Grateful To The Dead
Courtney Boyd Myers, 07.22.09, 12:01 AM ET via Forbes.com
On a Friday in June, torrential rain showers and a crowd of 15,000 Phish fans (many without ponchos or shoes) descended on New York’s Jones Beach amphitheater, one of the band’s first stops on its summer tour. Despite the hurricane, hundreds of ticketless fans braved the rain, roaming the parking lot for extra passes to the sold out show.
While nearly everyone is feeling the economic pinch, hard times are nothing new to the music industry. Album sales are no longer paying the bills, but concert revenues are. That’s why industry giants like Warner Music Group require new artists to sign “multiple rights” contracts and “360 deals,” in which the company helps pay for and promote the tour in exchange for a significant percentage of profits from ticket sales, merchandise and endorsements. Often these deals are made in conjunction with ticket vendors like Live Nation and Ticketmaster–companies known to aggrieved music fans for adding on fees of up to $15 per ticket.
In this environment, the success of a few niche touring bands like Phish, Widespread Panic (WSP) and the Disco Biscuits, which reject such studio deals, is all the more remarkable. They keep their wallets thick with imaginative grassroots marketing and free distribution of their recordings, and by cultivating a symbiotic relationship with their devoted fan base.
In 2004, Phish held their “last” concert in Coventry, Vt., drawing 65,000 people, despite a storm that left hundreds of cars stranded on a one-lane highway and thousands of fans walking 15 miles to the stage. Four years later, in September 2008, the band members announced that they would reunite to play three nights at Hampton Coliseum in Hampton, Va., in March 2009. Days after Phish announced the reunion shows, and months before tickets went on sale, every hotel within 20 miles was booked solid.
In the months leading up to the Hampton concerts, Phish announced it would also go on tour in the summer of 2009 and play 25 shows (not including two nights at the Bonnaroo Music Festival, for which tickets are sold separately). Tickets were first available through Phish’s Web site, which reserved up to 50% of tickets for each show for the band to sell itself before making tickets available through Live Nation and Ticketmaster. For those band-sold tickets, which cost $50 a piece before processing fees, Phish debuted a lottery system in which fans were able to request tickets to whatever shows they wanted. Winners were notified a few months later, and the losers got their money back.
After the lottery, in mid-March, the first weekend tickets for the summer tour went on public sale via the ticketing companies. Ten million requests overwhelmed Live Nation’s Web site. Phish’s entire summer tour–over 400,000 tickets–sold out in a matter of hours. That’s over $200 million in ticket revenue–for just three months of touring. And it’s not so far behind mainstream pop’s biggest star, Britney Spears, who sold 614,949 concert tickets in the first half of 2009, according to the concert industry publication Pollstar.
Unlike Spears, Madonna and other stars who put on highly produced shows, Phish and WSP are known for their musical improvisation, which makes each night a new experience. When promoter Ron Delzin approached WSP’s manager Buck Williams to have the band play one night at Madison Square Garden, Williams says that he told Delzin, “No, I’m not sure I can sell out one night, I have to have two nights. With one day, we play just to New York City. With two, we play to the whole region, because people come in to see both shows, and it’s worth it for them to travel.” Delzin gave Williams what he wanted and WSP sold out two dates, Williams says.
And to whom should these moneymaking hirsute bands be grateful? The Grateful Dead, of course. They were the epitome of the touring band, gaining fans by word of mouth in the ’70s and ’80s. The band rarely had a hit song on the charts but became one of the highest-grossing live musical acts of its time.
Like the Grateful Dead, Phish and WSP are notorious for their open recording policies, encouraging fans to record their shows for free. “Music once spread through word of mouth. Now it happens on the Internet–very quickly,” says John Bell, the lead singer of WSP. While Internet downloads bite into record sales, it’s plausible that if these bands had enforced their copyright, they never would have achieved such popularity. Bell says, “It’s like being out in the Wild West, as new technology comes into play, new rules have to be crafted. And when I was younger, before the band even started, I’d run around and tape bands.” By allowing people to share shows and music for free over the Internet, Phish and WSP build exposure to their brands.
Bands with live acts worth paying for are able to avoid signing away rights to major music labels. Aron Magner of the Disco Biscuits, a trance jam band from Pennsylvania, says, “We’ve never signed with a label and never will. We’ve never had a problem drawing thousands of fans to our own summer festival, Camp Bisco.” The British band Radiohead, following great commercial success, turned the industry upside down with a “pay what you want” model for the release of their latest album, In Rainbows. Mash-up artist Girl Talk and small indie bands have followed suit. Last summer, both Girl Talk and Radiohead sold out entire tours.
Most niche bands market through their own Web sites. Widespreadpanic.com typically gets 750,000 hits a day while the band is on tour. These bands not only encourage others to record and share their music but also give it away themselves. Hours after Phish’s Hampton reunion show ended the entire three-day set could be downloaded–for free–on its site. A slew of other artists have disrupted the market with free giveaways as well, including Pretty Lights, a deejay who played at Camp Bisco in July 2009.
Amid an economic downturn, fans across the country are willing to make financial sacrifices to reunite with Phish. What’s even more charming about this two-decades-old band is that it gains new concert-goers all the time. As one non-fan who recently attended his first Phish concert (the rainy June show at Jones beach) says, “I think it’s all about the cultural intrigue. [As someone] not coming from that niche in society, it has a sort of hippie-mystique draw … I’d equate seeing a rare performance with getting a Wii before your friends get one.” Niche bands like Phish and WSP succeed by giving music fans what they want–free downloads, and inimitable live experiences.
Courtney Boyd Myers works for the opinions team at Forbes.
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