Author | Titan
Edit | Liu Chezi
Title map | Figureworm Creative
During the May Day holiday, many people have already embarked on the journey. In addition to sightseeing and food tasting, music festivals and concerts are also one of the must-see items during the holiday.
This May Day, are you going to go to a concert or music festival? /pexels
Since the beginning of this year, the three forms of music scene - concerts, music festivals, and live houses have fully recovered, and the number of official announcements, the size of coffee booths, and the high ticket prices have even exceeded before the epidemic. As the first small holiday since the recovery of the industry, May Day will inevitably become a hot schedule.
The heat is back, and the price is even hotter than ever
Incomplete statistics from the reporter of the new weekly found that there were as many as 18 music festivals officially announced in China during the five-day holiday, and each family was competing for the lineup. Jinan's Wheat Field Music Festival invited Li Ronghao; Handan's Frenzy Motorcycle Music Festival invited Zhang Liangying; Beijing's wireless music festival invited Pu Shu. Beijing also has the Strawberry Music Festival and the Trend Music Festival at the same time, and there are 3 music festivals in one city.
Last year's Changzhou West Taihu Lake Music Festival, I finally squeezed into the front row, and I didn't dare to go to the toilet. /Photo by Titan
If it is a hardcore iron fan, it is impossible to open any door to catch up with so many music scenes.
The concert is not far behind, Zhang Shaohan Nanning concert, Hua Chenyu Chengdu concert, Zhang Jie Wuhan concert, Xue Zhiqian Nanjing concert... They are piled up one after another during the May Day holiday, and often once announced, the tickets are empty.
On one side, it is difficult to find a ticket, and on the other side, the price of tickets has increased significantly.
It seems that the increase in concert ticket prices is reasonable, and the ticket price of a large-scale ticketed concert a few years ago usually ranges from 280 yuan to 1280 yuan, and in 2023, the average price increase is two or three hundred yuan. For example, Ren Xianqi's Wuhan concert, the weekend ticket price is 499 yuan to 1399 yuan; Also in Wuhan, it was the same weekend, and the ticket price of Liu Ruoying's concert, which had not been sung for many years, reached 1599 yuan.
In contrast, festival ticket price increases were much higher. In July last year, the epidemic prevention policy had not yet been relaxed, and music festivals were still scarce at that time, and under the influence of the law of scarcity, the ticket price of some music festivals had risen to the range of 1,000 yuan. This is not the scalper price, but the official selling price -
At that time, the full-price ticket for a music festival in Wenzhou sold for 988 yuan, and the two-day VIP pass for a music festival in Chengdu was as high as 2999 yuan!
Come and see, this is the ticket price of the festival
You know, the venues of music festivals are generally very narrow and long, and most of them are flat ground, the rear row of vision is limited, and most people can only watch the big screen. Even for VIP tickets, the view is poor unless you grab a front-row spot. This pricing simply rubbed the experience of most music fans on the ground, and at that time there was a hot search on Weibo #Who will manage the show assassins#, which was enough to see the anger of music fans.
This year, the epidemic prevention policy has been relaxed, the number of music festivals has shown a blowout trend, the market supply has increased, and it is said that the price should return to rationality, but this is not the case. Even the general ticket seats, which have to look up on the big screen, have generally risen to more than 400 yuan.
After the niche becomes a manifest school, the experience is gradually diluted
In 2000, the first Midi Music Festival was held without even tickets. In 2004, the Midi Music Festival was in its fifth edition, and 10 yuan tickets were charged. After 2012, the performance market began to develop, and tickets gradually rose to more than 100 yuan.
At the time, however, music festivals were a niche culture. A group of people meet together, the tickets are not expensive, the scene is not crowded, and the experience is just right.
The watershed appeared in 2017-2018, when "China Has Hip Hop" and "Summer of the Band" were broadcast respectively, respectively, bringing the two major music genres of rap and rock, respectively, and the influx of "variety fans" turned this originally niche field into a prominent school, and the price of musicians also rose. The simultaneous change in supply and demand has pushed up ticket prices for live music.
This change is even more pronounced at Live House. Before being heated by variety shows, Live House was generally priced at about 100 yuan, or even dozens of dollars.
Jazz female singer Liu Lian once said that when she debuted, only 7 people came to watch, even if the ticket price was only tens of yuan. After the broadcast of "Summer of the Band" and "Sister Lang 3", at this year's "Pillow Trek" tour in Guangzhou, more than 1,000 people crowded outside the venue and lined up for three rounds (the number, admission, and signing must be queued separately), and the ticket price was also speculated by scalpers from the official more than 200 yuan to more than 1,000 yuan.
Liu Lian's Live House, if you want to queue so early, you have to start queuing that morning. /Photo by Titan
Even without scalpers, the official price of Live House has risen in recent years. "Rap New Generation" singer Jiang Yunsheng, who is controversial in singing skills, has been on the hot search because of the ticket price of 669 yuan, and some iron fans said that "the dance is beautiful, worth the ticket price", and was complained by senior fans: "Isn't that the LED screen?" Selling fast 700 yuan a piece, I think (this kind of ticket price) is purely the money of fans, too stupid, especially bad. ”
Rising prices are only one thing, there are too many festivals, and there are not enough musicians. Some music fans complained: "These music festivals are full of bands and singers back and forth, nothing new." "In addition, there is a trend of mixed quality in the quality of music festivals.
