The summer concert season, according to a recent issue of Pollstar, is a disaster. Last year the industry rebounded only anemically after the 1991 debacle; now it’s gazing into the maw of hell as Pollstar’s accounting of the top 20 tours of the year so far puts ticket sales off 10 percent from last year. How bad is that? Well, this year’s top 20 have thus far earned only a skosh more than the top 10 tours did as recently as 1990. Most depressing is the aesthetic news: the three biggest acts–and the only ones to bring in bucks in the ten-digit range–were the Dead, Paul McCartney, and Neil Diamond.
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You’d think that there’d be long faces over at Jam Productions, the biggest promoter in the midwest, but no. “We’ve had a great year,” enthuses booker Andy Cirzan. Why? The answer lies in the way the concert promotion business is financially structured. Promoters offer a band a guarantee based on an estimate of how many tickets the group can sell locally. So it matters less how many acts or how many tickets than how well the promoter finesses the acts and tickets that pass through its hands. Enter the bookers, whose job it is to make the estimates.
And as in the stock market, it’s harder to make money off the sure things. Cirzan won’t talk specific figures, but the Dead, for example, has a reputation for the hard bargains it drives with promoters. This year the band expected to sell out its two shows at Soldier Field. That’s 57,000 people shelling out an average of $26 a ticket–you do the math. The Dead certainly do, and pitch their guarantee correspondingly high. Since there’s little risk involved, Jam doesn’t earn much money on the show.
Even then there are surprises. Take the Spin Doctors tour, an Alternative Nation-sponsored outing with Soul Asylum and the Screaming Trees, which stopped at the World Music Theatre July 25. “I would have been happy with 15,000,” says Cirzan–half a house at the World. “Thirty thousand was mind-boggling. It was the biggest date of the tour.”
