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He also warned accountant Ed Grossman that he'd ring it if he fell asleep, which killed any idea the man from London's Martin Greene Ravden may have had of snoring through this year's Sunday afternoon session.
Trotta's panelists and a vast majority of the delegates didn't share his enthusiasm for the bell, but Trotta in full-flight is a hard man to stop. Former Cockney Rebel frontman Steve Harley was particularly annoyed with the bell. Harley snatched it off the table at one point, but Trotta soon got it back and gave it what curiously sounded like a triumphant ring. So this is how Quasimodo must have felt.
After two days of ILMC panels, finishing the weekend in the company of a lunatic campanologist wouldn't have been everybody's first choice. But it was a good-humoured session and a fitting end to what had been a very good-humoured conference.
Trotta chose Tony Bennett's "That's Amore" to play himself in. Along with Harley, Roland Gift from Fine Young Cannibals, New Model Army's Justin Sullivan, jazz performer/entrepreneur Dennis Jetter and a couple of youngsters from upcoming bands, he set out to explore how much the industry does for new talent compared with how much new talent is doing for itself.
The emphasis shifted to what the older artists on the panel are now doing themselves and, perhaps inevitably, what sort of relationship they have with any managers, promoters and agents they still have working for them. All three showed a commendable loyalty to agents and said they generally trusted their judgment. Harley said he was more than happy to have been with Asgard for about a couple of decades.
And what did they say of promoters? Not much. They gave the question a collective shrug and said they didn't have sufficient contact with promoters to build any sort of loyalty. They admitted they might not even notice if an agent switched from one to another in any particular territory. Even where they do have a loyalty, all besides Gift admitted they wouldn't hesitate to take a bigger offer from a rival promoter in the same territory.
For many acts, perhaps money is the sole motivating factor. In an earlier panel, Solo agent John Giddings said "they'll play in your backyard if you pay them enough." It seems he might have been right.
The conversation turned to the audience's perception of the promoter. Toby Leighton-Pope from Live Nation said the public "has no idea who the promoter is." This brought Harvey Goldsmith to his feet to suggest that's because Live Nation promoters "work for a machine with no individuality" and spend too much time "hiding backstage and playing with the computer."
If Goldsmith was suggesting the punters do actually know who the promoter is, it's still a safe bet
that, deep down inside, he knows he really means the public knows who he is. In an interview in The
Guardian a couple of days earlier, in which he admitted a hankering to become Lord Mayor of London,
he responded to the writer, pointing out that he's slipped down the U.K. promoters' pecking order.
"I'm minuscule. But I'm the only one that anyone has heard of." It seems Leighton-Pope couldn't have
read the article.
The most cunning ruse of the three-day term at "Doctor Hardnock's Academy For Misspent Youths" was Wembley Arena GM Peter Tudor's whizzo plan of inviting Marc Melander from the recently formed Association of Secondary Ticket Agents (ASTA) to explain the ways touts are looking to regulate themselves.
He came to the conference via ASTA's printer, where he picked up a couple boxes of a glossy new handout that's intended to be a discussion document that reaches out to the live music industry and the government's Office of Fair Trading (OFT).
It didn't reach very far. Live Nation U.K. managing director Stuart Galbraith said he believed he was speaking for "the vast majority of people in the room" when he said, "It's unethical for your members to sell tickets they don't have". "That doesn't sit well with me at all. You shouldn't enter into a contract if you haven't got the goods to supply," he added, clearly drawing the line where many in the industry feel "entrepreneurial" becomes "unethical."
If the glossy document didn't say anything about ASTA members promising, or maybe even being bonded, to only sell tickets they have in their possession, then Galbraith and "the vast majority" he'd so ably represented probably didn't see much point in reading the rest of it. It's a fundamental issue. If Melander didn't understand that on the way into the room, there's no doubt it was clear in his mind as he went out. There's no point in trying to tell Dance Factory's Geoff Ellis that ASTA members give 150 percent of the transaction price as a refund for any ticket they can't provide because he has first-hand experience of the misery caused outside his T In The Park Festival after Getmetickets.com oversold more than 200.
