The Music Void was rewarded for making the journey across an uncharacteristically cold and snowy London last week in order to attend the monthly digital music pow-wow known as “OpenMusicMedia”.

Held at the William IV pub near Old St., conveniently close to the Last FM mothership, some of the UK capital’s most interesting people from the digital music space gathered to discuss the issues affecting the live music industry under the evening’s theme “Live & Kicking“.

The guest speaker this month was Ian Hogarth, Founder and CEO at Song Kick, a start-up operating in the live music sector. Despite being slightly upstaged by the pub’s resident cat, Ian persevered and proved a particularly knowledgeable and interesting presenter, giving the audience an excellent overview of the live music sector, both from an online and offline perspective.

About Song Kick
Song Kick has been ‘designed with the music fan in mind’ and aims to make discovering and purchasing tickets for live music events a vastly more satisfying experience than at present. Rather than registering details with individual online ticketing agents, the site simplifies music buying for fans by aggregating gig listings from over 25 major vendors in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Along with ‘online ticketed gigs’, the site’s crawler also picks up and lists gigs that are selling tickets in a more traditional way e.g. at a box office. The service currently lists shows from about 750K indexed artists. Song Kick also has a recommendation element, suggesting gigs from artists based on their proximity to established fan favourites in places such as gig reviews and fan sites.

In Ian’s words; “We’re trying to make finding and attending gigs as easy as choosing and going to see a film.”

The Live Music Food Chain
The discussion then turned to a general overview of the state of the live music buisness. The following breakdown was offered by Ian as a rough-guide to the live music value chain:

• Artists 50-75% (includes Management 20%)

• Agents 2-10%

• Promoters/Venues 0-5% (sometimes even loss-leading)

• Ticket Vendors 5-6%

Additional revenue (for Promoters) arises from:

• Concessions/Parking – Promoter/Venue (explains willingness to take a loss on ticketing)
• Sponsorships – Promoter/Venue ($0.5b in USA in 2003, rose to $1bn+ in 2008)

Other revenue streams include:

• Royalties – Performing Rights Societies/Artists
• Recordings – Publishers/Artists
• Brand tie-ups – Promoters/Artists (al-la Groove Armada/Bacardi. See TMV review here)

Inevitably, the question of the much-hated ‘ticketing surcharges’ arose. Interestingly, it was pointed out that Ticketing Vendors such as Ticketmaster frequently pay the Promoter and Vendor costs up-front, hence absorbing risk, and then seek to recover these investments from the surcharges. This is not always clear to the average ticket buyer.

Live Music Exploding
Next, the discussion turned to what most of us have been hearing, namely that live music is doing better than ever. In a world where the thrill of locating a 12” Import has given way to a Google search; where bustling music stores have given way to webpages and where dazzling album artwork has been replaced by invisible MP3 files, the live music experience has become one of the last remaining ‘unique experiences’ left in music.

As David Bowie once said:

”Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity…So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left. It’s terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn’t matter if you think it’s exciting or not; it’s what’s going to happen.” [ed: TMV thanks to OpenMusicMedia for locating quote]

The numbers reflect this:

• According to the figures quoted at the event, the live music market in North America alone has risen from $1.3b in 1998 to a whopping $3.9b in 2008. Worldwide, live music tickets represent $35bn in revenues.

• In the UK, the percentage of the population attending a gig in last 12 months has risen from 24% to 33% of the population. This figure includes festival attendances.

• In 2003, the average percentage of an artist’s income stemming from live music was 33%. In 2007 this rose to an incredible 67%!

Of course, this last figure is an aggregate, with the reality being that a relatively small number of mega-acts are earning a hugely disproportionate amount of the money, but it also shows that the general public are seeking out live music events more than ever. With digital pirates continuing unabated and so threatening download and CD sales, the question was raised whether this would spell danger for the “non-touring” artists?

Our guest speaker didn’t necessarily think so, but he did feel that it probably meant that they would either have to ‘hit the road’ in the future or be much more innovative and flexible in the way they monetise their work.

Which Artists Will Prosper?

At this stage, Ian speculated on how many artists might actually be able to make decent living from live music alone. Doing some rough calculations, he estimated that for a 3 or 4 member band, they would have to be touring 1K+ capacity venues (e.g. the Scala in London) fairly regularly (1-3 times/month) in order to cover costs and make a ‘comfortable’ living.

Taking this assumption further, he then looked at how many bands sold out the Scala in 2008 and then at the size of those band’s communities on MySpace. While the figures are obviously very fast and loose, they are indicative. Ian estimated that of all the bands/artists on MySpace, perhaps only 30,000 of the 5m+ artists claimed to be hosted on MySpace could realistically support themselves live.

Side observation: Ian estimated that when all the duplicate and derelict sites are taken into account that MySpace actually hosts something much closer to 700K artist profiles in reality.

Next Month’s Event & A Charitable Request
Overall the evening was entertaining and informative. For more information and details of the next event, visit the OpenMediaMusic blog: http://openmusicmedia.wordpress.com

The event organisers and Song Kick are also asking that all of us in the music industry to check out the charity website Twestival (Twitter + Bestival) which will take place this Thursday, February 12th in over 175 cities worldwide and at a mobile phone near you. They are requesting donated tracks as well as T-shirt and song sales in order to help raise $20K+ for seriously worthwhile organisation Charity:Water.

“Right now 1.1 billion people on the planet don’t have access to safe, clean drinking water. That’s one in six of us. Please do what you can to help give something back to those going without this the most basic of life-sustaining commodities.”

Other readers also read:

Event Report: Eurosonic 2010

Event Report – Bounce (London, UK)

Event Report: All2gether Now (Berlin)