{"id":1464,"date":"2004-09-14T18:50:00","date_gmt":"2004-09-14T18:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=1464"},"modified":"2018-08-01T12:33:37","modified_gmt":"2018-08-01T17:33:37","slug":"1464","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2004\/09\/14\/1464\/","title":{"rendered":"In Touch with Middle America"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In this month&#8217;s <i>Playboy<\/i>, in between alternate Bush-bashing and baring, a round table entitled &#8220;Rip. Burn. Die.&#8221; gathers music industry insiders to discuss the problems and challenges within the industry.  While discussing exhorbitant concert prices, two known figures offer nuggets of insight into the little man&#8217;s mind set:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b>John Mayer<\/b>:<br \/>\nWe charge around $40 for a ticket, <b>which isn&#8217;t a lot of money<\/b>.  Twenty-three year old kids have $40 to spend on a concert.  They may say they don&#8217;t, but they do.<\/p>\n<p><i>(John Mayer doesn&#8217;t point out that $40 represents almost seven hours&#8217; of labor at minimum wage.  Factor in the convenience fee applied to a ticket, and you&#8217;re looking at a full day&#8217;s work.  Now, imagine you&#8217;re taking a date; that&#8217;s Monday and Tuesday of your work week, which isn&#8217;t a big deal to John Mayer.  Now, say you&#8217;ve got a family, and you need parking for the minivan, and suddenly you&#8217;re not buying any souvenirs or food, and the concert&#8217;s not that much of a good entertainment value, but who am I to complain?  I&#8217;ve already been to one whole concert this year.)<\/i><\/p>\n<li><b>Sharon Osbourne<\/b>:<br \/>\nWe could charge more, <b>but with what&#8217;s going on with unemployment in this country<\/b>, we want to keep ticket prices down.<\/p>\n<p><i>(Ms. Osbourne doesn&#8217;t mention that unemployment is still at a relative historical low, which means that if she had her druthers, the marked increase in ticket prices would be even more if she weren&#8217;t afraid to lose more concertgoers, so she&#8217;ll get in a little dig at the current president if she doesn&#8217;t have anything else to say.)<\/i><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Thanks for your insight, celebrities and those whose work provides them with a better-than-middle-class living which apparently has divorced them from fiscal realities here outside the stratosphere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In this month&#8217;s Playboy, in between alternate Bush-bashing and baring, a round table entitled &#8220;Rip. Burn. Die.&#8221; gathers music industry insiders to discuss the problems and challenges within the industry. While discussing exhorbitant concert prices, two known figures offer nuggets of insight into the little man&#8217;s mind set: John Mayer: We charge around $40 for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-magazines","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1464"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21091,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1464\/revisions\/21091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}