On Sunday, October 25th, U2 played a sold out concert at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena California. The Black Eyed Peas were opening to an audience of 96,000 people. It promised to be quite an amazing evening of great live music.
But let's look at both the time and the cost of getting there. I definitely wouldn't want to miss BEP as the opening act. They would be on around 7:30PM. To get there I would have to take the 10 to downtown to get to Pasadena in the Valley. And with 96,00 people, you have to figure not everyone's going together in the same car, so that's 120,000 all converging on the freeways of Los Angeles. I would probably need to leave my apartment by The Grove at 5PM. The concert would go on until 11-11:30PM, so I would get home at 1AM and off to bed immediately since Sunday was a school night. Total time 5PM-1AM - 8 hours round trip, door to door.
What about the financial costs? My ticket price alone is $250 and that's for the nosebleed seats. Gas would be about $10 round trip. Parking would be at least $20 and God only knows how long it would take to get in and out of stacked parking at the Rose Bowl. Then I have to buy at least 2 beers at the show. That's probably $27 with tip. Total financial expenditure - $307.00.
People, we are still in a recession. I do not have 8 hours and $307 to spend to see any band from nosebleed seats. Hell, on Broadway, $150 buys me great orchestra seats. How am I supposed to see 4 short Irishmen from 3/4 of a mile away? But I do really want to see U2. My solution turned out to be YouTube.
U2 was broadcasting the concert live on You Tube. So rather then spend 8 hours and $307, I got to see the show for free, while pausing it, sitting in my own home for 2 1/2 hours with the lights off watching the U2 concert. Of course there were some drawbacks. The stream wasn't digital in either sound quality or picture. But it was good enough for me. And the fact of the matter is, I would have paid $10 for a digital music and digital picture stream (and then have found a way to connect it to my 41" TV and watch it live on my digital TV). It's a new revenue stream for both U2 and Google and great publicity for the site. According to U2, over 10 million streams were served of the concert. Can you imagine how much server space and computer power and technology it must have taken to produce 10 million simultaneous streams of the U2 concert? Simply incredible.
I love concerts, but I don't go to nearly as many as I used to. And now when I go, I have to get seats. I can't handle standing for 2 hours in some general admission SRO section. My perfect concert solution is MTV's HD concert channel (in LA) and HD Net (in Miami). I just record the concerts on the DVR and then play them back whenever I want to in my apartment with digital sound and a digital picture, all for free, with better seats than I could get by actually attending the concert.
But I digress, back to U2. I love how Bono is financially raping rich white men to feed the children of Africa. And for a save the earth icon like Bono, the carbon footprint on this tour is massive. They need 3 days in between shows just to set it up, at 100 tractor trailer trucks to haul the massive and unique genius of concert engineering city to city (I cannot imagine the cost to fly it continent to continent). The gas prices alone must be staggering. But at $250 a ticket X 96,000, that's $24 million in 1 night. U2 is not impoverished, and you know they fly a private jet show to show too.
Getting back to the concert. It was definitely the best U2 show I've ever seen. The set list was perfect, the band sounded great, the stage was a spectacle unto itself, and I literally had the best seat - in my house.
No comments:
Post a Comment