Fact #176421
When:
Short story:
Pollstar reports that Madonna was the biggest worldwide live music draw of 2008, grossing $281.6m (£194.8million) worth of tickets for her Sticky And Sweet tour, $105.3m of this total being in the USA alone. Runners up were Celine Dion, Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen and The Police.
Full article:
PUBLICISING LIVE MUSIC IN 2008
As the ripples from the live music explosion continue, public relations (PR) companies have found their roles and rules changing to accommodate the ever-evolving market dynamic.
Based in the London office of worldwide advertising agency MAndC Saatchi, account director John Parker is well-placed to observe the new alliances being forged as a result of the live boom.
“The Madonna, Jay-Z and U2 deals with Live Nation are an interesting evolvement of the traditional record deal,” he notes. “Free downloading means the music artists create is no longer the thing that earns them money. Tours, merchandise and other artiste-brand partnerships are where the money lies now.”
One effect of these changes is that the very nature of the work undertaken by the PR community has also had to evolve.
“All PR is merging into one new 360-degree style,” reckons Alan Edwards MD at The Outside Organisation, whose roster includes Paul McCartney and David Bowie. “For example, you might now work celebrities off the back of a festival, turn a concert into an event or PR a band as a brand. There’s a convergence of styles and approaches from all areas of PR, which we try to embody at Outside.”
Founded in 1986 to specifically service the music business, LD Communications has increasingly moved into live events of all kinds.
“Probably 60 per cent of what we do now is live events,” says LD director Bernard Doherty. “Record company in-house PRs are over-stretched because of staff cutbacks, so we do Take That on the road, but the label handles the records’ side.
“Sometimes there’s a synergy between promoting the artiste and the tour, with last year’s Genesis tour being a good example, because that was about the core trio getting back together. And we’re doing a Tina Turner tour this year where there’s no new product.”
Richard Wootton, founder of leading country and folk PR agency, Richard Wootton Publicity, says, “Live events are particularly important for heritage artistes and I’m often employed not by the label, but by the artiste. James Taylor approached me directly about his last tour.”
Wootton, who has looked after Cambridge Folk Festival for 20 years, was among the first PRs to realise that many older music lovers and festival-goers don’t listen to commercial music radio.
His successful strategy of targeting magazine shows on BBC Radio 2 and 4 supports his conviction that, “a lot of people only hear new music on those shows, so they’re very important to a festival like Cambridge.”
Great expectations
Pete Bassett, founder of Cambridge-based Quite Great Publicity, works with the Pink Festival and the Cambridge Rock Festival. Like Wootton, he feels it is vital to understand the audience.
“You have to think more broadly, as the age demographic can be far more disparate and they are not driven by the music pages, but by the news and feature sections,” says Bassett.
LD account director Doug Wright observes that festivals can offer PRs a broader spectrum in which to work. “You have access to a wide range of artists for a start. We used Kiss very effectively to promote this year’s Download festival, but you can also get stories about festival catering into food supplements, tent cities into camping magazines and so on.”
Since 1995, Roland Hyams of Workhard PR has cornered a significant chunk of the hard and heavy rock field.
“Ten years ago you could charge five figures to work an album for three months, but so many artistes are now on specialist indies or their own labels, that you can’t do that any more,” he says. “I realised ages ago that I had to get into events and festivals.”
This year’s Guilfest and the London Tattoo Convention will both benefit from Hyams’ expertise. “The connection between the Tattoo Convention and artistes like Ozzy, Lemmy [of Motorhead] and Iron Maiden is obvious,” he declares, “so it opens doors to a range of alternative magazines where those kinds of artistes can be plugged.”
Mel Brown, who started Impressive PR a decade ago, confirms Hyams’ analysis. “The surge in live events isn’t just about music,” she says. “We have an equal balance between tours, new bands and a comedy, because comedians now play arenas and The Mighty Boosh even have their own festival.”
Echoing Edwards’ point about 360-degree PR, Brown says, “We do all the media for our live events, which include Here And Now, Solid Silver 60s and Edinburgh Festival Comedy – that means TV, radio, press and, now more and more, the internet, where sites like rememberthe80s.com are increasingly important.”
Touring diversity
Further evidence of the diversity in the live scene comes from Judy Totton, whose Judy Totton Publicity handled the Monsters Of Rock festival for over a decade.
In recent years she has looked after clients from Kiss to His Holiness The Dalai Lama and all points between.
