Category Archives: Entertainment

Ticket scalpers? Blockchain could fix that!

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Music fans of a certain age and demographic have been complaining loudly about the use of “dynamic pricing” when trying to buy tickets for their favourite band’s highly anticipated reunion tour. (There must be a pun in there about “Don’t book online in anger”?)

Part of the rationale given for using a demand-based pricing system is to disincentivise scalpers. The higher the cost of the ticket in the primary market (not the same as the ticket’s face value), the smaller the potential mark-up in the secondary market. Except that some tickets with a face value of $150 were priced at $450 at the box office, only to be re-advertised in the secondary market for several thousand dollars. In other words, the touts have simply increased their margins, in response to the so-called dynamic pricing mechanism.

Without offering any sort of apology or mea culpa, the said band have now announced additional tour dates, tickets for which will be allocated and sold in a form of ballot. Stop me if you think I’m being cynical, but by quickly adding dates to an existing tour itinerary, it shows that the band knew there would be excess demand, because it’s not that easy to reserve major (and highly profitable) venues, even 12 months in advance. And if they can run a ballot system now, why couldn’t they have done that in the first place?

All of which simply shows how out of touch bands like this are with technology and market dynamics. In short, ticket sales and allocations could have been achieved far more equitably if the band and their promoters had chosen to use blockchain, crypto and web3.0 solutions.

Here’s a simple list of options that could have been used:

1. Issue all tickets as NFTs (non-fungible tokens)

2. Limit the number of tickets per digital wallet and/or the number of wallets per ticket buyer

3. Ensure the use of soul-bound tokens to link wallet ownership and ID to specific individuals (to limit the number of tickets per wallet, and to limit the resale of tickets)

4. Run social media campaigns, quests and airdrops to allocate and distribute tokens that entitle holders to a place in the ticket queue – e.g., the more active a wallet holder is in the band’s fan community, the higher their chance of securing a priority place in the ticket queue

5. Pre-publish the expected ticket price ranges, and enable wallet holders to vote on the minimum/maximum price they would be willing to pay (using something like Snapshot)

6. Cap the amount an NFT-based ticket can be sold for in the secondary market or write the token smart contract to allocate a percentage of the resale value as a commission to the ticket issuer

Of course, the UK competition regulators are taking a close look at this ticketing fiasco, to see if so-called dynamic pricing breached fair trading or other consumer protection laws. If punters were not aware that they may have to pay far more than the advertised or face value of a ticket, this would appear to be unfair and unconscionable conduct. It’s potentially a form of under-quoting – advertise the ticket at a artificially low price, then force buyers to pay well over the face value at the actual point of sale (under the guise of “market demand”), knowing full well that the fans had little or no choice in the matter.

One final thought – knowing the volatile history of this band, the chances are that the concerts (or at least some of them) may be cancelled. Hopefully, the ticket agent and box office operators won’t be counting the advance ticket sales as recognised revenue, rather they are required to hold the funds in a verified escrow account until the performances are delivered and the ticket revenue actually earned….. (again, something that could be easily factored into a smart contract – no release of funds until the loud-mouth sings?).

Next week: Cooking the books?

 

 

 

Sakamoto – Opus

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Live concert films are mostly formulaic. The audience filing into the venue. The performers warming up backstage. The band close ups, the cutaways to the wings, then zooming out to the ecstatic crowd. The sweaty and exhausted atmosphere in the dressing room afterwards. Sometimes the live footage is inter-cut with interviews, location footage, and the “making of” narrative. Occasionally, there will be scenes shot on the road, revealing the inevitable tedium and monotony of live touring.

A few notable exceptions have tried to break with this format, to present something more dramatic, more mystical, even mythical – think of Pink Floyd’s “Live in Pompeii” (knowingly echoed by Melbourne’s own Mildlife), Talking Head’s “Stop Making Sense”, and David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars”.

Often, the concert film becomes a souvenir. For those who were there, it enables them to relive the experience. For those who weren’t, they may get some vicarious thrill, but they won’t get to experience the performance as it was fully intended. These films can make us feel we missed out on an historic event, but they can also remind us why we are glad not to have been there at all (the Rolling Stones at Altamont?).

