A fan has paid £83,000 for a pair of tickets to see the Led Zeppelin reunion concert on 10 December; and there was I thinking they were expensive at their original price of £125.
Now I hear that they are like gold dust. I have to admit that I was never a fan of Led Zeppelin thirty-five years ago when they were in their raging prime. More of an Andy Williams man, myself. And I certainly would not pay several hundred pounds to watch any pop group of yesteryear.
The only circumstances that might induce me to part with my money would be if Led Zeppelin was playing anywhere within earshot. Then I might pay a good sum to pass the evening elsewhere.
How 50-somethings became the new market for music
What is going on? Do fans really enjoy the music that much – or is it just nostalgia? My guess is that it is the latter.
Original Led Zep fans are now into their fifties and sixties. The mid-life crisis is upon them. Their hair is going grey. The ambitions they once had for their career have been replaced by a quiet relief that things did not turn out as badly as they might have done.
Their children use words that they don’t understand, and remind them that they are out of date and dull. They can no longer down ten pints of real ale and bounce out of bed the following morning. Their youth has gone. It will never return, and they know it – but oh! Just to sample the thrill of teenage years once more.
Can they recapture, fleetingly, the feelings they had when they were young? Those sepia memories of the Reading Pop festival. Of Camden and Notting Hill. Of the back seat of a friend’s Deux Cheveux as they cruised down to the south coast. Of the Fresher’s disco, and the pubs down the King’s Road, and the chance that the eyes of a member of the opposite sex might linger upon you for more than just a moment.
The young generations of the sixties and seventies are the middle-aged generation of today. But they would rather not admit it.
Little evokes the past as much as popular music. So back comes Led Zeppelin. Back comes the music of Blondie, now to the West End stage. Back come Status Quo, rocking at Wembley – well, they never went away, did they? On roll the Stones, while Van Morrison, Rod Stewart, and Elton John croon in defiance of the passing years.
This is big business. The fifty and sixty year olds have the money. They have the secure pensions. Their children have been paid for. They have, if they are lucky, their health – and they want to use it before it is too late. They want to be young again. And I don’t mean cosmetic surgery. They want motor bikes. They want flared trousers. They want to jump about at the Wembley Arena just as they did all those years ago.
What else can we offer them? Platform shoes? Wide ties? Shoulder length hair with a centre parting? Maybe I should market a self-assembly bike shed, so that they can nip out and have a quick fag behind it. But above all they want to experience things. They want to bungee jump. They want to feel the wind in what remains of their hair. They want to see the world. And they do not want to sit at home and watch TV or listen to their CDs. There will be all too much time for that later on.
A revolution in the music industry
This is all part of the great revolution that is sweeping through the media industry. The middle-aged no longer buy recorded music. They have all their favourites already. Today’s teenagers do not buy recorded music. They download it onto their ipods free of charge, whether it is legal or not.
The music industry has given up trying to sell it to them. Radiohead released their latest album (is that the right word, these days?) online, free to anyone who wanted it and in return for a contribution from anyone who felt like making one.
The music industry has been turned upon its head. No longer are concerts seen as a platform from which to sell CDs. Today it is the other way round. Recorded music is free. But if we like it enough we will go to the concert. We will buy the T-shirt. We will go to the show or the film that plays the songs we like.
That is why it is so much more interesting to invest in companies like Mama (MAMA), which runs live music venues like the Hammersmith Apollo, or First Artist (FAN), which promotes West End Shows, or X-Phonics (XPH), which works with musicians and song writers, than in companies such as EMI that are still trying to endlessly re-package and flog recorded music.
That business model is just… yesterday’s news, man.
This article is taken from Tom Bulford’s free daily email ‘Penny Sleuth’.