By Jim McCarthy Mar 27, 2009 0 comments

Economist Will Page Says Hello

As I mentioned last week, there’s a lot of good work being done to demonstrate objectively that the Live 2.0 phenomenon is real.

One of my favorites in this area has been, for a couple years now, Will Page, the chief economist for PRS for Music, whose mission is to support the music business in the UK.

Anyway, I sent him a link to the post I did here about his work, and we started exchanging emails on a number of topics.  The good news for readers is that we’re going to twist his arm sometime in the next few weeks to talk to us about some of these fascinating topics.

The good news for Will is that he’s getting married in Valencia, Spain in the near future, so we’ll let him concentrate on that for a while.

In the meantime, he sent along some interesting background reading on the industry, seen from a European/British point of view, but all highly relevant in America and beyond.

All this research points in one direction:  Live Entertainment, including but not only live music, is on the way up.  There’s a strong undercurrent of interest and desire for live entertainment from the public that the research demonstrates, and to add my own layer of opinion to that, I believe, after seven years in the business of getting people out to live entertainment more, that the real issue in our business is in tapping the demand that’s latent in the marketplace.

In other words, people would go out more if they weren’t hung up by their barriers.

What are those barriers?  In our own research at Goldstar, we’ve learned a number of things.  Surprisingly to some, price isn’t at the top of the list.  It’s really convenience and priority, and price follows that.  In other words, live entertainment suffers a ‘convenience gap’ versus other forms of entertainment (movies, home entertainment, or just doing nothing).  To me, that’s an indicator that a big part of your marketing focus should be on helping people overcome that convenience gap.

Second, the ‘priority’ issue is a thorny one.  What do people mean when they say they have other priorities or interests that keep them out?  Sure, everyone’s busy.  As a marketer, you should pretty much ignore that as “I’m busy” is the all-purpose modern equivalent of the Nuremberg defense.

After seven years of looking at this and thinking about it, my conclusion is that when people say “I’m busy,” what they really mean is that they don’t care enough about going to a given show.  Some part of them would like to go, but they haven’t been given enough reasons.

My evidence for this is that when consumers do find something compelling, suddenly their calendar clears right up.  Yes, people are busy.  They’ve always been busy, and they will always be busy, but they will also always make time for the things that they actually care about.

Our job in this business is to give them something really, really worth caring about!

So stay tuned to hear from Will once he’s on the other side of singledom!

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