“We handled The Rat Pack Live In Las Vegas during the four years it played in the West End; three touring circuses - the Chinese State Circus and the Circus of Horrors and Cottle And Austen, and currently the hit show Afrika! Afrika!”
Totton adds, “We do more live work now than ever, certainly more than CD promotion, and a lot of our business comes directly from promoters. Although we're often taken on for specific CDs or back catalogue projects, the days when artistes would engage you ad infinitum are long gone.”
Ed King is PR manager of the Big Cat Group, whose wide-ranging portfolio includes Birmingham’s Custard Factory, home to such venues as Space 2 and The Factory Club.
King feels a secondary factor sparking the live boom was “the introduction of Temporary Event Notices under the 2003 Licencing Act, which allow licencing of events in a much wider range of locations.”
“The increasing number of events inevitably means more intense competition between promoters,” he says. “Festivals, for example, often end up with the same acts on their bills, so there’s a real need for PRs who can make one festival stand out from another.”
Opportunities abound
Even Nikki Wright, whose Global PR company specialises in international events, including Serbia’s Exit Festival, Germany’s Melt! Festival and France’s TignesFest, has found that Britain’s love of live is bringing in new business.
“International events are increasingly interested in promoting themselves in the UK, so I am being approached more from abroad.” she says. “I think this is because Brits are willing to fly to a country they don’t know much about for a weekend of music and mayhem.”
She cites Exit, which attracted over 10,000 UK visitors in 2007, and notes that Spain’s Benicassim and Denmark’s Roskilde are increasingly popular destinations.
Quite Great’s Pete Bassett feels the live boom has opened up a number of opportunities for PR companies.
“It is very positive, not just from a PR perspective, but also from the project management side through to sponsorship,” he says. “We have around 10 to 12 acts gigging every month and, if they’re not signed to a major, we can help with everything from how to maximise CD sales at gigs, through to merchandising and, with our online expertise, how to increase tour traffic to the bands' sites.”
MAndC Saatchi’s John Parker believes music’s gain in this area has been football’s loss.
“During the ‘90s and early 2000’s football was where many brands invested their money, but many have now realised that live music is enjoying a resurgence and are now investing in music.”
Live music events, he asserts, lend themselves particularly well to certain types of brands and he cites Tuborg Lager as a good example.
“Tuborg was re-launched in the UK by Carlsberg last year with a limited exploitation budget,” he says. “Our PR partnerships took Tuborg into as many after-show parties, award shows and exclusive gigs as possible. This led to concert promoters approaching Tuborg to be their official beer at Wireless, Download, Reading, Latitude and Hard Rock Calling, to name but a few.”
Branding sensitivity
Amazing Media director Jacqui Chalmers is delighted with this state of affairs.
“Brands want to align themselves with specialist agencies who understand their brand and can strategically plan campaigns,” she explains. “This is a strong area for Amazing - we are able to work promoter or brand side and this is reflected in our client list, which includes the Shockwaves NME Awards and Nokia Tickets.”
Lorna Burt, co-founder of the Edinburgh and Glasgow-based Burt Greener Communications, says, “The growth in Scotland’s festival scene has generated a bigger music portfolio for us, plus we have added several brand-led music initiatives to our client list – 32 Music, IRN-BRU 32’s new live music platform, and Tennent’s Mutual, a ground-breaking new music programme from Tennent’s Lager.”
Other Burt Greener clients include DF Concerts and T In The Park festival
Branding, of course, can be a tricky art to master.
Zest PR founder Ian Roberts is looking after Vince Power’s One Day at the Hop Farm event in Kent, headlined by Neil Young.
“Neil’s a man of high principle and thinks hard about which events to play, because he doesn’t like to be associated with branding, or the idea of VIP areas at his concerts,” explains Roberts. “So we have to fine-tune what we do to take account of all that. The Hop Farm, with its policy of no branding and no sponsorship, fits the bill.”
Big Cat’s Ed King, sympathises with this approach, saying, “As a PR person, I recognise that this can be an immoral industry. Bands and brands should be kept apart. Too often, brands are in it only for the money, although there are instances – such as the Bacardi Bars at festivals which attract great bands and create a fantastic party atmosphere – where it can work.”
Perhaps thinking of Glastonbury’s failure to sell-out immediately this year, Pete Bassett of Quite Great sounds a warning note.
