at radiohead’s website too long and the download process too lengthy, slow loading, and cumbersome to deal with. When rapidshare or mp3blogs can easily be searched and a quick solution can be reached, the official free download doesn’t mean a thing.
Comment by Jeff — October 22, 2007 @ 8:31 pm
And in other news:
Music Sharing Case
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21139965/
Comment by Scott — October 23, 2007 @ 4:35 am
Scalpers using Bots is a big problem! I purchased 2 tickets for Elton John and was on the phone with Ticketmaster within 3 minutes of tickets going on sale. Best available seats were ok at best.. Later I found out it had sold out in 35 minutes. Of course a few days later I see tickets galore in the Local newspaper and ebay at 3 times the normal price. Its ridicules..
Comment by Rejean — October 23, 2007 @ 6:25 am
“its incredible that people go and steal it on limewire that is considerably less quality than on the radiohead site itself.”
Given that no one has a copy of the cd to rip at a lower quality, I would imagine the files on limewire are the exact same ones (160kbps) you can download off of radiohead’s site. Things don’t magically becomes less quality when they hit Limewire.
“Free isn’t even a bargain which is another valuable learning lesson.”
Or maybe the lesson is “convenience rules.” The word on my street was that the process on radiohead.com was painfully slow & often dysfunctional. I heard stories of several people giving up completely after 45 minutes or so of trying to pre-order a legitimate copy. No one, especially anyone who wasn’t planning on spending any money to begin with, is going to go through that hassle. Not when you get the same tracks quickly & painlessly off of Limewire. 160kbps is actually pretty poor quality, anyhow. The idea that you can only find comparatively low quality files on Limewire is a myth.
Here’s another point seldom made… legal downloads have to swim upstream against identity theft fears & distrust from years & years of inbox spam. Most people don’t want to give any information over the internet, least of all financial information or their e-mail address. Not unless they absolutely have to, & even then it’s only to the handful of sites they trust (iTunes, Amazon, PayPal, etc).
Comment by Jon Cole — October 23, 2007 @ 2:48 pm