Author|Sisyphus
As a live music lover, have you struggled with which concert to watch lately?
On March 25, Li Ronghao's national tour of "Across the World" began at the Nanjing Olympic Sports Center Stadium. The lowest temperature in Nanjing that day was 10 degrees, and the entire stadium was still full of spectators; On the same night, Lin Junjie braved the rain to hold a concert at the Hong Kong Central Waterfront Event Space, and fans watched the concert in the rain; On the evening of the 26th, singer Old Wolf opened the "Time Flow" concert at the Cadillac Center in Beijing, making fans cry.
In just two days, there were three big star concerts. Next, a series of stars, including Jay Chou, Xue Zhiqian, Zhang Jie, Zhang Shaohan, Liu Ruoying and so on, will start their national tour. According to incomplete media statistics, there will be at least 200 star concerts this year.
"No way, the market demand is here. The previously scheduled concert has been delayed again and again, three years, fans are holding back, we also want to seize this wave of revenge consumption opportunity, the earlier the concert starts, the more advantageous in popularity. A performance agency said.
In the face of hungry fans, star artists, performers, and scalpers all rushed forward with full power.
Entertainment Capital learned that scalpers used more than 3,000 WeChat groups to grab tickets together, and the price of Jay Chou's internal tickets soared 10 times; Tickets for concerts of second-tier celebrities start at twice the face price; Audiences are more common than in previous years when they buy and are "refunded"; Even the hot concert market has spawned a new generation of scalpers in China.
It can be said that the entire concert market is booming and chaotic.
Some insiders are worried that this year's concert market is too hot, and while digesting the previous inventory, it is also overdrawing the spending power of fans. Due to the large environment of consumption, this hot situation will not last long, and after this year's concentrated release, the market will return to a stable period next year.
Half a month ago, the more scalpers sold tickets, the more they lost money
After three years, fans finally went to see the star concert live.
On the evening of March 25, when Li Ronghao began to cover "Qilin", the audience was boiling. There was a female fan with incomplete notes who sang "The King of Comedy" throughout the whole process, which was filmed by the surrounding audience and posted online. Some people in the video comment area said that the grandstand ticket that was only bought at 980, this young lady sang 900 live, Li Ronghao sang 80, out of tune is not important, the important thing is to vent, it is crazy.
If you look at the ticket sales and face price in the primary market, it is actually difficult to feel the popularity of this year's concert market. After all, it is the norm for head star concerts to be sold out as soon as they are ticketed. According to the observation of Ferris wheel ticketing CEO Liu Hui, the current star concert ticket price has not changed much compared with 2019, and it is generally 380, 580, 780, 980, 1280, 1580 and other grades.
But the real market and ticket trading situation is only known to scalpers.
"This year, the concert market was more hot than we expected, which caught us off guard." A big scalper said that about half a month ago, as long as you sell tickets, you would lose money, and you could only stop the loss if you didn't sell them. The reason is that the market is too hot, and all concert ticket prices are changing from time to time and rising all the time.
Scalpers generally only have 10% of the cash tickets in their hands, and the remaining 90% are temporarily transferred from peers when there are spectators to buy them. This year, they just hung a price on a second-hand ticketing website one second, and when they found a peer the next second, the price of the peer was more than 200 yuan higher than their own list price.
"In this case, it is impossible to sell to the audience at the price on the ticket website, and we will refund the audience's deposit or full ticket price directly, which is equivalent to our breach of contract." Otherwise, the more you sell, the more you lose. ”
Not long ago, a screenshot of Weibo was circulated on the Internet, which showed that he had been in the ticket market for 7 years and had never seen such a strange phenomenon this year. Second-tier stars like Li Ronghao not only have to increase the ticket price by several hundred as soon as they start, but the ticket price is close to that of first-tier stars.
A Guangdong performer believes that although Li Ronghao is a second-tier star, he has accumulated high popularity on social media in the past three years this year, so it is normal for concert tickets to be sought-after.
Li Ronghao's recent "Wumeizi Sauce" is popular on short video platforms. "Li Ronghao's grandstand tickets can sell for more than 1,200."
Gao Zhi began to be a scalper in 2017 and slowly grew bigger, becoming a member of the core layer of scalpers. Now Gao Zhi has a lot of SKUs in his hands, including concert tickets, Maotai, tide play, etc., almost what is hot to grab.
"In order to grab Jay Chou's concert tickets, I launched more than 3,000 WeChat groups to grab them together. I will train the members inside and teach them to grab tickets. After they grabbed the tickets, I not only returned the commission to them, but also promised that I would sell them the concert tickets they would buy in the future at the original price. So that they grab very actively. ”
Gao Zhi said that in the past two days, the ticket price of the concert has not fluctuated so frequently, and he dared to sell it, and he raised more than 3 million yuan to transfer goods between concerts.
"The first generation of scalpers in China was actually born at the time of the bigbang concert, and later the second generation of scalpers were those who grabbed Xiaomi's mobile phones. In the past three years, there have been almost no large-scale concerts, and many of the previous concert scalpers have stopped working, and this year it has suddenly become so popular, and some new scalpers have come in. They are likely to be the third generation of Chinese scalpers. ”
Who is the one with the scythe behind the concert?
Market demand is one of the reasons for the explosion of this year's concert. The above-mentioned scalpers said that contrary to the overall downturn trend of the entire consumption environment, fans have very strong purchasing power, and they are not afraid of selling at high prices, they are afraid of not having tickets. "Some fans in the mainland spent tens of thousands of yuan to buy tickets to see Lin Junjie's concert in Hong Kong."
In addition, the collective promotion of concert organizers and performers in the entire performance chain, eager to make money, is also an important reason for the popularity of the entire performance market.
