[HN Gopher] The Business of Phish (2013)
___________________________________________________________________
The Business of Phish (2013)
Author : Tomte
Score : 64 points
Date : 2025-03-19 15:40 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (priceonomics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (priceonomics.com)
| anders16 wrote:
| phish's annual nye run at msg is a must see!
| baskinator wrote:
| The business of the Phish shakedown is an interesting read too.
| Ice cold fatties..
|
| https://www.villagevoice.com/inside-the-nitrous-mafia-an-eas...
| keammo1 wrote:
| Thank you! I was actually hoping the original article would get
| into the Shakedown "economy" that surrounds Phish and other jam
| bands. Not just the nitrous part, but people selling grilled
| cheeses, burritos, single cans of Heady Topper and unlicensed
| merch. Like what kind of numbers they actually do, how do they
| secure their spot, how do they deal with competition, are they
| hopping on other bands' tours, how many are Phans vs just there
| to make a buck, what does their typical non-tour life look like
| etc
| baskinator wrote:
| It's wild how it pops up and disappears. Well not completely
| disappears because I went back the next day after a show and
| there was balloon debris and trash littered everywhere.
|
| I have a friend who has seen 100+ shows and he knows people
| whose identity and lifestyle is following the tour. They
| scrap to make ends meet and live on the road. A contingent of
| shakedown merchants fit that profile. Of course, some are
| there just to make money and don't see the shows. And some
| probably take turns running the booth while their clan is is
| at the show that night
| gatnoodle wrote:
| They're way is the complete opposite of Tool, probably why Tool
| lands up taking decades to release albums.
| gnatman wrote:
| 1 for 3, 2 for 5
| immibis wrote:
| numbers go 0 1 2, 3 four 5, silly goose
|
| (I don't know what this is supposed to mean)
| jeffdotdev wrote:
| It's the price of the beers in the parking lot before the
| concert. (or at least used to be.)
| switz wrote:
| As someone who could reasonably be considered an expert in Phish,
| as well as someone who built their own indie business, I can
| confidently say no book, business, or entity influenced my
| business more than Phish. Phish is a business, but they are more
| accurately defined as a creative conduit for the four members to
| sustainably make music. Their goals were to work incredibly hard
| (both in front of an audience and away from them), grow
| sustainably, and perform live music. They, by and large, treat
| their fans right and focus on crafting incredible live
| experiences. Their interviews are gems for those pursuing
| creative work who are obsessed with process, intent, and
| improvement.
|
| Their business changed drastically in 2009, when they came back
| from an extended hiatus. The business side of things had burned
| them out and they pared down their internal organization to ~3-4
| people and outsourced most of it to some close friends (an
| external management team), so they could focus on the music and
| their families. Whereas in their first 20 years they were far
| more fan-friendly and even anti-consumerism (they regularly
| covered up the advertisements in hockey arenas when playing
| there), the band's business has since become far more profitable
| and extracting, though not necessarily to an obscene extreme. The
| band members have mostly removed themselves from the business
| side and focus on the creative - a role that lets them keep
| rolling, but sometimes at the cost of fan-friendliness. It's
| worth noting that they are incredibly philanthropic, and have
| donated immense money to environmental, educational, and drug-
| treatment efforts.
|
| Overall they are a masterclass in running a well-balanced
| organization that is both a capitalistic business as well as a
| down-to-earth creative organization and I have no doubt each and
| every one of us could glean a lesson or two from the way they
| built their structure over years.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| >the band's business has since become far more profitable and
| extracting, though not necessarily to an obscene extreme.
|
| At this point, it is getting extreme. With ticket sales and
| couch tour (live streams of concerts you can pay for) they are
| absurdly rich. Their ticket prices have climbed to a crazy
| amount and they allow all the fuckery that ticketmaster is
| hated for. Phish is my favorite band of all time and I have
| completely stopped seeing them live. I hope they enjoy their
| money.