Many concerts these days (and the accompanying Blu-Ray discs) are all about the spectacle, sometimes at the expense of the actual music. Choreographed to within an inch of their lives, these shows leave very little to chance or the unexpected, with their troupes of dancers, video backdrops, somersaults and acrobatics, multiple costume changes, “forced” audience participation, and the “surprise” guest appearances during the encores….

So the footage of the final live performance by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto goes against this trend. Filmed alone, on piano, in stark black and white, and with no audience, no voice-overs and no talking heads, “Opus” is not strictly speaking a concert. Due to his failing health, Sakamoto was unable either to withstand the rigours of touring or to perform a single concert. Instead, these performances were shot in stages, and edited together to form a seamless programme, with nothing but Sakamoto, a piano, and the music, plus some very subtle lighting and framing. The sound recording is brilliant, and the content covers most aspects of Sakamoto’s illustrious and prolific career. It’s a fitting tribute, and a perfect counterpoint to “Coda”, the documentary he made when he had just come through an earlier health scare.

Sometimes, less is more.

Next week: Severance….

Music streaming is so passé…

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Streaming services have changed the way we listen to music, and not just in the way the content is delivered (primarily via mobile devices), or the sheer number of songs available for our listening pleasure (whole catalogues at our fingertips).

These streaming platforms (which have been with us for more then 15 years) have also led to some more negative consequences: the deconstruction of albums into individual tracks (thereby undermining artists’ intention to present their work as a whole, rather than its component parts); shifting the relationship we have with our music collections from “ownership” to “renting”; paying paltry levels of streaming fees compared to royalties on physical sales and downloads; pushing suggested content via opaque algorithms and “recommender engines” rather than allowing listener self-discovery; squashing music into highly compressed audio formats, thus impairing the listening quality; and reducing album cover art work and design into tiny thumbnail images that don’t do justice to the original. (If you can’t appreciate the significance and importance of album art work, this forthcoming documentary may change your mind.)

Of course, streaming is not the only way to consume music – we still have vinyl, CDs and even cassettes in current production. (And let’s not forget radio!) Although optimistic numbers about the vinyl revival of recent years have to be put in the context of the streaming behemoths, there is no doubt that this antique format still has an important role to play, for new releases, the box-set and reissue industry, and the second-hand market.

For myself, I’ve largely given up on Spotify and Apple Music: with the former, I don’t think there is enough transparency on streaming fees (especially those paid to independent artists and for self-released recordings) or how more popular artists and their labels can pay to manipulate the algorithms, plus the “recommendations” are often out of kilter with my listening preferences; with the latter, geo-blocking often means music I am looking for is not available in Australia. (As I am writing, Spotify is playing a track which has been given the wrong title, proving that their curation and editorial quality is not perfect.)

Streaming can also be said to be responsible for a type of content narrowcasting – the more often a song is streamed (especially one that has been sponsored or heavily promoted by a record label) the more often it will appear in suggested playlists. Some recent analysis by Rob Abelow suggests that fewer than 10% of songs on the Spotify billion stream club were released before 2000. This may have something to do with listener demographics (e.g., digital natives), but it also suggests that songs only available as streams (i.e., no download or physical release), or songs heavily marketed by labels wanting to promote particular content to a specific audience, will come to dominate these platforms.

Further evidence of how streaming is skewed towards major artists is a recent post by Damon Krukowski, showing how independent musicians like him are being “encouraged” to be more like megstars such as Ed Sheeran. Never mind the quality of the music, just think about the “pre-saves” and “countdown pages” (tools which are not yet available to every artist on Spotify?).

I’ve been using both Bandcamp and Soundcloud for more than 10 years, to release my own music and to discover new content. I began with Soundcloud, but soon lost my enthusiasm because they kept changing their business model, and they enabled more popular artists to dominate the platform with “premium” services and pay-to-play fees that favour artists and labels with bigger marketing budgets. Whereas Bandcamp appears to be doing a better job of maintaining a more level playing field in regard to artist access, and a more natural way for fans to connect with artists they already know, and to discover new music they may be interested in.