“There are now too many huge unwieldy events. A return to the smaller, more homely type of event is coming, where friends can meet without feeling that exhaustion is a pre-requisite to the weekend. Sometimes the big events can feel like an episode of Crystal Maze.”
(Source : feature by Johnny Black in Live UK magazine, 2008)
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As the ripples from the live music explosion continue, public relations (PR) companies have found their roles and rules changing to accommodate the ever-evolving market dynamic.
Based in the London office of worldwide advertising agency MAndC Saatchi, account director John Parker is well-placed to observe the new alliances being forged as a result of the live boom.
“The Madonna, Jay-Z and U2 deals with Live Nation are an interesting evolvement of the traditional record deal,” he notes. “Free downloading means the music artists create is no longer the thing that earns them money. Tours, merchandise and other artiste-brand partnerships are where the money lies now.”
One effect of these changes is that the very nature of the work undertaken by the PR community has also had to evolve.
“All PR is merging into one new 360-degree style,” reckons Alan Edwards MD at The Outside Organisation, whose roster includes Paul McCartney and David Bowie. “For example, you might now work celebrities off the back of a festival, turn a concert into an event or PR a band as a brand. There’s a convergence of styles and approaches from all areas of PR, which we try to embody at Outside.”
Founded in 1986 to specifically service the music business, LD Communications has increasingly moved into live events of all kinds.
“Probably 60 per cent of what we do now is live events,” says LD director Bernard Doherty. “Record company in-house PRs are over-stretched because of staff cutbacks, so we do Take That on the road, but the label handles the records’ side.
“Sometimes there’s a synergy between promoting the artiste and the tour, with last year’s Genesis tour being a good example, because that was about the core trio getting back together. And we’re doing a Tina Turner tour this year where there’s no new product.”
Richard Wootton, founder of leading country and folk PR agency, Richard Wootton Publicity, says, “Live events are particularly important for heritage artistes and I’m often employed not by the label, but by the artiste. James Taylor approached me directly about his last tour.”
Wootton, who has looked after Cambridge Folk Festival for 20 years, was among the first PRs to realise that many older music lovers and festival-goers don’t listen to commercial music radio.
His successful strategy of targeting magazine shows on BBC Radio 2 and 4 supports his conviction that, “a lot of people only hear new music on those shows, so they’re very important to a festival like Cambridge.”
Great expectations
Pete Bassett, founder of Cambridge-based Quite Great Publicity, works with the Pink Festival and the Cambridge Rock Festival. Like Wootton, he feels it is vital to understand the audience.
“You have to think more broadly, as the age demographic can be far more disparate and they are not driven by the music pages, but by the news and feature sections,” says Bassett.
LD account director Doug Wright observes that festivals can offer PRs a broader spectrum in which to work. “You have access to a wide range of artists for a start. We used Kiss very effectively to promote this year’s Download festival, but you can also get stories about festival catering into food supplements, tent cities into camping magazines and so on.”
Since 1995, Roland Hyams of Workhard PR has cornered a significant chunk of the hard and heavy rock field.
“Ten years ago you could charge five figures to work an album for three months, but so many artistes are now on specialist indies or their own labels, that you can’t do that any more,” he says. “I realised ages ago that I had to get into events and festivals.”
This year’s Guilfest and the London Tattoo Convention will both benefit from Hyams’ expertise. “The connection between the Tattoo Convention and artistes like Ozzy, Lemmy [of Motorhead] and Iron Maiden is obvious,” he declares, “so it opens doors to a range of alternative magazines where those kinds of artistes can be plugged.”
Mel Brown, who started Impressive PR a decade ago, confirms Hyams’ analysis. “The surge in live events isn’t just about music,” she says. “We have an equal balance between tours, new bands and a comedy, because comedians now play arenas and The Mighty Boosh even have their own festival.”
Echoing Edwards’ point about 360-degree PR, Brown says, “We do all the media for our live events, which include Here And Now, Solid Silver 60s and Edinburgh Festival Comedy – that means TV, radio, press and, now more and more, the internet, where sites like rememberthe80s.com are increasingly important.”
Touring diversity
Further evidence of the diversity in the live scene comes from Judy Totton, whose Judy Totton Publicity handled the Monsters Of Rock festival for over a decade.
In recent years she has looked after clients from Kiss to His Holiness The Dalai Lama and all points between.
“We handled The Rat Pack Live In Las Vegas during the four years it played in the West End; three touring circuses - the Chinese State Circus and the Circus of Horrors and Cottle And Austen, and currently the hit show Afrika! Afrika!”
