What I Hate

I have to admit that I rarely pay for concert tickets. Some people get discounts on store merchandise or free fries or some other perk in their job, and mine just happens to be that I don't usually pay for concert tickets. HOWEVER, that is not always the case, and the ones I do pay for, are usually the really mind blowing expensive ones. I remember on one of U2's tours a few years ago paying like $250 for a ticket from a scalper or ticket broker as they prefer to be called.

I bought the ticket a few days after tickets had gone on sale, so the concert was still months away, and I hadn't even really heard much about the show. When I did start hearing things, I heard that U2 wasn't playing more than two or three of their big hits, and were instead only playing songs from the past two albums or some nonsense. Yes, those two albums are and were great, but that is not the point.

I don't care how tired you are of playing your hits, or if you are trying to sell more albums, or you are trying to make your show fit one theme or style. We as fans are not paying hundreds of dollars per ticket so you can experiment. We want what we like and what we enjoy. You want to charge $15, you can play whatever the hell you want. You charge $500 for VIP seating, I better hear crap I know every word to.

Another favorite trick of musicians is to combine 4 or 5 of their hits into a medley. Again, this only works if you have 20 hits and can't possibly sing them all in the time allotted. Cool. But if you are doing it to give the old songs a rest, forget it. You might sing the same songs 50 times each tour, but we, your fans are only hearing them once. Yes, if you are Phish fans you are hearing them every night, but you don't remember what you heard the night before anyway so it doesn't matter.

Oh, and Dave Matthews, I love you, but if I hear another 40 minute version of one of your hits, I am going to storm the stage. At last count, Dave plays about five songs in a 2 hour set.

I bring all this up because I saw that Kylie Minogue is going to not play any of her big hits on her new tour. Now I don't give a rats ass about Kylie or her tour, but I'm sure there are hundreds of thousands of her fans who will be paying astronomical sums to see her, and they want to hear her hits. If an album doesn't sell well, it means that fans didn't like it, so why on earth would you charge a fortune to your fans and have them endure only songs from that album that sucked.