Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson was recently interviewed by ATMósferas Magazine where he discussed the changes in the music industry over the last four decades and the high concert ticket prices.
Read what Dickinson said regarding this topic:
“The music industry has done two things. On the one hand, if you’re an artist, it’s contracted, as in it’s shrunk in terms of the amount of money you get paid for your art, unless you are some massive social media thing, or whatever it is, or unless you’re a DJ who turns up with a memory stick and gets paid five times what a band gets paid.
”And they have to split it eight ways, and he just turns up with his memory stick and pretends he’s doing something, and goes away with a huge amount of money. So the world has gone on its a*s from that perspective. And there’s not a lot that any one individual can do about that. You just have to work with the way the world is.” […]
About the high concert ticket prices, Dickinson shared the following:
“Well, two things. One, it depends what the show is and kind of who the audience are. I mean, I’m not gonna go around and say specific artists, because most of the artists that are charging, like, 1,200 dollars a ticket, like in Las Vegas, if you wanna go and see the U2 show, I think it was 1,200 dollars per seat in the sphere.
”I’ve got no interest in paying 1,200 dollars to go and see U2 in the sphere, none. A hundred bucks, maybe. But for me, what’s important is to try and keep, on the one hand, the right type of tickets at the right price. So by that I mean the right type of tickets, I mean, the tickets that are in front of the stage, which everybody says should be the most expensive tickets.
”Actually, no, they should be the most reasonably priced tickets, ’cause the people who are gonna go there to the front of the stage are gonna be people who are real fans, people who are kids, people who can’t afford the crazy money, but they are the people that need to be down the front; they’re the people that are gonna keep this music alive.
”And then you get the people that they might be fans, but they wanna bring their wife and they don’t wanna get too hot and sweaty and all the rest of it. So, there’s some seats at the top or something else like that, what they’re gonna pick, and those get priced differently.”