In the past three years, affected by the epidemic, the performance market, especially celebrity concerts, has almost zero performances and no revenue. Many performers have closed down or changed careers because they cannot receive business.
"Finally, the market has recovered, and the living performance company needs to hurry up and open projects and make money in order to keep the company." Xi'an DAYS Dasheng Creative Performance Space Manager Wen Lu believes that in a sense, holding a concert this year is 1.5 times or even twice the cost of the previous one.
For large-scale celebrity concerts, the venue is usually booked in the first half of the year and the tour route is arranged. If you release pigeons, it means that all the preparatory investment done before has been lost. Several stars have officially announced that they want to hold concerts before, but they have all been delayed due to the epidemic. This year's concert naturally has to make up for the cost of the water drift.
Financial pressure comes not only from the costs already incurred, but also from the prediction of future economic trends.
From the perspective of the overall consumption trend, the economic situation in the second half of this year and even next year is not very clear. The marketing budgets of various consumer brands are also concentrated in Q1 this year, and decrease from Q1 to Q4. The showrunners think the same way. The sooner you do it, the more proactive you have.
For core fans, no matter how expensive the ticket price is, no matter what city it is in, their idol's concert must be watched. But for most passers-by fans who want to go to the scene to find emotional value, they have a limited budget to spend on concerts every year, and there are no fixed favorite stars.
In this way, whoever starts the concert early, they will pick which one, the more the time drags on, the less interest of passers-by fans, and the ticket price and the number of audience members are difficult to guarantee. "Get the money in the pockets of the audience as soon as possible, and put the pockets in the pockets for Anfang." A middle level of a second-hand ticketing company said.
The intention of quick return and some of the high concert costs are all passed on to the ticket price.
If it is sold at the face price announced on platforms such as Barley and Maoyan, it may be difficult for the income from a concert to cover the star's appearance fee, let alone make a few bucks. In order to obtain higher profits, after a small number of affordable tickets are given to the formal ticketing platform, the rest of the tickets are transferred to scalpers at a premium through various channels.
"In order to make money, the organizer will pass through a middle ground person and transfer a part of the ticket premium directly to the scalper. This person generally does not show up, but is trusted by the concert organizer and is a firewall between the organizer and the first-class scalper. The above-mentioned scalper said.
How long can the offline performance market continue?
There is no doubt that this year is a big year for offline performances, both in terms of quantity and ticket prices.
A young man who watched high-frequency performances said that the price of an offline talk show in Beijing is 880 yuan, the ticket price of a livehouse performance has soared to more than 1,000, and the stage play of Happy Twist has a ticket price of 380 years ago, and the same position will become 580 after the year; A symphony orchestra concert in Shanghai sells tickets together with the surrounding area, and the price is as high as 1999 yuan.
But everything has an AB side, and there are layers of hidden worries behind the popular offline performance. Especially in the concert market, some insiders believe that the current explosion of concerts will overdraft the consumer market to a certain extent.
The aforementioned Guangdong performers said that this year's solo concert is also the home of top stars, such as Jay Chou, Lin Junjie, Xue Zhiqian, Hua Chenyu, etc., but in addition, some newcomers also take advantage of the market to make fun, which may "hurt" themselves.
"The head singers have a certain accumulation in their works, and the works they have sent can withstand many tours. However, there are not so many new singers, and if multiple concerts are forcibly held, it is difficult to ensure the quality of the next few concerts, which is also irresponsible to fans, and is likely to cause powder loss. ”
In fact, for small and medium-sized performance companies, this year is not a good opportunity to make great strides. Because of a new trend in the concert market, the monopoly has increased.
Some of the top star concerts are personally operated by the agency behind the star, and their cooperation mode with the performers is divided into large bags and small packages. Big package refers to the fact that the performance company with strong capital strength in the market takes the initiative to negotiate cooperation with the artist agency, requires how many performances, and covers all the expenses and implementation; The small package refers to the fact that the artist agency finds performers from all over the world to cooperate with a single concert.
In the past few years, there have only been a few performance companies on the market that can make big bags. They can win national tours of top stars at one time, and then cooperate with top performers in various places, which is difficult for small performers to participate.
In the process of chatting, some performers said that a few years ago, they helped Li Ronghao do a concert in a second-tier city. At that time, the whole plate was a total of more than 5 million, but the tickets did not sell well, and only 20% were sold in the end. In desperation, the performance company could only break the contract in the name of a problem with the venue and compensate for liquidated damages.
"In this way, I can only compensate for the 1.5 million deposit in the early stage. Otherwise, the box office will not recover the cost, and if the show is forcibly started, we will have to lose four or five million. This year is not good, Gao Pan can't afford it, a concert company of our level can't get Li Ronghao's performance. ”
The performance company said that small and medium-sized performers should actually be cautious this year, the head star concert fairy fights, leaving not much market share for the small star concert, once the operation is not careful, it may be difficult to return the cost. "It may take until next year for small and medium-sized performance companies to try the opportunity again, and this year the opportunity is not great."
In addition to celebrity concerts, the greater concern of the offline performance industry comes from music festivals.
This year, Chengdu has 6-7 offline music festivals a month in some months, compared to about 10-12 performances a year in first-tier cities like Beijing, and an average of about 2 performances a month in a single month. It is clear that the supply of this year's Chengdu Music Festival is oversaturated. At present, the homogeneity of music festivals is serious, and the audience will know the approximate lineup after watching one or two performances, and the difference is only in the city.
"We predict that the festival market may fall in the second half of this year, and in order to stand out, the quality of the work must be guaranteed. Therefore, the festival is not included in our cooperation plan for the time being. Wen Lu said.
After this year's virtual fire, the performance will finally return to a stable development, and perhaps the entire industry will really go to a higher level at that time.