Pimp my gig

Charming security guards, mouth-watering sushi bars and top-notch parking facilities for the family saloon ... the dirty old rock concert has become a gentrified, commercialised jolly old lark in the park. Brian Boydlooks at the reasons behind the change

YOU are greeted off the bus by a solicitous security man in a yellow jacket who escorts you to the right entrance, where another helpful person takes over. There are plenty of bars and restaurants and there are no queues. You're led to your spacious seat, there are no restricted views and the sound quality is perhaps the best you've ever heard. At the end of the gig, more people in yellow jackets helpfully tell you all the transport options at your disposal, detailing journey-time, price and next availability.

For a couple of Irish seasoned gig-goers at the Prince show in the new O2 arena last summer, the above treatment was incredibly confusing.

Where were the surly bouncers? Where was the two-mile walk looking for the right entrance? Where were the 50-deep queues for ridiculously over-priced beer? Where was the bad sound/lighting/ atmosphere? Where was the trauma of trying to exit the venue without having a panic attack, swearing "never again" and then having to engage in hand-to-hand combat for the only available transport home?

The newly built 02 arena, (formerly London's hopeless Millennium Dome) has a lot going for it: it's on a direct Tube line, it's an indoor arena that can hold 20,000 people and it's all still box-fresh and gleaming, but the personnel who work there act like they've been to charm school compared with their counterparts around the world.

The O2 arena represents the future of the live gig. Its arrival has come at an opportune time. CD sales are falling and continuing to fall. As a result, more and more bands are being pulled out of the jacuzzi and put back on the road. The new music industry model is that only about 30 per cent of a band's income comes from record sales/downloads (way down from a pre-digital average of about 70 per cent) and that shortfall is now being made up by box-office receipts and the concurrent rise in merchandising sales.

Time was in Ireland where all there was for the gig-goer was a six-month wait wondering who would be playing that year's Slane - and then six months afterwards talking about the experience. Turn to the pages advertising gigs in this supplement and you will see an astonishing array of acts playing around the country. Add in the festival staples - Oxegen, Electric Picnic and any amount of big headlining shows in whatever castle happens to be handy that week - and you're looking at a fit-to-burst live music calendar.

The beauty of the tour for rock bands is that most of the middlemen are cut out. Of a CD priced at €20, a band would be lucky to see about €3. With the live show, the biggest bands get more than a third of the ticket price. Touring doesn't just shift band T-shirts, band key rings, band hoodies (and the whole array of tat now available on merchandising stalls), it also reboots CD sales. If a band plays a stormer of a Croke Park or an RDS show, their albums re-enter the Irish charts the following week.

Since popular music's inception, it was always the case that the tour was there to promote the album. In pre-MTV days, the trek up and down motorways in a cramped van was the only way to let people know you existed. Album sales have been so downgraded, though, that the CD is now often only there to promote the tour. Radiohead can confidently give away an album for free, but tickets for their Malahide Castle gig next summer cost €70. And no, there's no "pay what you want" option.

When U2 released the massive-selling The Joshua Tree in 1987, the resultant tour played to packed arenas the world over, but only returned meagre profits for "Rock's Hottest Ticket". As quaint as it now seems, a ticket for The Joshua Tree show cost less than the actual album. In the intervening 20 years, though, the ticket price (for the bigger bands) can be five to 10 times the cost of a CD.

U2 are an interesting case study of how the live show has evolved. Even with a hit album on both sides of the Atlantic with War, they still made a loss from their touring in pre-Joshua Tree days. This loss was swallowed by the band and their record company because they knew that touring would bump up CD sales - there was what's known as a cross-collateralisation going on.

On U2's most recent tour, Vertigo, the band played to more than three million people on a 90-date tour which grossed more than $260 million. It says everything about how strong the pull of a live U2 show is that not one single ticket on the entire tour went unsold. Vertigo is now the second biggest-grossing rock tour of all time. (See panel.)

As CD sales have fallen, so has there been a massive increase in the price of concert tickets. The market accepts such an increase because the demographics have substantially changed. Whereas once, people just stopped going to gigs when they hit 25, the new 30-, 40- and 50-somethings are loath to relinquish the teenage kicks of a rock gig.

With more "heritage" type acts (The Eagles, Fleetwood Mac etc) hitting the touring circuit, a new audience has opened up, with these acts dragging their original fan base into the arenas with them.

Expectations have been raised also - if you're paying €100 for a ticket, you want to be able to see the band properly, hear the band properly and not be treated like you are a potential threat to public security.

Bands simply can't get away with what they used to - slouching on stage drunk an hour-and-a-half late, forgetting the lyrics to their songs and generally looking like they're only contractually obliged to be there. Advances in sound technology (similar to what the cinema multiplexes offer over the local flea-pit) and a commitment to putting on a "show" have seen a more professional sheen put on a formerly shoddy affair.

Take That are a prime example of how putting a bit of thought into a show can pay dividends. The band defied conventional boyband wisdom by not just reforming but also playing to bigger audiences the second time around. With little in musicianship on offer, the band are now staging a very tight almost theatrical show that keeps all generations of their fans happy.

At the 02 arena, they're cognisant of all these changes. Sushi bars, organic coffee outlets and haute cuisine have replaced the beer in a plastic cup, and because of its state-of-the-art technology, you feel like you've been to an "event" as opposed to tour date number 27 out of an artist's 62-date tour.

The figures are certainly stacking up for the live music industry. With most every other sector of the music business reporting doom closely followed by gloom, the live market is buoyant. In the US, ticket sales grew by 16 per cent in 2006 to $3.6 billion. Over the past 10 years, the live-music audience has grown by 50 per cent and is still growing.

This is why two much-commented upon decisions this year by well-known artists made perfect sense. Prince gave away three million copies of his new record with a British Sunday newspaper as a loss leader for his subsequent 21-date residency at the 02 arena. Madonna signed a record deal with a tour promoter, Live Nation, and not a record label, because Live Nation know that as exclusive agents for Madonna, her ticket price is five or six times the price of her CDs. You can actually buy Madonna's entire back catalogue for less than the price of a seat at one of her shows.

Over and above all the number-crunching and changing demographics, though, is perhaps a more surprising explanation for the boom in the live industry. So much of our lives are now mediated through social networking sites. Whether it's MySpace, YouTube or this year's hula-hoop, Facebook, there has been a fragmentation in our social worlds. An Arcade Fire or a Bruce Springsteen live show has now taken on the status of almost a tribal gathering as people realise that they are participating in a here-and-now experience that no amount of YouTube footage or reportage on Facebook can replicate.

Here we are. Now entertain us.