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The Sonic Road Podcast
The stuff that doesn't make it to YouTube.
What's up everybody — Beau here.
I sat down with John Gist this week — founder of Vegas Rock Revolution and the guy behind Planet Desert Rock Weekend — and what was supposed to be a conversation about his festival turned into a full teardown of the concert industry: ticket prices, Ticketmaster, Blue Dot Fever, Gen X radio stations, Nirvana at a frat house, a box of old Circus magazines, and John Garcia doing an acoustic set at a stoner rock festival. That's what happens when you get somebody in the room who's actually lived this stuff from both sides. Zero regrets.
Here's a piece of that conversation, and below that, some thoughts I've been sitting with that I wanted to share with you.
John Gist Joins the Show | The Sonic Road Podcast Ep. 36
WATCH HERE: https://youtu.be/cTI1n4MH5Gw?si=idZk9w57YIiuqySW
John and I get into why ticket prices are up 41% since 2019, what "Blue Dot Fever" actually means, and how he built Planet Desert Rock Weekend to run on the exact opposite model. If you dig what you see, the full uncut conversation drops on YouTube next week.
The Juice Isn't Worth the Squeeze
I want to talk about something that came up a bunch of different ways in this conversation with John, because when I step back and look at it all together, it's the same picture I keep running into every time I talk to somebody who actually works in this industry.
The live music business is broken. Not the bands. Not the music. The bands are great right now — rock's actually the fastest-growing genre in streaming, hard rock concerts were up 14% last year, vinyl just had its 19th straight year of growth. The demand is there. The system standing between the fans and the bands is what's broken.