Totton adds, “We do more live work now than ever, certainly more than CD promotion, and a lot of our business comes directly from promoters. Although we're often taken on for specific CDs or back catalogue projects, the days when artistes would engage you ad infinitum are long gone.”
Ed King is PR manager of the Big Cat Group, whose wide-ranging portfolio includes Birmingham’s Custard Factory, home to such venues as Space 2 and The Factory Club.
King feels a secondary factor sparking the live boom was “the introduction of Temporary Event Notices under the 2003 Licencing Act, which allow licencing of events in a much wider range of locations.”
“The increasing number of events inevitably means more intense competition between promoters,” he says. “Festivals, for example, often end up with the same acts on their bills, so there’s a real need for PRs who can make one festival stand out from another.”
Opportunities abound
Even Nikki Wright, whose Global PR company specialises in international events, including Serbia’s Exit Festival, Germany’s Melt! Festival and France’s TignesFest, has found that Britain’s love of live is bringing in new business.
“International events are increasingly interested in promoting themselves in the UK, so I am being approached more from abroad.” she says. “I think this is because Brits are willing to fly to a country they don’t know much about for a weekend of music and mayhem.”
She cites Exit, which attracted over 10,000 UK visitors in 2007, and notes that Spain’s Benicassim and Denmark’s Roskilde are increasingly popular destinations.
Quite Great’s Pete Bassett feels the live boom has opened up a number of opportunities for PR companies.
“It is very positive, not just from a PR perspective, but also from the project management side through to sponsorship,” he says. “We have around 10 to 12 acts gigging every month and, if they’re not signed to a major, we can help with everything from how to maximise CD sales at gigs, through to merchandising and, with our online expertise, how to increase tour traffic to the bands' sites.”
MAndC Saatchi’s John Parker believes music’s gain in this area has been football’s loss.
“During the ‘90s and early 2000’s football was where many brands invested their money, but many have now realised that live music is enjoying a resurgence and are now investing in music.”
Live music events, he asserts, lend themselves particularly well to certain types of brands and he cites Tuborg Lager as a good example.
“Tuborg was re-launched in the UK by Carlsberg last year with a limited exploitation budget,” he says. “Our PR partnerships took Tuborg into as many after-show parties, award shows and exclusive gigs as possible. This led to concert promoters approaching Tuborg to be their official beer at Wireless, Download, Reading, Latitude and Hard Rock Calling, to name but a few.”
Branding sensitivity
Amazing Media director Jacqui Chalmers is delighted with this state of affairs.
“Brands want to align themselves with specialist agencies who understand their brand and can strategically plan campaigns,” she explains. “This is a strong area for Amazing - we are able to work promoter or brand side and this is reflected in our client list, which includes the Shockwaves NME Awards and Nokia Tickets.”
Lorna Burt, co-founder of the Edinburgh and Glasgow-based Burt Greener Communications, says, “The growth in Scotland’s festival scene has generated a bigger music portfolio for us, plus we have added several brand-led music initiatives to our client list – 32 Music, IRN-BRU 32’s new live music platform, and Tennent’s Mutual, a ground-breaking new music programme from Tennent’s Lager.”
Other Burt Greener clients include DF Concerts and T In The Park festival
Branding, of course, can be a tricky art to master.
Zest PR founder Ian Roberts is looking after Vince Power’s One Day at the Hop Farm event in Kent, headlined by Neil Young.
“Neil’s a man of high principle and thinks hard about which events to play, because he doesn’t like to be associated with branding, or the idea of VIP areas at his concerts,” explains Roberts. “So we have to fine-tune what we do to take account of all that. The Hop Farm, with its policy of no branding and no sponsorship, fits the bill.”
Big Cat’s Ed King, sympathises with this approach, saying, “As a PR person, I recognise that this can be an immoral industry. Bands and brands should be kept apart. Too often, brands are in it only for the money, although there are instances – such as the Bacardi Bars at festivals which attract great bands and create a fantastic party atmosphere – where it can work.”
Perhaps thinking of Glastonbury’s failure to sell-out immediately this year, Pete Bassett of Quite Great sounds a warning note.
“There are now too many huge unwieldy events. A return to the smaller, more homely type of event is coming, where friends can meet without feeling that exhaustion is a pre-requisite to the weekend. Sometimes the big events can feel like an episode of Crystal Maze.”
(Source : feature by Johnny Black in Live UK magazine, 2008)