Entertainment For Lively Minds
Hello Dolly? I don't think so
Posted by Martin Simmonds on 11 February 2011 - 10:55am.
I've always fancied seeing a Dolly Parton show. Dates have just been announced for a uk september tour. How much do you think they want for the seats on Level 4 at the O2? Go on have a guess.
Only £84 each!
Unless we can get her for the next Word in your ear gig at the Lexington, I'll be giving it another miss.
Surely there has to be something wrong with that pricing model? What's happened to the downward trend?
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Those rhinestones
won't pay for themselves , you know.
Dolly Parton Ticket Pricing Policy?
It's all gone tits up.
Yes
Justified criticism too.
I hope she handles her knockers and doesn't let it get her down oh jesus christ just me shoot where I stand now please....
Damn...
I was gonna make a tits joke.
I guess that's what happens
when folk are downloading her records without paying for them (I think it's called stealing). A girl's got to make her money somewhere. Maybe all the free(down)loaders will reconsider their modus operandi and help to bring live tickets prices down.
I'm sorry
but it's not as if Dolly is wondering where the next dime is coming from. It's just greed, pure and simple. I go to see bands that sell a lot less records than Dolly and also charge a hell of a lot less than £84 for seats at the back of enormodome.
But
Purely playing devil's advocate, if she sold them for £30, the touts would make a killing. So where's the line?
The current model seems to be - put them on sale at £stupid and see how many you can sell, then put them on 2 for 1 to sell a few more to the punters who balked at the original prices and now get a smug air of superiority even though this was the plan all along. Then (optionally) give the rest away via local newspapers.
I thought Seinfeld would never sell at the O2, myself, but was proved utterly wrong.
It gonna bust
the bank to afford this one.
Hmmm.
On a bit of a high horse there, Hazzard. I could be wrong, but I don't imagine a lot of Dolly's audience are into downloading music, stealing it online or whatever. Jay Z's, aye. Kasabian's, aye. Muse's, aye. Not Dolly's, though. Sweeping generalisation I know, but would any of Dolly's audience even know how to go about getting music in this manner? Would they even have computers? (go on, take the bait....!)
I think the reason the tickets are the price they are is because she now considers herself one of the 'living legends', and therefore one of the acts that you must see in concert at least once.
Security's tight at a Dolly gig, apparently. But I'll see you down the front. That's where the biggest bouncers are.
Aimed at Saga louts
I suspect the gig is aimed at the grey power generation who have the resources to consider this sort of financial outlay. Most of those are unlikely to be the offenders of illegal downloading. (Most of her stuff is available very cheaply on amazon anyway).
Even Michael Jackson tickets were cheaper than Dolly's.
Absolutely right, Mr Spector,
I just can't resist a dig! I can see both arguments for free downloading, but I don't think young people who don't see why they should ever pay for a recording really understand what's involved. A young friend of mine, who's a happy clappy Christian, used to do it until I teased him by asking him if he would feel comfortable stealing an old person's pension at the post office. It made him think, since I'm of a certain age and my main income is from royalties. On the other hand, I understand that free downloads actually prompt people to buy as well. And you're right: the audience will be mostly grey/white haired.
Interestingly,
when news broke of Ms Parton's impending gigette this morning at work, the crowd of mostly 20-30 year olds I sit in the middle of (elder statesmen-like, natch') started foaming at the mouth with excitement.
They have all bought tickets. One of them purchased 6. She's probably no older than 22, 23, has Dolly's entire back catalogue and has not stopped talking about the gig/singing snippets of songs since.
Down the front some tickets were £1,000. Others were £250.
So, although most of the audience probably will be old enough to be her grandparent, clearly the first law of economics is applying here.
Good job we're struggling to climb out of a recession, eh - demand being what it is, who knows how much the old girl would have charged (and got)?
Everybody wants cheap or free music
Most people, whatever their age are not used to paying an appropriate price for their music. Young people (like us??!!) will download legally or otherwise, older people who aren't necessarily used to having a music collection, will buy cheap cds or get others to copy cds for them. The people that seem to lose out are artists that can't perform live and the people that go to gigs.
Younger/older?
