Garth Brooks at the Wynn: Ticket brokers cry foul [Updated]

In response to anti-scalping measures that Garth Brooks and the Wynn resort have put in place in connection with Brooks’ forthcoming performances in Las Vegas, a consortium of ticket brokers criticized owner Steve Wynn on Tuesday for warning that any tickets determined to have been sold for more than face value would be subject to cancellation and refund at face value.

“Fans should have the right to buy and sell the tickets they want without having to RSVP their guests or risk cancellation based on new, arbitrary rules,” the National Assn. of Ticket Brokers said in a statement. “They’re changing the rules in the middle of the game, and it’s only going to hurt the fans who can’t find tickets, or are stuck with ones they can’t use.”

In announcing Brooks’ engagement at the 1,500-seat Encore Theatre, marking his return from self-imposed retirement, Wynn said stringent measures would be taken to ensure that the $125 face-value tickets would not be re-sold at inflated prices.

[Updated at  5:25 p.m.: "Steve Wynn and Garth Brooks intend to protect guests and fans from the predatory practice of scalpers who seek to charge hundreds and hundreds of dollars over face value for concert tickets," said Jennifer Dunne, vice-president of public relations and marketing for Wynn/Encore, in response to the association's  statement. "They will not be successful at Wynn Las Vegas, as we will cancel these tickets.  Fans looking for seats should not be misled by these scalpers and should understand that these tickets will not be redeemable at Wynn Las Vegas."]

The brokers' association accused Wynn of trying to block competition. “These actions aren’t meant to address any problems with brokers or the reselling of tickets,” it said. “They are meant to restrict the open market and eliminate any competition for tickets.

“Fans hire brokers to help them find the tickets they want, for the price they can pay, or to resell the tickets they can’t use,” the statement said. “Wynn has no right to tell these fans, ‘Hey, tough luck -- unless you bought them at our box office within two hours of going on sale then you can’t go to the show.’ "

The first batch of about 30,000 tickets for 20 concerts at the Encore sold out within a few hours of being put on sale Saturday morning at the Wynn’s website. The shows begin Dec. 11.

-- Randy Lewis 

Live Nation introduces a $50 season pass at club-level concerts

Los Angeles-based concert promoter Live Nation is introducing a sort of season pass for club-level concerts, allowing fans to purchase a $49.99 "passport" to reserve a spot at non sold-out shows for the remainder of 2009. Beginning today, fans will be allowed to buy one passport, which will be good for one ticket at five area venues -- the Wiltern, the Hollywood Palladium, the Avalon and the House of Blues clubs in West Hollywood and Anaheim.

The initial offerings to passport buyers include more than 25 shows, among them Moby at the Wiltern (Oct. 14), Brand New at the Hollywood Palladium (Oct. 18), the Get Up Kids at the Avalon (Sept. 24) and Randy Travis at the House of Blues in Anaheim (Oct. 1). A full list of available concerts is included at the end of this blog post.

Live Nation will release a list of new concerts each Monday on its site and social networking properties. Fans can use their passport to reserve one ticket to participating shows, and as long as there is availability, they will be guaranteed access. Fans must reserve a spot by 4 p.m. the day before a non-sold-out show to be assured of entry. For procrastinators, if a show happens to not be sold out, passport holders can arrive at the venue and will be granted access. 

While there is one passport to customer, there are some restrictions. The passport does not include parking, it can't be combined with any other offers and fans must still try their luck at reserving a spot. However, regular show goers in Los Angeles will have an advantage, in terms of this particular promotion, over other markets, as the concert behemoth does have a larger presence here. Most markets have only one participating club.

The promotion follows Live Nation's "no-service-fee" Wednesday, in which the concert promoter offered discounts and free hot dogs at its arena concerts throughout the summer.

-- Todd Martens

Here is the initial list of participating concerts for the passport, courtesy of Live Nation:

Hey! The Pixies to kick off a mini 'Doolittle' tour at the Palladium

When the Pixies remind us, as they have today, that their groundbreaking "Doolittle" album is 20 years old, does this mean we can start calling the pre-grunge alternative nation era classic rock? Call it what you will (ed. suggestion: nostalgia), but that record was brilliant and dynamic, and good enough that the Boston quartet plans on surfing that wave of mutilation on a tour across the U.S. and Europe.

Promising to play all of the tracks from the 1989 4AD/Elektra release, as well as the B-sides (think "Weird at My School," "Dancing the Manta Ray" and "Bailey's Walk"), the Pixies will kick off their tour at the recently remodeled Hollywood Palladium. "We wanted to do something special for 'Doolittle's' 20th anniversary," Black Francis said in the band's announcement of the concerts, "and we thought this was a good opportunity to play all of the songs from that album, something we don't normally do at a regular gig."

