Visual China.
Text |Tech Planet, Author |Zhai Yuanyuan.2023 is a year of full recovery and even madness in the performance market, with star concerts blowing out.
According to incomplete statistics, there will be more than 70 concerts by Xue Zhiqian in 2023;***, which has been caught in a fake singing turmoil, will hold more than 59 concerts in 2023;Jay Chou, the singer who made the most money in concerts, toured 29 concerts in the whole year;Singer Zhang Jie held 21 concerts throughout the year.
According to data from the Damai platform, the number of large-scale concerts and performances nationwide exceeded 200 in November and December, which was basically the same as in October. In the first three quarters of this year, the number of audience members in the performance market exceeded 1100 million, exceeding the level of the whole year of 2019.
The concert has been lively from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, and the revenge consumption of young people is particularly obvious, Jay Chou's concert is hard to find, and a single concert ticket has been fried to 60,000 yuan;TFBOYS's ten-year concert, more than 30,000 tickets, were sold out in a few seconds, and the number of people who wanted to see it was as high as more than 6 million.
A concert can set a city on fire. The Haikou Bureau of Culture and Tourism previously disclosed that Jay Chou's 4 concerts were directly brought to the local area 97.6 billion yuan of tourism consumption income;Xi'an previously released data that TFBOYS concerts directly drove tourism revenue of 4$1.6 billion. Behind every concert with a strong ability to attract money, from the front of the stage to the backstage, from the infield to the outfield, there may be hundreds of people working together to complete a perfect performance.
2023 is the year with the most concerts, and it is also the year with the busiest and most involved in related practitioners. Among them are directors, cinematographers, visual executives, security personnel, and vendors who set up stalls outside the venue. They are all front-line participants, but also witnesses and creators.
I am a concert visual executive in Macau, which is the VJ in the industry terminology, and I have 7-8 years of experience in the industry. The specific work content is actually that you see all kinds of wonderful patterns flowing on the concert screen, the one playing with the computer on the console, and then when to cut the live signal, when to convert it into animation, and those impressive visual effects creation work are all done by us.
For VJ, if it is not for the production from beginning to end in the front, middle and late stages, it can be completed within a week, the customer gives us the first time, communicates the rhythm, and finally follows their execution method.
This year, I have participated in as many as 50-80 performances, and the income of one performance is about 10,000 yuan. There are concerts, festivals, and meetings. There are many performances in Macau, such as on December 23, there were 7 performances of different scales in Macau, with concerts by different stars such as Li Ronghao and Li Keqin. There are hundreds of performances a year.
In this year, I remember November as the busiest, when I was involved in a ** festival project, I was busy for 2-3 weeks, and at the same time there were other performance projects, so I participated in almost 5 performances that month, and I went to one venue a day when I was the busiest. The Cool Festival works long hours, from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. the next morning.
The biggest feeling this year is that the performance industry is really crazy, during the epidemic, almost all offline performances were suspended, and this year's performances are 5-8 times more than last year, and more than in 2019. Personally, I participated in a third fewer projects in 2019 than I did this year. At that time, there was no feeling of a revenge concert, it was relatively stable, there were 2-3 venues every week with a show, and now every venue has a performance every week.
This year's concert blowout is of course a good thing for the performance industry, but it has also exposed some problems, and there is indeed a shortage of manpower in Macau's performances, and relevant talents are relatively scarce. I've heard from many partners that it's not that they don't want to do some performances, but that they don't have enough people to do them.
Compared with previous years, an obvious change this year is that the venues for concerts and conferences have begun to become smaller. Large and small venues and artists have begun to go down, and small venues have begun to look for artists with different coffee positions to try to hold a concert or star meeting. And they're confident that a small venue can attract audiences.
The prosperity of Macao's performance market is also related to the policy, and now Macao wants to build a "performing arts capital", so practitioners are working hard to follow the policy.
I went to almost every concert in Hefei this year. is different from the star chasers who spend money to go to concerts, I went to work as a security guard, and I went to work every day to listen to celebrities sing for free, and then I could earn one or two hundred by the way, which can be said to kill two birds with one stone.
