Gratuitous entry
By : Robert Wylot
King of pain: Ex-Police star Sting at Warsaws Gwardia stadium last week.
Music promoters in Poland could be facing a tough summer as the number of fans paying to see live acts tumbles.
As well as blaming the country's economic slump, poor infrastructure and red tape for a drop in audience figures, promoters said they are also being squeezed by competition from free, sponsored concerts.
"If people get used to free events, they are less inclined to pay zl. 100 for a ticket," said Steven Todd, who runs the Polish office of the Budapest-based Odyssey Concerts (http://www.odyssey.pl), the biggest music promoter in Poland.
Todd said Odyssey organizes 80% of all international music events in Poland and recently convinced Sting to come to Poland for the third time in four years. But while the company is eager to promote large international acts in Poland, Odyssey is also aware of the intense competition for live acts from media firms such as radio broadcaster RMF FM. "The attendance (at ticketed concerts) in 2001 has been down 30-40% compared to 2000, solely due to free events organized by radio RMF FM," he said.
Since 1991, RMF FM has staged a large free music event each summer called Inwazja Mocy. Odyssey, meanwhile, charges zl. 80-zl. 100 for fans to see Sting play.
According to Anna Kozlowska, RMF FM's spokeswoman, last year's Inwazja Mocy attracted 3 million concert goers and the total costs for RMF FM and its partner-sponsors, Skoda and Plus GSM, amounted to more than $5 million. "The biggest audience of 800,000 came to see the Scorpions in Krakow," Kozlowska added.
Figures like those are bad news for Odyssey. "Odyssey's biggest concert has so far been the 25,000 Metallica event last year," Todd said. Nevertheless, Todd and other promoters of fee-paying concerts are livid about free shows being organized by broadcasting companies. "They are not professional concert organizers, they are media companies," he said, adding that many of the artists at free events were unknown amateurs and rock 'n' roll has-beens. "They bring failed artists."
Jacek Wolff of Wroclaw-based promotions company Interart (http://www.interart.com.pl/kone), agreed. "The quality of these concerts is sometimes just embarrassing," he said.
Kozlowska, however, said criticism of RMF FM's events was unfair. "If our concerts were bad, people simply wouldn't come," she said.
But whatever the critics say about free concerts, promoters across the board agree that Polish music fans can ill afford to see international celebrities. "Young people don't have enough money to pay zl. 70 for a star," Wolff said. Kozlowska agreed: "Tickets are so expensive in Poland that many people cannot afford them. Zl. 100 is not cheap for a teenager or even a university student."
The lack of a big spending public is also off-putting for visiting pop stars who often leave Poland out of their itineraries.
"It's difficult to convince an artist to come to Poland," Todd said. "The audience is half and the ticket price is half of what they get in the West, so the revenue is one-fourth ... the economic slowdown is not helping our sales either."
Wolff said the slump in sales is evident, as it is in most industries now. Compared to the early 1990s, "the drop in sales is by 50% at the least," he said.
Interart's president, Maciej Partyka, said the main concern of promoters is event sponsorship. "The business is now ruined by sponsors who finance free events," he said. "This is the biggest problem. They can become our allies, but in a different model of concert business. If sponsors support our concerts, we can cut the ticket price by half. And everyone will benefit: promoters, sponsors and fans."
Tomik Grewinski, manager of Polish pop sensation Kayah, also sees sponsorship as a problem for promoters of fee-paying music events. "At the moment it's quite difficult to organize a tour where people have to buy tickets," he said. "The only events that really happen are sponsored events with no ticket sales.
But despite the success of sponsored events, Grewinski also added a word of warning about the future of free concerts. With the economic slump and worsening unemployment, sponsors are becoming more difficult to find. "Fewer firms are interested in sponsoring at all," Grewinski said. "Legislators, like the Sejm, make it even more difficult (to sponsor events) because they introduce a ban on beer advertising. They think of sports, but they don't think about music.
"Most summer events were sponsored by beer producers, so those are additional obstacles that will definitely have an effect next year."
As a further sign of the times, this year's annual RMF FM's Inwazja Mocy has been cancelled because of company restructuring and redundancies.
