Rock rebel Kid Rock has taken his independent streak to the box office, offering fans $20 tickets for his concerts in a one-man crusade of what he called "highway robbery" tour ticket costs.
And fans are responding in droves.
According to The Detroit Free Press, Kid Rock's attendance is up substantially from his 2011 shows, in some cases threefold.
The newspaper reported that the last six weeks of shows, with opener ZZ Top, are nearly sold out. McCollum said, for example, Kid Rock is expected to perform in front of 28,000 in Chicago, where he drew 15,000 in 2011.
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Kid Rock's management team is already calling the experiment a grand slam.
"That’s the thing: If Kid Rock is winning, it’s because he’s looking out for fans," Fielding Logan, from the artist's management firm Q Prime, told the Free Press. "Clearly, he has a large blue-collar fan base, salt of the earth. Twenty dollars really speaks to them."
As an example of just how much Kid Rock is bucking the concert pricing trend, a Pollstar report said that the average ticket price in North America for the Top 100 tours in the first six months of 2013 was $70.91, up 14.1 percent from last year.
"It's always going to come down to price, but I think (from the fan's perspective) it's more the service charges, the fees, getting in there and not knowing what beers will cost, what they'll hit you for parking,"
Kid Rock told Billboard back in April when he first launched the $20-a-ticket tour.
"Every little thing they nickel and dime you, and it's not just music, it's sports, it's going to the movies. Artists demand so much money, and you have to set ticket prices at (a certain level). Everyone's fighting the system, and it's really been all of our faults. We're all fortunate to make as much money as we do, and I can surely take a pay cut and help out in these hard times," Kid Rock added in his Billboard interview.
It's now looking like a stroke of genius on the musician's part but it still has some risk, according to the Free Press. Instead of taking a set fee for each performance, the artists and promoter, in this case Live Nation, splits revenue from ticket sales, concessions, and merchandise, meaning Kid Rock's neck is on the line every concert to get rear ends in the seats.
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