Of course, security is not my full-time job, I work as a consultant for academic qualifications and professional qualifications. Then there is cooperation with the security company, so I usually give my own students a connection by the way, and they can do it if they want to. I also got a security guard certificate, so I had the opportunity to work part-time at various concerts. I went to this year's concert in Hefei, Zhang Jie's concert, Xue Zhiqian, Zhang Xinzhe, Li Ronghao, Jolin Tsai and so on. In total, I earned a few thousand dollars.
As a concert security guard, meals and water are included, and wages are paid daily. The main job content is to maintain the order of the concert site, on duty, etc. Each security guard is in a fixed position, does not need to patrol, enters three hours early, and ends at 11 p.m.
The salary of different concerts is different, and the salary of a security guard is about 160-180 yuan a day, because for each concert, the organizer gives a different amount, which is generally not less than 150.
This year, many people have come to apply for a security guard certificate because they want to go to a concert. There are also those who can't buy concert tickets and want to spend money to find security guards and cleaning personnel, and ask the security guards and cleaners to hand over the day's work to them, so that they can blend in with the scene and save ticket money. There are all kinds of new things. In fact, it is easy to understand that white prostitutes can make some money at the same time, why not?The cost of taking a certificate is only 500 yuan, and we can arrange our own students here in Hefei to enter the infield. Entering the infield, it is equivalent to listening to the concert for white prostitutes and seeing the stars at a very close range.
Like Zhang Jie's concert in Hefei this year, some people spent thousands of yuan, but for me, I didn't spend a penny, and I earned 180 yuan a day. The only difference is that compared to them, they sit and we stand.
Even if you don't want to go to a free concert and get a security guard certificate, you can go to other places to work as a security guard. For example, in the high-end community in Hefei, the security guards are all young guys, and the salary is also good, and they all require certificates. With a certificate, there is an additional employment channel.
Now I can't finish the concert, I can't finish listening to it at all, and there are still many concerts recruiting security guards during the New Year's Day holiday and after the holiday. However, the salary may not be too high, many of them are 100 yuan a day.
There are a lot of concerts this year, and the stalls are also overcrowded.
I have set up a stall four times this year, one is to sell Internet celebrity food hot milk treasure, and the other three times are concert stalls. The three star concerts selected are all star venues with a large number of fan audiences, namely Jay Chou and **Zhang Shaohan.
Whether you can make money in the end of setting up a stall at a concert mainly depends on the security policy, and if you are too strict to set up a stall, you will not make much money.
Before setting up the stall, I actually went to do market research, and the pricing mainly depends on peers, and the strategy is that you will sell as much as they sell, and then flexibly increase or decrease the price according to the situation. The purchase channel is the same for everyone, that is, go to 1688 and Pinduoduo, and then some goods will also be bought from Xiaohongshu.
Concert stalls are not as profitable as imagined. Some people may earn 10,000 yuan in a few days, like a colleague of mine who took leave to set up a stall at the door of Jay Chou's concert, and earned me two months' salary in one day, but not everyone can earn that much. I also talked about a colleague who set up a stall before, she had her own job, and then she saw that the stall was very popular, and thought that she could easily earn 10,000 or 1,000 a day like others, so she took a day off to set up a stall in front of Jay Chou's concert venue, but she didn't even earn her salary back that day.
The most profitable time I made was setting up a booth at a concert, earning nearly 600 yuan. I didn't make a lot of money that day, but it was a big win for me. The three giants of ace sales are: braided hair, tattoo stickers, and lyric keychains. Braiding hair is a low-cost and high-income perennial winner, and almost half of my 600 yuan income that day came from braiding. The cost of the hair rope is only a few cents, but the cost of braiding a hair is 35 yuan. I searched for a hair braiding tutorial on Xiaohongshu, which is particularly easy to use, and it looks good with dopamine stars.