At the Dragon Palace Music Festival in Huai'an in April this year, the live sound lag phenomenon was serious, the big screen was too muddy to see, the security guard was also rude to the music fans they brought with support, and the price of goods in the field was also very high (20 yuan for a grilled sausage, 50 yuan for bag storage, 200 yuan for dirty braids). Such an experience made Pu Shu on the stage unable to stand it: "I beg the organizer to respect the experience of the audience!" ”
Some music festivals have chaotic management on site, with scalpers randomly walking around harassing music fans and peddling VIP tickets. There are even venue volunteers who get involved, selling their staff vests to fans so they can get close to the stage.
Fortunately, the ideal back garden did not participate in "Summer of the Band", otherwise the ticket price would have gone crazy. /Photo by Titan
Similar situations occur frequently, making more and more fans unbearable. In early April, the Fuzhou Moyin Music Festival announced that it was canceled due to "weather reasons", but local netizens reported that the weather forecast was a sunny day. Coincidentally, the Qingdao Lane Music Festival was also said to have been cancelled due to "force majeure". Later, everyone found out that the cancellation was because the lineup could not hold up, and the ticket price was too high and was boycotted by fans.
To a certain extent, the reasonable rise in performance ticket prices is also in line with the laws of the market, and musicians need to update their equipment if they want better performance effects. At the same time, the cost of venues, transportation and accommodation are rising, which will push up ticket prices.
The key is that the organizer guarantees the fan experience, which is also the fruit of respecting the musician's labor.
Scalpers disrupt the market, we just want to see the show!
Under this wave of music scene return, there are always two phenomena that accompany each other - on the one hand, the ticket sales platform "repeatedly seconds empty", on the other hand, scalpers swear to have tickets and guarantee consecutive seats.
The most typical thing is that Jay Chou's Hong Kong concert starts in May, and the official ticketing platform opens tickets in April, but scalpers began to "open pre-sales" in the circle of friends in March. So the question is, where did their tickets come from?
Generally speaking, scalpers can get tickets in two forms. One way is to grab tickets like ordinary music fans. But in terms of specific operation, two forms are derived. The first form is to use the loopholes of the ticketing platform to swipe the code to automatically grab tickets.
At the beginning of the year, the Escape Plan Band manually verified the tickets sold with the Xiudong platform and cancelled 92 tickets bound to the same virtual mobile phone number. At that time, the band of the escape plan said on Weibo: "After the ticket was issued in Shenzhen, we received feedback from many friends that we could not grab the ticket. It was found that 92 orders with a mobile phone number starting with 121, and the Xiudong login method was the real-name system of the mobile phone number, which basically determined that these 121 mobile phone number orders were scalpers using script code to grab tickets. ”
Forcing real names was supposed to deal with scalpers, but scalpers also have solutions. /Weibo
The second form is that scalpers pay a little money, such as hiring a dozen college students for a few hundred yuan to grab tickets. This kind of music scene that is generally aimed at mandatory real names requires face brushing and ID card secondary verification to enter. But in any music scene, there will be a situation where music fans can't go temporarily and need to transfer tickets. Therefore, the official platform generally has a transfer mechanism, which provides room for scalpers to operate.
The second way scalpers can get tickets is to directly establish cooperative relationships with performance organizers and ticketing platforms. That is to say, these "regular troops" are actually first-hand scalpers, with a lot of tickets in hand, and everyone wants to make a handful of money. And folk scalpers generally do not call themselves "scalpers", but "ticket agents".
According to Tech Planet, the tickets for the concert will generally be released to the designated partners, etc., and some tickets, especially VIP tickets, will be reserved for partners and organizers, and 30% of the tickets will be given to the studio, and many scalpers sell tickets that are given by the organizers. The tickets that flow out of the organizer have already been added to the first price. When the ticket is in the hands of the scalper, there will be a second round of price increases, and the price will naturally rise.
Coupled with retaliatory consumption after the liberalization of epidemic prevention policies, because the vast majority of people have not watched concerts and music festivals for 3 years, they want to solve their hunger immediately, and the increase in ticket prices is much larger than in previous years.
Some fans told the New Weekly reporter that he went to see a Jay Chou concert in 2019, and at that time he could buy scalper tickets with only 500 yuan, but he couldn't buy it with 1,000 yuan this year. It is said that the concert has been speculated to more than 200,000 yuan, and the scalpers are very loud: "Bring the budget, bargain and avoid talking." ”
2014 Jay Chou Guangzhou concert, my mountain top position, fans will buy tickets for the group, 380 yuan. /Photo by Titan
A president of the Jay Chou Fan Association also said that around 2014, when Jay Chou's concert tickets could also be purchased through the fan club, scalpers could not intervene at all. "Now it's the other way around, there are scalpers everywhere, and fans won't be able to meddle at all."
In fact, music fans just want to watch the show, don't want to bother, and don't want to suffer. However, the current industry is overheated, and if you want to participate, you can only wait and see.
Proofreader: Lai Xiaoni
Operation: Lu Zirui
Typesetting: Yang Yue