Are Stadium Shows quickly becoming a thing of the past?

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Eric Weinraub, Feb 18, 2019.

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  1. lazydawg58

    lazydawg58 Know enough to know how much I don't know

    Location:
    Lillington NC
    We can only hope. Outdoor festivals, amphitheaters, theaters, concert halls, small indoor (basketball) stadiums are really about as big as it should be. Anything larger and it's an "event" not a concert. If you have to watch the band on giant screen why even go?

    Multi night runs in theaters would seem to be a much better alternative. I know that the Allman Brothers did that at the Beacon for more than a decade and now Tedeschi Trucks are doing that some.
     
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  2. Oatsdad

    Oatsdad Oat, Biscuits, Abbie & Mitzi: Best Dogs Ever

    Location:
    Alexandria VA
    As already discussed, that's not really practical. A band who can sell 30,000 tickets in City A would then need to play at least 10 shows to move the same number of seats. A 40-date tour would become a 400-date tour!

    I've been to 100s of arena/stadium shows, and I know each one was a concert, not an "event"...
     
  3. lazydawg58

    lazydawg58 Know enough to know how much I don't know

    Location:
    Lillington NC
    If I'm so far away from the performers I have to look at a big screen to tell what is going on in my opinion its not much of a concert, it is an event. At this point in my my life I'm looking for quality of experience, not bragging that I saw the Rolling Stones at Carter Finley Stadium.
     
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  4. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    It's better for the performers as well, to be able to play in the space where they can see most of the audience members. Kate Bush was offered the O2, and said she felt like crying when her set designer showed her renderings of what it would look like. That's when she decided that 15 (later increased to 22) dates at the Hammersmith Odeon were going to be the much better choice.
     
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  5. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member


    Personally, my preferred limited is circa 3K seats. And better yet, I'd rather be in a venue like the Village Vanguard that seats 125 and features performances every night by the best improvising musicians in the world. I don't mind 3K seats of unamplified concert music in a place like Carnegie Hall. But personally, I don't think there's all that much difference from a audience member's perspective between seeing a concert in a 20K seat indoor sports arena and in an 80K seat outdoor sports stadium (150K with people on the field), except maybe in the cheapest/farthest-away seats/locations. Functionally the experience is mostly the same -- watching distant performers on TVs, an "experience," listening to a giant sound system not so much musicians in a room.

    But I understand from a business perspective the appeal of rolling into a town and grossing grossing $22 million in a single night, as Taylor Swift's show at Met Life Stadium on July 20, 2018 did, according to Pollstar (last year's top-grossing concert date), with the cost of a single set up, marketing for a single show, a single night's stay in a town for the whole touring company, etc.
     
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  6. TonyCzar

    TonyCzar Forum Resident

    Location:
    PhIladelphia, PA
    Festivals and stadium concerts predate giant screens.
     
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  7. TonyCzar

    TonyCzar Forum Resident

    Location:
    PhIladelphia, PA
    Behinds in upper deck seats are what pays the bills. Consider yourself a patron of the arts.
     
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  8. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    First stadium giant screen I ever saw was "Tullavision" when Jethro Tull headlined a Summer Jam at Arrowhead Arena in Kansas City. In fact the radio station ads included the fact that there was going to be a giant television - a mighty Eidophor, which required 2 days to set up, three phase power and running water for cooling.

    [​IMG]

    It produced about as much light as one of today's medium-priced business projectors and was far more complicated. From Wikipedia:

    Eidophors used an optical system somewhat similar to a conventional movie projector, but substituted a slowly rotating mirrored disk or dish for the film. The disk was covered with a thin film of transparent high-viscosity oil, and through the use of a scanned electron beam, electrostatic charges could be deposited onto the oil, causing its surface to deform. Light was shone on the disc by a striped mirror consisting of strips of reflective material alternating with transparent non-reflective areas. Areas of the oil unaffected by the electron beam would allow the light to be reflected directly back to the mirror and towards the light source, whereas light passing through deformed areas would be displaced and would pass through the adjacent transparent areas and onwards through the projection system. As the disk rotated, a doctor blade discharged and smoothed the ripples in the oil, readying it for re-use on another television frame.
     
    Last edited: Feb 21, 2019
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  9. TonyCzar

    TonyCzar Forum Resident

    Location:
    PhIladelphia, PA
    That made my head hurt. Rube Goldberg would be proud.
     
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  10. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    NASA had a number of these as the screens in the control room for the Apollo missions, and I can imagine there was an entire team dedicated to keeping them running.
     