Although many credit "Doolittle" as being the vehicle that really launched the careers of the Pixies (and subsequent solo projects by Black Francis/Frank Black and Kim Deal), the album didn't spend much time on the U.S. pop charts. Not to be overlooked is the video above created by one of the first YouTube phenoms, Tasha and Dishka of Israel, whose lip-synched tribute to the Doolittle hit "Hey" has been seen more than 27 million times.

Official concert and on-sale dates of the Doolittle Tour after the jump

Knitting Factory to close Hollywood club

The rock ‘n’ roll continues to disappear from Hollywood Boulevard.

All-ages music venue the Knitting Factory is opting not to renew its lease at its current location and looks to shut its doors this fall, confirms the company’s CEO Morgan Margolis.

Concerts that include shows by metal act A Static Lullaby and Scottish indie rockers Frightened Rabbit are currently booked through mid-October at the venue, but barring last-minute renegotiations the Knitting Factory’s final show will be around Oct. 31, Margolis said. A representative from property manager CIM Group declined to comment, but did confirm that the club’s lease is expiring.

“Our lease is up Oct. 31,” Margolis said. “I’ve opted not to extend it. We’re closing that location, but we are not out of the L.A. market.”

Margolis said he was speaking to Pop & Hiss while inspecting a possible new location. Rumors of the Knitting Factory’s closure have persisted for more than a year. Last summer, neighbors' complaints threatened the club’s conditional use permit, which a venue needs to operate, and subjected the club to zoning hearings. The Knitting Factory was able to make its case to the city, but Margolis said the battle cost him $200,000.

Margolis said he’s been aiming to leave Hollywood since before the struggle to keep his permit began. “I’ve been looking two years now for the right space,” he said. “I’m looking all over -- downtown, Silver Lake, Los Feliz, North Hollywood, Studio City. I’ve looked as far as Alhambra.

“I don’t want the community to think that the Knitting Factory is done in Los Angeles,” Margolis said. ”I’m looking, and have a couple deals on the table. If one of these goes through, there may be a full-on lateral move and no shutdown. It may just be a week or two changeover."

But before anyone gets too optimistic, he adds, "Or it could be a year.”

With the Knitting Factory on target to exit Hollywood Boulevard, it will be the second major music-related operator to disappear from the neighborhood. Earlier this summer, Virgin closed its last remaining Virgin Megastore in Los Angeles, which was a short walk from the Knitting Factory (a Hard Rock Cafe will move in to the Virgin Megastore space).

Linkin Park, Alice in Chains and Tool to headline the Epicenter music festival in Pomona

Tool, Linkin Park and a revamped Alice in Chains will anchor a new addition to the summer festival circuit.

Dubbed Epicenter, the rock-focused event is scheduled for Aug. 22 at the Fairplex in Pomona and also will feature Australian metal act Wolfmother and Tom Morello's latest project, Street Sweeper Social Club.

Hip-hop artists Atmosphere and Aesop Rock also are scheduled to perform at the all-day event, as are Hollywood Undead, Atreyu and Sonny.

Miley Cyrus -- back on tour

Will Miley-mania extend into 2009?

We’ll find out come June 13, when tickets go on sale for Miley Cyrus' 2009 North American tour, which opens Sept. 14 in Portland, Ore., reaches Southern California for stops Sept. 22 at Staples Center in L.A. and Sept. 23 at the Honda Center in Anaheim.

The tour encompasses 45 dates in 43 cities, concluding Dec. 2 in Miami, and will feature Metro Station as her opening act at all performances. Notably, it's being billed as a Miley Cyrus tour, without marquee billing for her Disney Channel alter ego, Hannah Montana, as on her previous tour.

Her previous tour set off a ticket feeding frenzy among her teen and preteen fans, with scalpers asking thousands of dollars for the best seats at various stops.

This time, tour promoter AEG Live is using a paperless ticket delivery system, where ticket buyers will be admitted to the shows by showing a government issued photo ID and the credit card used to buy their tickets. It’s similar to a system AC/DC used successfully to reduce scalping on its last tour.

-- Randy Lewis

Photo credit: AP
 

Live Nation wants your heart (money), dropping service fees on cheap seats for a day

Concert promotion behemoth Live Nation is scrapping service fees on a number of summer tours, with a few caveats. On June 3, the company will forgo the added service charges for 24 hours only. While the deal will be resurrected on Wednesdays throughout the summer, for now it's good only on the lawn seats.

All told, expect to save around $9 or $12. A pair of $20 lawn seats, for instance, to Nickelback's Sept. 3 show at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Irvine will end up costing $70 when all the fees are included in the cost of the tickets.

So, how does an extra $30 get added to the price of the ticket? Service fees are $9 ($18), and parking is $6 per ticket (the Live Nation website is adding the parking fee to each ticket). So if you buy those lawn tickets on Wednesday, two $40 tickets should cost you $52. 

The Associated Press writes that the promotion will cover 43 venues and that about 5 million tickets will be available in the deals. A number of SoCal shows at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater will be part of the special, including Coldplay, No Doubt, Blink-182 and the Fray, among others. 