What made matters a lot worse for Melander was Wembley box office manager Lyn Dicks pointing out that Premier Tickets, an ASTA member, had already broken the code of practice on not pre-selling shows. Dicks said the company is offering tickets for a George Michael tour that hasn't been confirmed. One of the most public fiascos caused by Getmetickets.com, which was due to face a High Court wind-up March 20, was to sell Robbie Williams tickets for two stadium shows that didn't figure in the final routing.
Next up, Melander was visibly shrinking back as NEC arenas' director Linda Bull hounded him on whether ASTA members would be bonded to protect the public. His answer was far from unequivocal and certainly didn't answer her question. "Please explain how the public should trust you?," she asked. "Trust is something that you don't get overnight," Melander replied, which might have sounded odd coming from someone who popped into ILMC with the hope of getting live industry trust in about 20 minutes.
"I thought it was fair to invite them [ASTA] along to make their points," Tudor explained, shortly after he saw the gathering give his guest the sort of welcome that's usually afforded to a fart in a spacesuit. Melander had presumably gone off practising how to walk with his tail between his legs.
The most offensive thing he did was to issue what sounded like a threat. He said the secondary market would continue to exist whether the industry liked it or not. He said failure to have a dialogue with it would only "drive it underground" and make it "even more divisive." He made it sound a terrible business, but somehow it was hard to believe he wouldn't still be part of it. If the industry only had two words for him, the post-session consensus was that the second one would probably have been "off."
Richard Marks from Scarletmist.com received a better reception. His secondary market site re-sells at face value with the tickets coming from fans who bought them and couldn't make the show. He said he named the company Scarlet Mist because he set it up to help Glastonbury fans. He said the words captured the essence of the festival. He described his site as a place where fans can "connect" and said he likes to look at it as "an ethereal presence where people meet in the mist." He sounded like he'd been to a lot of Glastonburys.
"Festivals are the mothers of the live business," Herman Schueremans said as he began this year's Festival Forum and the best speech of the weekend. It's not that the Rock Werchter promoter said anything particularly new or amazing about festivals and their roles in and contributions to society, but he articulated it in the confident, lucid manner that's based on some very sound, joined-up thinking. He and others have put similar points before, but it's doubtful if they'd ever been put better.
It's no surprise his festival won the Arthur award for "liggers favourite" because it would be well worth hanging around backstage to hear this stuff. Sounding part like the rock promoter he is and part like the politician he has become, a "loosely Liberal Democrat" member of the country's Flemish parliament, he spoke of the importance of the festival to the artist and its role as a social gathering. He touched on the influence they can have on helping "reinvent society" by showing that "people can peacefully live together in a happy and constructive way." He said they can set a good example of living in a community and demonstrate how to deal with environmental issues by cleaning up after themselves. He has actively encouraged his Werchter customers to come to the festival by public transport. So much so that the public travel is included in the ticket. The scheme has been so successful he was entitled to point out that a festival can also show its country how to organise an event that will draw 80,000 people a day for four days and not have a traffic jam. It's quite a feat. All the rest of Belgium is a traffic jam. It was easy to be impressed with his points because he made them so easy to grasp.
"You're in the right panel," he reminded any who started to wonder if they accidentally wandered into a lecture on model ideal societies. "You're in the future of the music business and [the future] of the community," he concluded.
Padma Coram from Dubai's Talent Brokers' opening words at the Emerging Markets session included describing Dubai as "a glorious place" that is "going through a boom phase." She had no idea that a day earlier a journalist from the Arabic-language Emirates Today had caused the cancellation of a Saxon gig there by printing a story condemning the band's lyrics. The piece paid particular attention to a song called "Crusader" (The 12th Century), written in 1984, which is a snapshot of the so-called Holy Wars that were fought in the region at the time. When the widely-read English-language paper Gulf News picked up on the story and reprinted the lyrics, suggesting they could be construed as being offensive to Muslims, the media coverage swelled to the point where the government and promoter Jackie Wartanian (Centre Stage Management) were left with no choice but to pull the act off the bill. The local authority withdrew the act's permit and Wartanian agreed that letting the show go on would be a risk because it would only take one person to cause a serious problem. As nobody complained about the band's lyrics during the weeks its name sat on the poster, the band's management suggested the journalist had done it himself to create a story and in doing so raised the potential for racial and religious tensions in a country renowned for not having any.
