The Arthur Clement Hilton Band only ever played one live show. The audience tried to get us off stage by the traditional means of throwing things and booing loudly. We were made of sterner stuff and when that didn’t work someone pulled the plugs out of the amps. It’s hard to say what they disliked so much. It could have been the histrionic atonal singing. Maybe it was my obvious unfamiliarity with either a drumkit or rhythm. Most likely they hated us because we were visionary pioneers whose brilliance could not be appreciated by a provincial hick audience. In fact that’s what it definitely was.

One of the agonies that day in Lisburn has spared us all is trying to work out when good commercial sense morphs into selling out. The image is from an advertising campaign for a brand of trainers which nearly made me trash a shoe shop this morning. As a heroin addict Sid Vicious was probably willing to do most things for a bit of cash. Fair enough. Decades of careful listening to his words and music make one feel that Ian Curtis would be less than thrilled at his “brand” image being used to sell shoes. It’s not just the dead who are being harnessed to sell clothes. Next week The White Lies are playing a show to launch the new Levi’s store. As a devotee of both guitar based pop and Levi’s jeans I find that really depressing.

Two things seem to be happening in music. One is that bands and their managements do not see any sort of a problem in these sort of commercial tie ups. Selling yourself as part of a multi-national’s marketing strategy is perfectly natural and has no impact on either your artistic credibility or sense of self respect. Consumerism has corroded and absorbed what used to be a form of rebellion and rejection. The other side of that is that very few bands at the moment seem to have any real politics.

The second thing is another way in which the market has taken the commodification of music to a whole new level. U2’s 2005-6 tour grossed $389m. The Police grossed $243m with their 2007-8 tour. One of the reasons for this is that the prices of concert tickets increased by 82% between 1996 and 2003 according to research produced by Princeton University. Over the same period inflation was 17% and the price of cds has been more or less constant for twenty years. Someone has spotted an opportunity.

Live music is where the money is and the promoters control the ticketing and the merchandising. The days when gigs were free or bands expected to make a loss playing live are over and now the object is to squeeze every penny out of the audience. The ethos is summed up by Miles Copeland, Thatcherite former manager of the Police, who says “it has become accepted that you go out and take as much money as people are prepared to pay.” Now you know why your bottle of water gets confiscated when you go into a gig. The O2 arenas in London, Berlin, Prague and other cities are all owned by the same company which is run by Duran Duran’s former tour manager and if you want to experience this philosophy at work visit one of them.

Market share of concert going is also subject to a tendency to monopoly. The Princeton research suggests that in 1981 26% of revenues went to the top 1% of artists. In 2003 it had risen to 56%. Madonna is the queen of this phenomenon. Her deal with Live Nation – the people who add about a tenner onto the price of any ticket you want to buy – puts them in charge of her tours, albums, merchandise, website, fanclub and DVDs for the next ten years. This is the woman who introduced the music going public to the £150 seat and you can be pretty certain that her negotiations with Live Nation for the next tour will examine in minute detail just how far they can stick the arm into the concert goers. The way Jason Garner of Live Nation puts it is “there is huge excitement about the ability to talk to the fan at the moment of passion.” This is open to two interpretations. Setting aside the Benny Hill one it seems to mean that they get really turned on by collecting a huge database to which they can market DVDs, merchandise, downloads and tickets for other events.

At a time when a credit card sponsors music awards, a mobile phone company has splashed its name on concert venues all over Europe, almost every music festival is plugging a company and scumbags are screwing as much as they can out of audiences the time has arrived for a counter revolution of cheap and free gigs and the two fingered salute to accountants taking over music.