| switz wrote:
| I would agree with you that as of late it has been bordering
| on excess, but comparing to the other large touring acts
| they're still cheaper. The most egregious thing has been
| leaning into platinum tickets, which Ticketmaster purports as
| a way to avoid scalping, but all it does is create an
| artificial scarcity that drives up false demand. For the last
| few years, there's rarely been a Phish concert where you
| couldn't find a face value ticket (or much cheaper) the day
| of the show despite every show selling out instantly. So it's
| all a facade designed to rent-seek the more wealthy fans,
| while keeping the less motivated fans away from the concert
| and encouraging people to buy up as many tickets as possible
| to use for trades, even if they have no intention of
| attending that concert.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I don't understand why world famous acts are expected to
| have cheap tickets. No one is saying the price of any other
| scarce/limited non-essential products or resources should
| have price controls.
| devin wrote:
| Parent isn't suggesting price controls in any way.
| tristor wrote:
| I don't have an issue with high prices, in the general
| sense, I have an issue with artificially inflated prices
| via dark patterns and other unethical means, which
| Ticketmaster has built their entire business around.
|
| As a customer who earns a tech salary, mostly I want to
| be able to go on the site, find the "best available"
| seats, and buy them. Done.
|
| What Ticketmaster instead forces you to do is go through
| an artificial queuing system, lies to you about what's
| best available, has widely ranging dynamic pricing,
| doesn't allow you to purchase all seat classes available
| at any given moment and releases them randomly, and does
| all sorts of other horrid fuckery and at the end as an
| extra middle finger charges you a "convenience fee" for
| having you print your tickets yourself or scanning them
| from your phone after you went through the least
| convenient, pleasant, and reasonable process every to get
| overcharged for the tickets.
|
| And let's be clear, we're talking about overcharging. The
| face value of a ticket can be high for a world-famous
| act. So let's say the face value of a typical seat is
| $250 for a concert. Ticketmaster will absolutely charge
| you $700 for that same ticket.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| You're contradicting yourself here. You want tickets to
| be both _cheaper_ and _easier to buy._
|
| They can't be both. The value of the ticket is just high.
| Either you pay in time, or money. Your enemy isn't
| ticketmaster, it's the 100,000 people who want to go to a
| 1,000 person venue.
| tristor wrote:
| I don't mind paying $700 if $700 is the face value of the
| ticket. You're acting like I'm against first-come, first-
| serve. I am not. I am fine with it. I'm fine waking up at
| 3AM to buy a ticket. What I'm not okay with are bots and
| bullshit.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| It's not artificially inflated if people are willing to
| buy them. If people are scalping them, Ticketmaster isn't
| charging enough.
| tristor wrote:
| Scalping is an after-the-fact action, which by the way
| Ticketmaster directly enables (they own Stubhub and have
| built-in scalping tools in their app). While I find
| scalping distasteful, that is not the reason why
| Ticketmaster's pricing and practices suck.
| ks2048 wrote:
| Yeah the live stream prices are absurd.
|
| And just to complete myself sounding like a grumpy old man -
| just open ReListen App or Phish.in and choose any show from
| 1993-1997 and you'll get something 10x better.
| pugworthy wrote:
| Makes me think of King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard which I
| saw for the first time in the Bay Area last year.
|
| Opposite of Phish, I believe they live stream all concerts
| for free on YouTube.
| devin wrote:
| I haven't been to a show in a long time but was obsessed as a
| young person. I heard some people I know were planning to go
| to Riviera Maya. I did not expect it to be cheap, but the
| prices were eye watering. It bummed me out.
| mlhales wrote:
| I saw them at the sphere and it was crazy expensive. But I
| met people there that had gotten cheap tickets through a
| lottery that Phish had done to allow fans to access the show
| for a reasonable cost. I thought that was really cool.
| devin wrote:
| I haven't kept up much over the last 15 years or so. What is
| the situation these days with ticket lotteries and the taping
| section? Are people still allowed to tape, and do they still do
| a lottery for tour runs?
| schnable wrote:
| Yes to both.
| martyz wrote:
| You might enjoy my friend's upcoming book (from St Martins
| Press in July) - Sharing in the Groove. Talks about the rise of
| the jam band explosion in the 90s - he interviewed artists,
| managers and more including Trey, John Popper so many...
|
| I have an advance copy and it is soooo good.
|
| https://bookshop.org/p/books/sharing-in-the-groove-the-untol...