Although events across the other side of the world were twisting Coram's words with ironic coincidence, everyone else on the panel agreed that her home market is "a glorious place." John Giddings from Solo, who's been there "loads of times," was most fulsome in his praise and sounded like he could have been angling for a job with the local tourist board when he described doing a gig there as "like going on holiday." Risto Juvonen from Finland's Live Nation / WellDone was definitely impressed. He said he has never been to Dubai but, after the presentation he's just heard, he would definitely make a point of doing so.
The weekend sessions had been full of good-humoured banter, starting with Carl Leighton-Pope's Talking Shop opening a conference that was due to welcome a record 800-plus crowd. Before the session, he told Pollstar he would cut his Bryan Adams references to two about a tenth of the Canadian rocker's usual weekend quota and he was as good as his word throughout. However, Adams did get a third name-check in Coram's Emerging Markets panel which she co-hosted with Peeter Rebane from Baltic Development Group. Giddings greeted the news that Leighton-Pope's client had broken new ground when doing shows in Pakistan by saying, "He has to play somewhere, doesn't he?"
Giddings said he isn't happy sending bands beyond Dubai and onto Pakistan and India because they keep changing the names of the cities. Bombay to Mumbai being a recent example. "We like to make it difficult for our ex-colonial masters," said Farhad Wadia from the entertainment division of DNA Networks, which publishes Hindustani Times.
As emerging markets, there's little doubt the so-called subcontinent's local spirit is willing.
Andrew Zweck from Live Nation's Sensible Events reported how Roger Waters and Mark Knopfler had
played India. The show was on "a piece of wasteland" on a stage "held up by sticks," but Zweck said
the effort that had gone into making the show happen and some sponsorship cash from a major phone
company and a major brewer "created a venue out of a piece of dirt." It had also left a huge
impression on both acts, with Knopfler saying it was his favourite show of his world tour.
The market is still in its infancy and, apart from the difficulties of finding a venue and any sort of local production, Wadia said most of the ticket selling is done in shops, people's houses and "out of the backs of cars." The U.K. secondary ticket sellers would probably dream of having a field day. Stuart Galbraith and Peter Tudor would have a fit.
Whatever the immediate future of India and Pakistan as emerging markets, the future of the whole live music business was up for discussion at "Meet The New Boss."
The idea is that Judge Heather McGill (19 Management) presides over a court where the younger generation of industry people accuse the older generations of screwing up the whole business for them. Judge McGill opened by "calling the session into session" and then embarked on her rundown of her powers over the court. The address sounded built for laughs but didn't get many. Exactly what this class action against the industry's old farts would be about was always likely to depend on what the witnesses made of it.
It turned out to be about nothing in particular, and pretty much about the music business in
general. There were occasional references to the roles that younger and older people have in it.
One school of opinion said younger people are in a better position to latch on to young emerging
talent, which is no doubt true, but the industry has known it for several generations. A quarter of
a century ago, the major record company A&R departments were already hiring talent scouts that were
hardly out of nappies.
The discussion slid into a free-for-all, with Primary Talent's Dave Chumbley keeping interest alive with some down-to-earth views that benefitted from being delivered in the manner of an East London barrow boy. He also had enough anecdotal tales including a very funny story about a young inexperienced agent booking a show with a venue's cleaner to get people laughing now and again.
But the whole session still sounded like a lot of conversations happening simultaneously in a crowded bar. It was as good-humoured as any of the other panels, and as outright funny as most, but it was the one session that might have benefited from Claudio Trotta ringing his bell a few times.
ILMC 18 was at London's Royal Garden Hotel, March 10th-12th, 2006.