Live Nation and Ticketmaster have proposed a merger, and are awaiting approval from the Justice Department. Live Nation reported in its first quarter results that attendance dropped 23% over the same period last year.

-- Todd Martens

Photo: Nickelback. Credit: Chapman Baehler / For The Times

Live: The Dead at the Forum and KIIS-FM’s Wango Tango at Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Irvine

It’s a day of tie dye and top 40 as the faithful descend upon the two L.A.-area arenas.

Jerry Garcia might have died 15 years ago, but ambling through the parking lot of the Forum on Saturday night, you'd have been hard pressed to know he's gone. Two hours prior to the Dead's first L.A. show in more than a half-a-decade, the sun-scorched asphalt was already swarming with people. The scene was a cross between a Renaissance Faire, a Bedouin crossing and the world's most pot-addled family reunion.

Limousines ferrying baby boomers idled next to withered Winnebagos still following a band that first formed nearly 45 summers ago. Rusting school buses cloaked in rainbow Day-Glo paint were packed to the gills with AARP-aged hippies - the strains of "Scarlet Begonias" mingling with the smoke from dirty windows.

Not so far away, at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater in Irvine, a very different kind of arena show was underway: KIIS-FM's Wango Tango, a top-40 blowout featuring Lady GaGa, Kelly Clarkson and the Black Eyed Peas, in addition to a host of other radio-friendly favorites, attended by hordes of screaming teenage girls.

The weekend concerts illustrated two opposing approaches to being a devoted music fan in today's pop culture landscape: Either embrace every genre and artist with the same open-minded ardor or single-mindedly invest all your energies into the one performer, group or style that defines you.

Trent Reznor decries scalping, looks to the future of concert ticket biz

In a post on the Nine Inch Nails message board, Trent Reznor takes on the current hot-button issue of concert tickets and scalping. His post strives to assure fans that no one in the NIN camp "supplies or supports the practice of supplying tickets" to the secondary market, and he notes that tickets sold through Nine Inch Nails' fan club do not result in a "profit center" for the camp.

As industry giants Live Nation and Ticketmaster aim to merge, more light has been shone on the ticketing biz. A recent Wall Street Journal article noted that some of the best seats in the house reach the secondary ticket market via the artist and/or the artist's reps, a practice that can sometimes amount to $2 million in added revenue, reported the paper.

The article prompted a response from Ticketmaster's Joe Freeman, who noted that such practices allow artists to "participate more fairly in the economic value of the experience they're providing to fans." Dynamic pricing is the buzz term, and, in short, it means that the cost of tickets could rise or fall as demand increases or decreases -- more like the airline industry, wrote Billboard.

It's a scenario/proposal that doesn't seem to excite Reznor. Rather than use the term dynamic pricing, he employs the word "auction." He writes:

Michael Jackson sells out 50, sort of -- secondary market tix topping $4,000

Michael Jackson's recent proclamation that his planned shows in London will be his "final curtain call" are inspiring fast ticket sales. Hundreds of fans queued up this morning to buy tickets to the 50-date run, which is tabled to begin July 8, and the BBC reports that all 50 dates have sold out. Of course, that depends on your definition of "sold out."

First, the BBC writes that "more than a million tickets to see the veteran pop star have now been sold," adding that approximately 360,000 were sold to via a pre-sale. Jackson's "This is It!" string of dates will plant the "King of Pop" in London through February 2010. It's quite the bold undertaking for an artist who hasn't staged any substantial live performances in more than a decade and has been plagued by controversy for much of that time.

Of course, the "sell-outs" hardly means that tickets aren't available. Promoter AEG Live cut a deal with ticket reseller Viagogo, reports Billboard.biz. The magazine quotes AEG Live CEO Randy Phillips as saying that "a small percentage of the house every night" had been given to Viagogo.

There's still plenty of tix available, at least for those willing to pay. On the second night of the tour, you can get a pair for $4,217. The ticket prices on the secondary market drop substantially as the run continues, however. If you have faith that Jackson will perform all 50 of his dates (and why would anyone be skeptical?), then you can commit about $700 to see him in February 2010.

Oh, and Billboard also notes that Viagogo "did something really bad," according to AEG's Phillips. Apparently it sent out e-mails to other brokers around London, offering them packages at a discount. AEG is trying to put an end to that.

But why would Viagogo offer tickets to other secondary market sellers at a discount when it has the hottest ticket in London? Is it skeptical of Jackson's recent performance history? Check the fine print on its site:

6.8 All Sales are Final. All sales and bids are final. No refunds, cancellations or exchanges will be issued for date or time changes, partial performances, or lost tickets.

-- Todd Martens

Related: Michael Jackson's London concert tickets go on sale  

Photo: Fans in London line up to buy Jackson tickets. Credit: EPA