Tattoo stickers are also a representative of low cost, high customer unit price and high sales, which can be sold dozens of times. Girls who listen to concerts like to put one on their faces. The product of stepping on the pit is a fan, and only 2 were sold that day, which may be related to the weather, and it is not easy to sell when it is cold.
Many peers like to sell water and paper towels when they set up stalls, and even if they can't sell them, they can keep them for their own use. But I didn't wholesale these things because I felt that the security could chase people out at any time, so I couldn't set up a fixed stall, and I had to be prepared to sell them on the move. I don't wholesale the bracelets either, because many concert organizers will send them to everyone for free. It's also best to check in advance whether the singer has a fixed field-controlled glow stick, and if so, it can't be sold. All of this research is essential.
In addition, the stall cannot be "i people" (referring to those who are introverted and have obvious social phobia), and they must shout boldly, because the competition on the scene is particularly fierce.
This year's concert is a blowout, but the implementation of the concert of well-known singers usually cannot reach our small company.
We are a performance agency in Tianjin, which can not only do concert execution, but also dock performance projects for the organizer. This year, we have received more types of activities, and relatively few performances, because many of the organizers of the performances have the ability to land, so there is no need to find a third-party company. For example, if a concert sponsored by a company is not capable of execution, they will find us to land.
This year, there are 2 concerts. There have been no projects at all in the three years of the epidemic, and the concerts undertaken before the epidemic have been several years ago.
Our landing plus execution fee is about 20-300,000 yuan, mainly depending on the scale of the project. The services include: docking venues, security, site protection, material production, cultural approval, public security approval, political and legal committee approval, third-party risk assessment report, etc. The organizer is only responsible for the artist, and we are a one-stop service for other on-site aspects.
Because we have experience in implementation, it is basically not difficult for us. The main reason is that domestic security is more important, and it is afraid of group incidents, so the approval will be stricter, such as strict requirements for the setting of safety exits, the number of security guards, and the placement of iron horses.
This year, well-known singers and artists have held a lot of solo singing and touring concerts, such as ***, which has been on the cusp recently, and has held nearly 60 concerts this year. Many others belong to platter concerts, and the organizers invite stars from different coffee positions. For a platter concert, what needs to be paid is the show fee for the artist's commercial performance. If you sing solo, the agency already has a mature stage production, and the organizer is only responsible for selling tickets.
Under normal circumstances, the cost of a single platter concert is about 400-10 million, and the difference lies in the artist's coffee position. solo singing, like this year's Rainie Yang and Wang Xinling's celebrity concerts, the cost of a concert is about six or seven million;Jolin Tsai is about 15 million;Zhang Jie, Jay Chou, and Jacky Cheung have about 20 million coffee positions. However, big-name first-line artists do not perform externally, such as Jay Chou, Andy Lau, Eason Chan, and **Lin Junjie, all of which are done by large companies, and others can't get them.
In order to save the budget, they can generally get it at a cost of six or seven hundred thousand, and they don't use more than 2 million equipment at all. But in fact, different audio equipment is very different, and the effect is definitely different.
2023 has been a busy year.
Before the epidemic, we didn't plan to enter the performance industry, and this year we worked in many concerts and festivals, but the studio happened to cooperate with some artists with outstanding personal ideas.
This year, my studio took on two national tours, a single concert of 10,000 people, and a full performance of the year-round project. There are only about 20 artist concerts and ** festival tours, and each performance is about 3-4 days of business trips.
The frequency of business trips is 2 times a month.
I remember that November was the busiest month, when as the chief director of a singer's concert, he led a team of 14 people, from the overall creativity, stage design to visuals, lighting, and on-site execution, the team worked day and night. The rehearsal time was relatively tight, and there was not much work left for everyone to prepare, so the team worked 24-hour non-dormant shifts, but fortunately, in the end, a perfect performance was dedicated to 20,000 people on the scene.
The work schedule is very full, and so far we have 7-8 visits from ** that we have not had time to reply. The team has been busy for a year, and now they have time to take a vacation at the end of the year.