The Biz

When it happens once, it’s a unique event. Twice, and it could be coincidence. Beyond that suggests a trend. And that’s what happened in the month of August to entertainment event stages.

It’s early June as this is written, and I’m still not sure why I haven’t already followed my own advice and bailed on the markets on the June 1 D-Day that my gut had been forecasting. As if they had coordinated their schedule with the my acid reflux, the economic barometers began reflecting the perfect storm of a housing market with no buyer incentives, the ending of the second round of quantitative easing and a negative jobs report. But despite the growing panic in the back of CNBC’s collective throat, I’m still on board a shaky ship, wanting to believe that, to paraphrase Hunter Thompson, when the going gets weird, the weird double down.

Last year, John Mayer’s Battle Studies tour was humming along globally. Chaos Visual Productions, winner of the 2010 Parnelli Award for Video Company of the Year, had assembled a complex 50-by-20-foot LED video wall composed of 45 Martin LC 2140 panels with four Barco 20k projectors that shot onto a custom screen, as well as a four-HD camera system to capture and play back the concert to the audiences.

I thought I was being clever when it occurred to me that the LED would at some point bring the lighting industry into the economic death grip of Moore’s Law, which, back in 1965, first postulated that the number of transistors that can be cost-effectively placed on an integrated circuit would double approximately every two years.

Japan’s twin disasters – the earthquake-driven tsunami and the damage to several of the nuclear reactors that provide most of the country’s electrical power – will have long-term impact on Japan’s ability to manufacture and deliver key components for an enormous range of products, including lighting and projection systems. Scores of Japanese firms, from component makers to electronics firms and automakers, were forced to keep plants shuttered, and damage to infrastructure including power, roads, rails and ports will take months to repair. It’s likely that damage to the global manufacturing and supply chain will disrupt many industries for months to come.

They say that economic downturns are opportunities if you have the leverage to take advantage of them. Production Resource Group (PRG), one of the biggest suppliers of entertainment and event technology systems, looks like it has done just that to broaden its reach into new markets. In January, PRG acquired New York-based AV post facility Pow! Pix.

Music concert touring hit a speed bump in 2010 and production equipment and service vendors can expect a knot on the head as a result. According to Pollstar's end-of-year report, concert touring ticket revenues for the 50 biggest grossing tours globally fell 12 percent, to $2.93 billion, from $3.34 billion in 2009.

This is the time of year when business columns turn their attention to tax strategies for the coming year. The lighting, projection and staging businesses are heavy with freelance professionals and that's a topic that's right in their wheelhouse. However, 2011 is going to be a wild ride for freelancers when it comes to both taxes and healthcare legislation. For starters, we nearly started the New Year with a lot of uncertainty about what the actual tax rates are going to be.

Collaboration between academia and business has become, well, big business. Since 1980 there have been over 4,300 start-ups that were incubated in U.S. universities, and new spin-off and technology and patent licensing deals are cut seemingly weekly.

In a world where it's harder than ever to be surprised, don't be shocked if Live Nation or AEG Live appears on the marquee of your neighborhood megachurch. The people who install their staging systems say it's increasingly difficult to distinguish what's inside them from any other theatrical venue anymore.