The Steve Beauchampé Column

MUSIC PUNTERS SING THE BLUES

06-07-2006

In a draw at home sits a ticketfor Queen at Stafford Bingley Hall, May 1978, cost £3.50 (still 30p more than I paid toattend the 1982 World Cup Final between Italy and West Germany in Madrid). And it cost exactly that...no booking fees, no credit cardcharges and I bought it from a local record shop who didn't add ona handling fee.

The bandsold out two nights, 8,000 fans per night, and no doubt Freddie and the lads got all the trappings of rock and roll debauchery thrown in on their rider, with everyone involved in staging the showvery well paid for their work.

28 years on and the cost of seeing'name' artists has obviously risen considerably, paticularly in recent years, with even mildly popularestablished performers regularly charging in excess of £20.

Naturally, in music 'big' doesn't always mean better (rarely in fact does this maxim hold true), but at a time when new CDs can usually be purchasedfor around £10 - and still quite recently released ones for £7-£8 or even less...and then enjoyed potentially ad infinitum, then the cost of watching live music is already often prohibitive, especially given that it's a lot less fun as a solitary experience.

That's bad enough. Arguably worse is the tricky, underhand way in which many gigs are now advertised.

Scan through the latest tours ads in NME or your local paper and note how few of them actually give ticket prices.

Instead, you are asked to call a national rate number (at around 9p per minute)whereupon, providing you cannegotiate the queuing systemwith all it's myriad options, you'll thendiscover the ticket price.

Of course,the promoters know that havingcommenced the booking process very few people will thenhang upwhen theyfind outthatticketscost a fiver more than they had anticipated, a fact that, had they seen it written on the advert,might have dissuaded them from dialling in the first place.

I make it a rulenot topurchase any item unless I know before I reach the till what it's going to cost me(so if a shop fails to price something and there's no assistant to ask thenthey probably won't get my trade).

When simply finding outsuch basic information costs money then they really can forget it.

The scam of handling fees was bad enough (and should have been outlawed years ago as ticket prices always used to includethe seller'scost and cut), but despite having failed to act on that, the Government should now force promoters and venues to include the full cost of the ticket in their adverts.

Until then, the performers involved can sing for my money.....but they won't get it.

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