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  11. sddoug

    sddoug Music Aficionado

    Location:
    San Diego, CA, USA
    Perhaps the stadium tour of the past has been replaced by the Summer Music Festival. Between Coachella, Lollapolooza, Kaboo, et. al. an artist can play to huge crowds without the risk of going it alone.
     
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  12. The last 2 stadium shows I've seen were Roger Waters with The Wall. Other stadium shows I've seen include Bruce Springsteen, The Police, Genesis and Paul McCartney.
     
  13. Chris DeVoe

    Chris DeVoe RIP Vickie Mapes Williams (aka Equipoise)

    The successor to the Eidophor was the GE Talaria.

    [​IMG]

    It was more compact and easy to move and set up, but had an even more bizarre optical system that used "wobbulation" - a word I've been desperate to work into a conversation for decades.

    A company known as "Nightmare Productions" would take them and make them ready to rock and roll by hotrodding the cooling, painting them black and building road cases. They were monochrome by default, or they had a spinning color disc for sequential color. They could also stack three of them up with color filters so you'd have one each for red, green and blue. David Bowie's Glass Spider tour used two stacks of three of them in Kansas City's Kemper Arena.
     
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  14. Jmac1979

    Jmac1979 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Louisville, KY
    For those of us who are more ADD and introverted, all the people who are there because it's the hip place to be this evening ruin it for those us who simply want to enjoy good music. Every single arena concert I've been to has had at least one annoying person who makes me question how much I should pay as my max price for a show because people are generally inconsiderate. Theaters have their share of those people too (like when i saw Tears For Fears at a theater and behind us was a redneck who kept talking over songs he didn't know, which meant pretty much everything not on Songs From The Big Chair) but its nowhere to the degree as the bigger shows because it's more intimate.
     
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  15. Oatsdad

    Oatsdad Oat, Biscuits, Abbie & Mitzi: Best Dogs Ever

    Location:
    Alexandria VA
    Again: I've gone to 100s of these shows. I enjoyed them as concerts, not as "events".

    Obviously YMMV, but knocking larger scale concerts in an absolute manner doesn't make much sense to me... :shrug:
     
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  16. Oatsdad

    Oatsdad Oat, Biscuits, Abbie & Mitzi: Best Dogs Ever

    Location:
    Alexandria VA
    There's a massive difference between shows at 20K arenas vs. 80K stadiums.

    At the former, there's a much higher percentage of decent seats. Even the worst seat is better than a good 75% of the seats in a stadium.

    If you're not on the field at a stadium, you're fairly far from the stage. There are plenty of reasonably close to the stage seats in an arena, but they're a low percentage in stadiums.

    Which is why I pretty much won't sit anywhere beyond the field at a stadium - and even then, I will only do 1st 15 rows or so.

    I'm more open to other seats in an arena...
     
  17. Oatsdad

    Oatsdad Oat, Biscuits, Abbie & Mitzi: Best Dogs Ever

    Location:
    Alexandria VA
    Obviously with more people, there's a higher chance you'll encounter a jerk.

    But I'm pretty sure there are jerks at smaller shows, too! :)
     
  18. Partyslammer

    Partyslammer Lord Of The New Church

    I think the number of stadium shows has actually increased the past decade as more and more legacy acts look for big paydays and shorter tours versus grueling multi-city dates on much longer stints. It's simply a matter of a bigger payday for less work (for the artists, anyway). Obviously, as more and more Stadium-worthy bands begin to age out of touring altogether with fewer and fewer newer bands having the kind of draw to fill such large venues, the number of at least single band headliners doing stadium jaunts is going to decrease. But I think the flip side is more and more traveling multi-act festivals in the near future.
     
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  19. Jmac1979

    Jmac1979 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Louisville, KY
    but my prob with arenas is that they get worse the closer to the stage. I saw Cher with Nile Rodgers/Chic a few weeks ago, we were in 19th row, tickets were about 200 a pop, and directly behind us were two guys who were insulting her and talking during the whole show because "we've already seen her three times on this tour" therefore those of us only going to see her once are supposed to just deal with their conversation being more important since what they're seeing is a rerun though it's not one to us. Or when I was about 30th row Fleetwood Mac, around the same price point, and some drunk lady kept groping my husband to the point I wasn't even able to enjoy most of the show (and during "Rhiannon" mind you, the centerpiece of Stevie's performance of the night) because I was dealing with an aggravated spouse who finally snapped on her telling her she's not his type. Etc....

    It really sucks to love so much music and want to see so many artists, yet have to deal with people who don't try to be as considerate towards others as you do.
     