But all of this simply means that streaming has possibly peaked, at least as an emerging format. The industry is facing a number of challenges. Quite apart from ongoing disputes about royalty payments and album integrity, streaming is going to be disrupted by new technologies and business models, thanks to blockchain, cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens. These startups are going to improve how artists are remunerated for their work, create better engagement between creators and their audiences, and provide for more transparent content discovery and recommendations. Elsewhere, the European Union is considering ways to preserve cultural diversity, promote economic sustainability within the music industry, remove the harmful effects of payola, make better use of content metadata for things like copyright, creativity and attribution, and provide clear labeling on content that has been created using tools like AI.

Just for the record, I’m not a huge fan of content quotas (a possible outcome from the EU proposals), but I would prefer to see better ways to discover new music, via broadcast and online media, which are not dependent on regimented Top 40 playlists, the restrictive formats of ubiquitous TV talent shows, or record label marketing budgets. Australia’s Radio National used to have a great platform for new and alternative music, called Sound Quality, but that came off air nearly 10 years ago, with nothing to replace it. Elsewhere, I tune into BBC Radio 6 Music’s Freak Zone – not all of it is new music, but there is more variety in each 2 hour programme than a week’s listening on most other radio stations.

Next week: More Cold War Nostalgia

 

Revisiting Macau – Asia’s Casino Theme Park

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During my recent visit to Hong Kong, I took a side-trip to Macau, a city I last saw nearly 25 years ago. Last time I was here, Stanley Ho still held the monopoly on licensed casinos, with the Lisboa being one of the most noticeable landmarks in the then Portuguese colony.

Arriving by ferry from Hong Kong, berthing at the Outer Harbour attached to the Macau Peninsular, things don’t look that different from last time. Until, that is, you travel further into the downtown area, which now boasts two-dozen casinos. Drive across the bridge that connects to the island of Taipa, and it soon becomes clear not all is quite as it was.

Between Taipa and the island of Coloane is an area of reclaimed land, called Cotai, forming a contiguous mass that incorporates both former islands. Within this district are another 17 casinos, including some of the most lavish gambling and hotel resorts outside of Las Vegas.

As my taxi pulled up to what I thought was the Sheraton Hotel, I stepped out on to a London pavement alongside the facade of the Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament), complete with Big Ben clock tower and a Routemaster double-decker bus. Across the street is St. Mark’s Campanile and the Rialto Bridge, and down the road is the Eiffel Tower…Welcome to ersatz Europe, as represented by the Londoner, Venetian and Parisian resorts respectively.

If movies are more your thing, then further along is Studio City, a Hollywood-themed complex, round the corner is City of Dreams, then the MGM Cotai, and finally the Wynn Palace.

Out on its own (in more ways than one) is the Grand Lisboa Palace Resort, complete with Japanese department store, and a hotel designed by the late fashion guru Karl Lagerfeld. This complex has cost US$39bn, and will have to work hard to turn a profit even as visitor numbers to Macau start to recover. “Outlandish” does not even begin to describe what beholds the unsuspecting visitor.

Wandering around inside the resorts and walkways that connect the endless shopping malls of luxury goods, the sense of disorientation is heightened – Venetian canals, bridges and gondolas (on a set that could have come straight from “The Truman Show”); red phone booths, Royal Mail post boxes and London black cabs; replica fountains and horse-drawn carriages; the zebra crossing outside Abbey Road Studios; a fake British pub front.

The latter is a reminder that despite the acres of hospitality these resorts offer, getting an alcoholic beverage was actually very difficult, as there was a distinct shortage of bars; until you realise that it’s probably much easier to get drinks within the gaming rooms….

Away from these pleasure palaces, it was nice to know that some parts of Macau remain the same – in particular Fernando’s restaurant next to the beach at Praia de Hác Sá, on the far end of Coloane. There are still a few other authentic pockets of the strange amalgam of “Asia by the Mediterranean” that epitomises Macau’s past, mostly in the more traditional cafes and restaurants around Senado Square, offering Pasteis de Nata and Macanese breakfasts.

But mostly, Macau seems content to outdo Las Vegas – from the Chinese government’s perspective, if you can’t stop people gambling, better to let them do it locally rather than losing their money overseas.

Next week: Trust in Digital IDs