No Expectations 019: Locket
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No Expectations 019: Locket
The best way to deal with Ticketmaster is to just support your local independent venue. Plus, some housekeeping and a call for mailbag questions.
Thanks for being here. You can expect a fresh newsletter from No Expectations like this one straight to your email each Thursday at 9am cst / 10am est as well as a twice-monthly Taste Profile sometime in the future alongside the weekly blog. Subscribe, share, like the post on the Substack app, and tell a friend.
Some housekeeping
The No Expectations newsletter now lives at noexpectations.fyi instead of joshhterry.substack.com. After Elon Musk temporarily disabled retweets, likes, and comments on all Substack dot com links on Twitter, I decided to pay for my own custom domain. It looks more professional and rolls off the tongue better than joshhterry dot substack dot com (H is my middle initial—despite what some publicists think, my name isn’t actually Joshh). I should note that Substack custom domains appear to be a little finicky for some subscribers so please let me know if something isn’t working.
Substack also just launched its social media-style feed called Notes. I’m, uh, “noting” on there. It’s like Twitter but it works. There are a lot of familiar faces on the platform and the timeline appears to be both bot-and-Elon-free. I’ll likely be spending a lot of time there in the future. You can follow me here if you’re not already a subscriber.
Send questions and tips to the official No Expectations email
I now have a newsletter-specific email at noexpectationsnewsletter@gmail.com. My personal inbox is sort of a mess—it’s too full of pitches, advertisements, and other newsletters—so I decided to have a designated place for all things No Expectations.
With the important caveat that I am probably not the person to ask for professional advice (I still don’t think I’ve figured out the answer to “how do you make a comfortable living as a freelance music journalist?”), I want the email to be a place where I can get questions from subscribers or requests on what to cover next on here. I’ll do my best to answer everything either via email or in the actual newsletter (with your permission, of course). Hell, I’ll even respond to the dreaded, “why haven’t you written about my band?” query.
I want to be transparent about music journalism as well as my process, and at the very least, offer practical tips to aspiring writers. It’s a weird gig and while I had a network of folks I could reach out to and learn from while starting out, I often felt like I was just figuring it out as I went along. I honestly still do most of the time. It can also get a little daunting thinking of things to write about here every week so the more people write in, the more it might free me up from worrying if I’ll have a good topic for the newsletter.
The Buy Local Approach to Live Music
Ticketmaster sucks and everyone knows it. If you want to see a big-name act play an arena, you’re going to have to shell out some serious cash through the service owned by Live Nation. In Chicago, the two cheapest nosebleed tickets for Beyonce’s Soldier Field gig this summer cost $402 for the pair, add on the $78 in fees which is 20 percent of the actual ticket costs, and consider yourself lucky because you actually were able to snag seats. In New York, Ticketmaster’s “dynamic pricing” tickets for shows like Beyonce’s, Taylor Swift’s, or Drake's can run you over $1,000 per ticket, which were most likely purchased by bots so they could be resold at a premium. It’s an obviously unfair system that’s only gotten worse since Pearl Jam protested the giant in the ‘90s (over $4 service fees on $18 tickets).
Though it’s unclear how big they are now, in 2018, the New York Times reported that Ticketmaster exclusively tickets 80 of the top 100 venues in the nation. Lately, artists have tried to circumvent the bots, the service fees, and the gargantuan prices. Most notably there’s The Cure, who charged a relatively cheap $20 through Ticketmaster, and even forced the service to partially refund customers their service fees. Elsewhere, country star Zach Bryan went through competitor AXS (owned by another giant in AEG) kept service fees low and ticket prices from $20-$130 but instituted some confusing rules to keep scalpers at bay like making sure the name on the ticket matches the individual’s going. Can you imagine buying a ticket as a gift and having to go instead of the recipient? Maggie Rogers was so fed up, she announced a summer tour, turned off online sales, and told fans, “Come buy a concert ticket like it’s 1965” in person at the actual venue.
These ticketing companies are so big that if you want to see a popular act live, you can’t avoid them. Even though they’re ubiquitous, they’re still unsustainable and inaccessible to most people. I don’t really have solutions to this besides “break up AEG and Live Nation.” That’s above my pay grade. Instead, the best and easiest thing you can do is to support your local independent venues and see smaller acts instead. I know it’ll suck to miss Beyonce but for the $480, you could bring a friend and go to a local $20 venue a dozen times. It’ll be more beneficial to your wallet as well as your soul. You will be supporting working artists as well as your neighborhood venue and its staff. More importantly, you’ll be immersing yourself in a local arts scene and the more you go, the more you’ll feel like a part of a community. That’s priceless.
Friend of the Substack and one of my favorite writers Natalie Weiner made a good point on Twitter, writing, “It really seems like from an environmental perspective if nothing else we need to start thinking about reinvigorating local music scenes like we do local foodways.” She’s right. As the New York Times points out, “The whole world of concert promotion had been small-scale and regional until the late 1990s, when it was all rolled up and Live Nation became the biggest concert company ever.” In Chicago, I’m lucky to be able to pop into several independent local venues, see a three-band bill for $25 or under, and feel good about my night and how much I spent. When I look back on the hundreds of gigs I’ve attended as a fan or a journalist, my best nights aren’t in the nosebleeds for something I paid hundreds of dollars for. Instead, the best nights are from seeing a local band blow the roof off Sleeping Village or Metro or the Empty Bottle. With the pandemic pausing live music and organizations like NIVA doing their best to lobby for legislation that would fund independent places while they weren’t making money, getting out of the house and seeing a show can be viewed as a moral good.
