money

Concert-Ticket Sales Slumped This Year, So Prices Will Be Cheaper in 2011

Seeing as no one pays money for albums anymore, the music industry has shifted much of its focus to stoking the lucrative live market. But that’s not going so well either! The Associated Press reports that the numbers are in for the first half of the year, and attendance fell by 12 percent over the same period in 2009; within that, ticketing giant Live Nation saw its numbers from July to September drop 16 percent. That meant a whole lot of embarrassing last-minute price-slashing — and, now, a promise to keep concert tickets affordable in 2011. (Live Nation’s cool with doing that because they own most of the venues where they put on events, meaning they profit when people take all that extra spending cash and buy $9 beers at the show.) This is all of note to the avid concert-attendee, but the best part of the report doesn’t actually have anything to do with the industry’s state of affairs: It’s that the AP wrangled a quote from a presumably pre-rehab Demi Lovato that is incongruously tacked on at the end. Lovato says: “I have best friends that aren’t in the industry and are dealing with just buying groceries and things like that, so I want to do my part.” [AP]

Concert-Ticket Sales Slumped This Year, So Prices Will Be Cheaper in 2011