They're Not Rocking 'Cuz They're Still Rockin': Older Acts Still Sell Tickets Because They're Still
The impression you get from MTV and Top 40 radio is around 30. That's about the age when many bands start to ease out of rotation (the likes of U2, Madonna and Pearl Jam aside) and fans, apparently, quit buying CDs.
But concert attendance figures paint a drastically different picture. Ask yourself, for example, what the highest-grossing tour of 2005 was. Mariah Carey? 50 Cent? Kelly Clarkson?
Not bad guesses, since they were behind last year's best-selling albums. But nuh uh. Try the Rolling Stones.
While that answer shouldn't be too shocking -- given the Stones' massive ticket prices and their place in rock history -- what may surprise is that out of the top 10 tours, only three acts -- Celine Dion, Kenny Chesney and the Dave Matthews Band -- released their first album after 1980.
"If you look at who is populating the top 20 tours every year, you'll see it's largely the James Taylors and Elton Johns, Bon Jovis and Stones, and all these people who have been around for a while," Pollstar editor Gary Bongiovanni said.
"These are the artists that have a legitimate body of recorded music," added Steve Slaton, the popular drive-time disc jockey on Seattle's KZOK-FM (102.5). "It's stood the test of time. So they're appealing to people of all demographics."
Green Day is actually the first band to appear on 2005's top tours list (at No. 12) with a top album. ("American Idiot" was No. 4 in sales for '05.)
While the Pollstar rankings for the first half of 2006 look a bit (but not a lot) less geriatric -- with Gen-X types like Madonna, Tim McGraw and Coldplay drawing big numbers -- the baby boomers still kick whippersnapper butt when it comes to concerts. And they'll make their presence felt like never before with a whole slew of AARP-eligible rockers on tour this fall.
The Beach Boys will wax nostalgic (albeit with only Mike Love and Brian Johnston
remaining from the original lineup) on Friday at the Puyallup Fair & Events Center. Elton John, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, The Who and Pink Floyd's Roger Waters are all on their way to KeyArena in the next few weeks. And the Stones -- not ones for doing anything small -- have launched a stadium tour that's sure to fill Qwest Field on Oct. 17 and top Pollstar's 2006 tour report.
DIVERGENT PATHS
Bongiovanni summed up a trend he said has become more pronounced in the past 10 to 15 years.
"The recorded music business and the live music business have been on increasingly divergent paths," he said. "The acts that sell concert tickets, many of them are well past their record-selling prime even on a minimal basis, except for catalog product. And you look at the record charts and you see acts debut with ... 150,000 units sold in their first week, and nobody's ever heard of 'em before in terms of live performance. They come out of nowhere.
"A lot of that is rap and hip-hop. Those acts become popular in a different way from the traditional model of touring and recording. It's really more of a recording project. It used to be ... a pretty good indicator (that) if someone was at the top of the charts selling records you could assume they would also be very popular as a concert draw. That's definitely not the case any more."
Meanwhile, it's no longer strange to see a 15-year-old sporting a Led Zeppelin or Aerosmith shirt without irony. And Slaton pointed to growing numbers of young classic rock fans who helped increase the rift between new-school and old-school ticket sales.
"I suffered through the MTV (Video Music Awards) and it was torture," he said of a recent TV viewing experience. "There wasn't really anything there. There were moments of brilliance. I thought Christina Aguilera did a good number. Jack White was there for a moment with Billy Gibbons."
But even those flashes of brilliance don't hold a candle to the likes of Bob Dylan.
"Bob is rock's greatest songwriter. And young people know this," he said. "There's never going to be another Rolling Stones. The Rolling Stones are the greatest rock band of all time. And their contribution is so profound it really can't be measured. And I think young people realize this; and this is their last chance -- or it could be -- to see the Rolling Stones in person."
WHO'S NEXT?
But the oldies have to retire sometime. Especially if Keith Richards keeps falling out of trees while on holiday. So who's going to pick up the slack over the next decade or so?
"U2 I'd say, of the '80s bands, (has) showed the greatest promise," Slaton said.
"The problem is there aren't enough Pearl Jams and Dave Matthewses that have come along and proven to have long-term careers," Bongiovanni said. "That's the real question. Will the hot acts of today still be selling tickets 20, 30 years from now? I don't know. It seems like there's a fairly high turnover among the new music acts. I'm not even going into rap and hip-hop, which is even more volatile in that area, or teen pop."
"Country's a little different," he said. "They've managed to really create a whole new generation of headliners. If you look at the big acts in country music -- Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Kenny Chesney, Rascall Flatts. Those are all relatively new acts in comparison to the rock 'n' roll business, where we're still dealing with acts that have been major forces for 20 or 30 years."
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