Local arts communities are the oases away from the corporate, soulless machinery that’s ruined concerts. Not everyone can live in a place with the ecosystem of a big city but it’s worth looking where you least expect for exciting artists, live music, and fulfilling artistic life outside these big companies. There is nothing wrong with wanting to see a popular artist but there is value in reframing your relationship to live music. Instead of the obvious choice that will cost you a paycheck, why not try the hidden gem in your own city?
What I listened to:
Report: Nick Lutso and the 100K Band at Park West (April 7)
Songwriter and comedian Nick Lutsko did a really excellent Taste Profile on No Expectations the other week and I had a blast at his Park West gig over the weekend. He played a near-two-hour set, which was wild, complete with hilarious visual gags and onstage bits. I’m really impressed with Lutsko as a performer but also for the fact that he’s really carved out a niche and a mostly-online community through his tunes. The crowd was so clearly stoked to be there and most everyone stayed to buy a CD and say what’s up to Nick. Indie rock fans can be cold and distant even if they’re having a good time so it was a rare and disarming thing to see such unabashed enthusiasm. It’s tough to not have fun seeing him play and to imagine how the venue staff must have thought about what was transpiring onstage with Dan Bongino sing-a-longs and creepy puppets.
Report: Unknown Mortal Orchestra at Radius (April 8)
Radius is a new 5,000-cap room in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. It’s massive and clean, beers are $15 and it looks like it could be a perfect venue for laser tag. But for its size, it sounds better than most bigger spots around the city. UMO played a real “for the heads” set going through their whole catalog and debuting tracks from their latest LP V. I’ve seen the band a bunch, most recently in 2018 when I made Ruban listen to Dave Matthews Band for the first time in The Vic’s green room, but this was probably the best. They have a new touring keyboardist in Christian Li who really rounded out the sound but seeing them in such a large room really made clear that that’s the proper venue for how these songs should be heard. Ruban’s a great songwriter and has quietly managed to stay above trends and set them himself.
What I watched:
Beef
This new Netflix series from A24 is like watching a trainwreck. It’s TV that makes you feel bad but you can’t look away. The show is about two self-destructive people (played by Steven Yeun and Ali Wong) who get into a traffic altercation outside a Los Angeles supermarket, kickstarting a feud that escalates over 10 episodes. I’m only about halfway through but watching these two characters fall deeper down a rage spiral is fascinating. Despite some laugh out loud moments, it’s not really a fun show. Rather, it’s a revealing portrait of what makes Americans break. The two main characters on Beef couldn’t be more different, Yeun’s is a hapless contractor with a Burger King addiction (note: I don’t really see why this is a problem) who is struggling to scrape by while Wong’s is a #girlboss small business owner and mom about to sell her company for $10 million dollars. The show smartly doesn’t fall into the “skewer the rich” or “class war” tropes but rather uses the plot to show how similar they both are as people. Plus, there are earnest Incubus and Hoobastank needle drops.
What I read:
Live Music Is Roaring Back. But Fans Are Reeling From Sticker Shock.
The cost of tickets for the tour has led to a roiling debate about whether the bond between artist and audience has been broken. Backstreets, the leading Springsteen fan publication since 1980, ran a fiery editorial last year saying that the new pricing “violates an implicit contract between Bruce Springsteen and his fans.” In February, Christopher Phillips, Backstreets’ editor and publisher, said he was shutting down the publication in protest.
For concertgoers across the board, it has been a season of sticker shock. Beyoncé, who had a far smoother sale than Swift, was selling dynamically priced seats off the floor at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey for about $1,000 apiece, according to one attendee’s receipts. At Madison Square Garden, you could get a pair of Madonna tickets for $1,300; “platinum” seats in the same section are now nearly $1,000 each.
When Drake’s three shows at Barclays Center in Brooklyn went on sale last month, “standard” tickets, listed at $69.50 to $329.50, were snapped up almost immediately, leaving fans to contend with dynamic prices as high as $1,182.
New study shows how scary fast today's AI is at cracking passwords
The cybersecurity firm Home Security Heroes recently published a study about AI and password cracking. Specifically, the researchers looked into a new AI-powered password-cracking tool called PassGAN (password generative adversarial network). In the study, the researchers used PassGAN to run through a list of over 15 million passwords. The results revealed that 51% of common passwords can be cracked in less than a minute, 65% in less than an hour, 71% in less than a day, and 81% in less than a month.
Streaming services urged to clamp down on AI-generated music
Universal Music Group has told streaming platforms, including Spotify and Apple, to block artificial intelligence services from scraping melodies and lyrics from their copyrighted songs, according to emails viewed by the Financial Times.
UMG, which controls about a third of the global music market, has become increasingly concerned about AI bots using their songs to train themselves to churn out music that sounds like popular artists.
AI-generated songs have been popping up on streaming services and UMG has been sending takedown requests “left and right”, said a person familiar with the matter. The company is asking streaming companies to cut off access to their music catalogue for developers using it to train AI technology.
“We will not hesitate to take steps to protect our rights and those of our artists,” UMG wrote to online platforms in March, in emails viewed by the FT.
No Expectations 019: Locket
This one 👏