I agree with Kyle about the highly irritating pricing policies of Ticketmaster. I suppose it's really the scalpers that I find irritating, but Ticketmaster doesn't seem to exert much if any effort to control them, and the implication of this article seems to be that they might even be profiting from that mechanism. But apart from all of that, I think that concert tickets are ludicrously expensive now. When I was in high school, I went to quite a few concerts, and I seem to recall paying between 25 and 50 dollars for them. At the time, that was the equivalent of 2-4 albums, which seemed reasonable to me. These days, even at face value the ticket price for a big name act can be over $200. That's the equivalent of 10 CDs - does that seem reasonable? And yet, they seem to have no trouble filling up the stadiums.

As for whether bands have an obligation to play their hits, I am firmly in the "no" camp on that one. Performers can choose to perform anything that they wish, but they have to understand that the size of their following will be dependent on those choices. If Smashing Pumpkins wants to divorce itself from its catalog, it'll lose some large percentage of its current fan base. I think that the prospect of a smaller and more discerning audience probably has appeal to many artists as they grow older.

Finally, have any of you played around with Muiscovery? I recently stumbled across it - I don't find it as interesting as Pandora was, and I don't yet have a good sense of the breadth of its catalog (although I did notice that their list of genres didn't include either country or folk). But it is interactive, and it does have stream some good music.


Mike