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Felix Salmon

sailing the rough rude sea

June 29th, 2009

Deceased icon datapoint of the day

Posted by: Felix Salmon
Tags: felix, ,

From the WSJ:

After the deaths of other major stars, including Elvis Presley, in 1977, and Kurt Cobain in 1994, around half of outstanding concert tickets were never returned for refund, according to people in the concert business, because fans preferred to keep them as souvenirs.

Is it possible that AEG will end up making more money now the shows have been cancelled than it would have had they gone ahead?

4 comments so far

I think this is exactly what was the intention of AEG and also possible there is a dark shadow connection with the Doctor Conrad Murray who AEG hired to stay at Jackson’s house.

Bottom line for any investigator to look into - AEG pays Doctor to give overdose to end Michael Jackson’s life to get more money out of the concert and pay out the Doctor who owes $400k plus. AEG make Money as does the Doctor (Just watch any increase of funds going into the Doctor Murrays Account over the next few weeks).

- Posted by Joel

Depends. They were insured for the first 10 shows - per the British papers - so they have that floor of revenue, but they did incur a lot of expense. The papers say maybe $30M, with some $10M to Jackson and $20M in various costs. Some of the $20M could perhaps be recovered, if it went for example to making up merchandise. I don’t know the number of available tickets, etc.

- Posted by jonathan

AEG will probably be able to recover its expenses, maybe even make a bit of profit; but you would have to show me clear and convincing evidence that AEG would engage in murder as suggested. I am in the record industry and can tell you that they stood to earn a hell-of-a-lot more money running the tour. Don’t forget outlets such as a “final concert” to a air on, say?, HBO, worth millions and maybe more with free-tv with a nice stack of sponsors, dvd to follow, a concert cd, and the list goes on. Trust me, I have been in a similar position as AEG (smaller scale) and they were interested in making the tour happen.

- Posted by Jay Lawson

I would guess that most of the tickets to the upcoming shows havent been printed/mailed yet. Also, many tickets these days are electronic or will call. Thus, while the souvenir factor will undoubtedly influence some physical ticket holders I would think that this is not the majority of the people who actually paid for seats.

- Posted by JM

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