"Younger people like us"
"Older people who aren't necessarily used to having a music collection"
Where's the cutoff? I'm old (60 next year) and have lived through the entire history of rock 'n' roll. Needless to say I have a *vast* record collection :-)
A 70 year old will have been 15 in 1956 - the perfect age to start collecting music.
The number of older people who aren't necessarily used to having a music collection will be pretty damn small by now!
Oops!
The "people like us" thing was supposed to be a joke - it obviously misfired.
My experience is that, until CDs became mainstream, most people, unless they were big music fans, simply didn't have record collections. Even though CDs were around in 1983, it took at least another 5 years for them to become mainstream and even then they were expensive so a large collection just wasn't built up. Cheap CDs via the Internet have only been available since about 1998. There were lots of people who simply weren't in the habit of buying records and then CDs.
This probably doesn't apply to anyone here but I'm sure that a lot of us have parents and in-laws that it does apply to.
I'm still not convinced...
To all practical purposes, most 'parents' of people who post here will be under (say) 70. As I said earlier, any 70 year old will have been 15 at the dawn of rock and roll.
I'm not altogether sure that the physical medium upon which the music was delivered had anything to do with it. my parents had plenty of shellac 78s and plenty of people of my advanced years had more than a scattering of albums.
Not just the living
Not just the living leg-ends, though. Was browsing the (kosher) web for tickets for another concert and noticed tickets for Roger Hodgson's up coming Albert Hall gig being listed at between £70is and £100ish.
Hmmm... one half of the creative partnership between the now largely forgotten Supertramp (caveat - in "man on the Clapham Omnibus" terms. I would guess that a large proportion of the population would recognise the name Dolly whether they were country fans or not, but Roger?) for best part of a ton a pop. To me that seems even more over-priced than Dolly - who, frankly is likely to do much more of an all singing all sparkling show than Rog.
I guess it's just supply and demand. They can charge that much so they do - there must be folks willing to pay that. Not me, whoever much I like "Give A Little Bit" or "It's Raining Again" as a tune.
Can pay. Won't pay.
We've only ourselves to blame for high ticket prices so long as we continue to pay them. We're just being taken for a ride by these artists who have absolutely no regard for their fans other than as cash cows to be milked. Mind you, I'm still a pushover for remastered box sets...
Not sure what you're getting at
but whatever it is, feel free to get it off your chest.
It costs a lot of money to look that cheap
*gets coat*
Isn't that one of her own quips?
Also:
Interviewer: "Dolly, who does your hair?"
Dolly: "Hell if I know. I'm never there!"
Eek
I saw Dolly a few years ago (she's marvellous by the way, but you all knew that) and almost wept at the £35 I paid then.
£84?! I'd want a boob-job thrown in as well for that money.
She even does a song in your name doesn't she?
I almost got to see her in Atlantic City when we were on holiday a few years back. Unfortunately it was a casino type gig and they wouldn't let my daughter in with us.
Well..
She's just added a second Cardiff date due to demand, so somebody's buying. (Seemingly the Welsh)
Incidentally, anyone after next week's Neil Diamond tickets - £75+fees too for top tickets.
Ron Sexmith at the Barbican
£22 for decent seat and only £2 booking and postage fee (flat fee regardless of how many you buy). That's more like it. £84 is just silly.
Ron looks absolutely over the moon, Lee
http://www.barbican.org.uk/music/event-detail.asp?ID=11554
He also looks like he's
packing a pair of Dolly sized moobs just out of shot.
People will be working 9 to 5 in the morning...
to afford them tickets. I bet she'll be ace though.
May be just me
but one of her UK concerts was shown on BBC2 a while back, and both my sister and I were convinced (and disappointed, as both big fans who would love to have seen her live) that she was miming her way through most of it.
I'd consider paying that if
she did a Sisters Of Mercy song since they covered Jolene...
Oh and she performed topless
Ah'll get me cape
I suspect you don't want to see Dolly without
the supporting engineering in place...
You'd need a seat
in the circle I reckon.
it was
100 quid to see Tom Waits about 2 years ago
The Dan
Same for Steely Dan in Edinburgh IIRC.
For that price you
Might as well buy a plane ticket to Amsterdam. The view from the plane as it flies over the O2 will be about as good as you will get from the "gods" in the O2.