  20. TonyCzar

    TonyCzar Forum Resident

    Location:
    PhIladelphia, PA
    And the thing with needing to get away from jerks is, the bigger the venue, the more seat-grabbing options you'll have.
     
  21. Oatsdad

    Oatsdad Oat, Biscuits, Abbie & Mitzi: Best Dogs Ever

    Location:
    Alexandria VA

    Sorry you've had bad experiences. I've been to nearly 1000 shows over my life and really don't think there's a difference between crowds at big shows vs. small shows.

    It's luck of the draw. I've been among great crowds at massive shows and a pack of jerks at smaller shows... :shrug:
     
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  22. Oatsdad

    Oatsdad Oat, Biscuits, Abbie & Mitzi: Best Dogs Ever

    Location:
    Alexandria VA
    True! It's easier to escape particular ill-behaved crowd members in a big place. If you're in a dinky venue, you're kinda stuck!
     
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  23. TonyCzar

    TonyCzar Forum Resident

    Location:
    PhIladelphia, PA
    Multi-act festivals are mostly "destination" events - Coachella, Bonnaroo, Firefly, Lollapalooza, etc. The logistics of herding 3-5 name bands on a roadshow is probably as thankless as herding cats. Far easier to say: "State and City. Be there or be square."

    There are a lot of two-act nostalgia tours out there doing casinos and state fairs, though. That business hasn't died, so it must pay.
     
  24. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    We obviously have different experiences of the whole thing.

    To me, the experience of seeing a show in a 20K sports arena and seeing a show in an 80K seat stadium are more like one another than either is like seeing a show in a small club or even a small theater.

    The last 20K show I saw was Paul Simon in his penultimate show at MSG -- I was sitting in the middle tier seats at the back of the arena. My wife really wanted to see the show and she got tickets from a friend who had bought them for herself and then needed to go a different day instead. The seats were far enough away not to be able to see anything that was going on on stage unless it was via the big screen TVs (pretty much anywhere in either kind of venue that's true unless you're very close), and of course, we were only hearing sound pumped out by the system. And there were disruptive people around us. Simon was great. Glad I saw the show. But it was more like sitting with a bunch of people and watching a TV simulcast than like going to a concert.

    The last stadium show I saw was much longer ago -- it was one of those shows where Springsteen closed Giants Stadium. Again, I was given seats by someone who couldn't attend, so I had no choice in the seating. It was midway up in the stadium and about 1/3 of the way back from the stage. The view of the on-stage action, though ant-like, was a little better actually than sitting in the middle back of MSG, but what I was doing was was still mostly watching the show on TV surrounded by thousands of people.

    To me, the difference isn't massive at all, it's marginal at best -- sitting in a crowd, watching distant performers on TV, listening to sound over from a giant PA system. I really only go to those kinds of shows anymore when my wife wants to go.

    Other shows I've seen recently -- went down to the Vanguard to see Fred Hersch, sat in a center table 10 feet or so from the piano, got to hear the sound directly from the instruments, look the musicians in the eye, watch what they were playing; went to see Wadada Leo Smith at the Appel Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center, sat in the front row, 15 feet from Smith, in a 480 seat theater and watched the musicians trading cues, heard the sound direct from the trumpet and cello, not the PA. Totally different experiences. Even going to see the Vienna Phil at Carnegie Hall, just under 3K seats, from my box in the second tier center, where I'm much farther away, but hearing the sound of the orchestra, not a giant sound reinforcement system, and watching the players -- not watching them on giant screens -- is a totally different experience that that arena/stadium experience, which, to me, is really one sort of thing different from these other kinds of concert experiences. Those experiences are more like one another than they are like arena/stadium experiences to me.
     
  25. Oatsdad

    Oatsdad Oat, Biscuits, Abbie & Mitzi: Best Dogs Ever

    Location:
    Alexandria VA
    At any size venue, your location is the most important thing.

    I've been at stadium shows where I'm 10 feet from the performer - I'll take that over being 100 feet away in a 1000-person club.

    I saw the Stones at the 2800-seat Beacon in NYC and had a less than happy time because of the stage. I was toward the back of the balcony, and the stage was so big that I could only see its back half.

    For 90% of the show, I only was able to see Charlie, the keyboard players, the horn players and the backing singers. On rare occasions, Mick, Keith and/or Ronnie would pop into view, but the line of sight was terribly limited. I'd have rather been at a stadium!

    Anyway, my point regarding stadium vs. arena is that the worst seat in an arena is still better than the majority of seats in a stadium. A bad arena seat = a pretty decent one at a stadium...
     
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