| MontgomeryPy wrote:
| Surprised no nod to their following the path that their heroes
| blazed (Grateful Dead)
| jeffwass wrote:
| The Dead are explicitly mentioned :
|
| So while Phish undoubtedly has fewer fans than Madonna, the
| ticket revenue per fan is way higher because fans loyally
| attend multiple shows. Not since the Grateful Dead has a band
| built a following as loyal as Phish. And like the Grateful
| Dead, Phish merchandising is a big business as fans gobble up
| Phish t-shirts, baby-onesies, and hats.
| MontgomeryPy wrote:
| Yes saw that but no suggestion that perhaps consciously or
| subconsciously they followed the Dead's template since the
| article focuses on their business model
| freejazz wrote:
| The Dead's template started as going on tour, selling LSD
| until it ran out
| block_dagger wrote:
| Cool to see my favorite band discussed here. One of my passion
| projects for the past 13 years has been running Phishin' [1], a
| free, legal, open source [2] website and API for discovering and
| streaming their music as recorded by the audience.
|
| [1] https://phish.in [2] https://github.com/jcraigk/phishin
| john_cogs wrote:
| Thanks for your service! I've spent many hours enjoying it.
| alexebird wrote:
| Thanks for your work on Phish.in! I've used it a lot over the
| years.
|
| Not sure if you remember this, but I used to run
| phishtrackstats.com and you let me integrate my api with
| phish.in. That was a big deal for me at the time.
| bloomingeek wrote:
| Sadly, I've never seen Phish in concert, but I have seen Trey
| Anastasio and his band at the Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa. It was
| mind blowing how perfect and complex the music was! My wife
| enjoyed the band immensely, even though she's not a fan of that
| genre.
|
| IMO, Phish and solo Trey are a kind of prog/jaze band, who jams
| out because the music flows in a long play type of way. (It's so
| good, where do you stop?)
| freejazz wrote:
| Sadly? They play all the time and aren't likely to die anytime
| soon. Catch them this spring or summer. And yeah, calling them
| prog is pretty accurate.
| john_cogs wrote:
| Seen Phish many times.
|
| Besides the band's success in carving their own niche, I'm
| equally surprised by the intricacy of the economy that enables
| Phish and other traveling shows to be successful.
|
| There are many specialists required to make it happen. Roadies
| who travel with the artists. Arenas (with their often billionaire
| owners). Security and hospitality staff. Vendors in the arenas
| selling food, drinks, and merch. Vendors outside the shows
| selling bootleg merch, street food, alcohol, and other illicit
| goods in the parking lots.
|
| There's a lot happening every night to make the whole thing as
| fun as it is.
| standardly wrote:
| Phish is the greatest band of all time and if you haven't
| attended a show I sincerely feel you are missing out, regardless
| of what your musical taste is.
|
| If you play an instrument, or have ever played in a band, you'll
| definitely appreciate the show they put on.
| qrush wrote:
| So, HN meetup at the Manchester shows this summer?
| alexebird wrote:
| Good article. I've been seeing them since 2009 and their
| operation is fascinating. Everything is planned, structured,
| coordinated and optimized, so the music can be chaotic.
|
| I've seen them 80 times (which isn't even that much in the
| community), and have had many moments where I thought I might be
| over it. Is all the expense and time worth it? A four night run
| (much less 13) is exhausting. I'll never stop though. It's as
| much about a familiar ritual as seeking new experiences.
|
| It is said that nobody hates Phish fans more than other Phish
| fans. When you fly halfway across the country just to stand next
| to drunk people talking all night ("chompers"), it's hard to
| disagree.
|
| I think a key part of their shtick is random variable reward. Not
| every show will be a banger, but there are enough legendary
| moments that there can be a feeling of chasing great shows, songs
| and moments. Like Pokemon pretty much.
|
| As a musician I realized that it's impossible to control whether
| a show will be great. Even Phish can't fully control that, thus
| the random variable reward is incidental. Although, they say
| there's no such thing as a bad Phish show.
| languagehacker wrote:
| I forgot about Priceonomics. Seems like the pivot from being just
| a blog to something more substantial left whatever this version
| it was in the wake.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-03-19 23:00 UTC)