The Police take a bow in their farewell concert, which benefitted New York public TV stations WNET and WLIW.
(Photo: McCotner. Creative Commons terms.)
Benefit concert with The Police grosses $3 million for New York stations
Last week’s farewell concert for The Police grossed just over $3 million as a fundraiser for New York’s WNET/WLIW duo, selling out the 18,222 seats in Madison Square Garden. Bill Baker, WNET president emeritus, called the benefit “phenomenally successful financially.”
The station could not yet estimate its net proceeds, according to licensee spokeswoman Kellie Castruita Specter. Though the rock superband donated its performance, bills for other costs have not been summed up.
Likewise, some of the revenue: An eBay auction of two guitars, a microphone and a drum set from the band members will close Aug. 14. With five days to go, total bids were approaching $14,000 on Saturday.
For the second song, the Police brought the more official New York City Police Band onto the stage to play along, Specter said [photo on Flickr].
Fans ranged from 20s to 60s, she said, and included such celebrities as rockers Bruce Springsteen and Deborah Harry and actors James Gandolfini and Leonardo DiCaprio.
It was the 150th show in a long reunion tour that apparently reminded band members Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland that they’d rather not work together.
"The real triumph of this tour is that we haven't strangled each other," said Sting, according to the Associated Press. "Not to say it hasn't crossed my mind — or Andy's or Stewart's."
The band said in many ways that won’t get back together again, AP reported. They brought a fat lady on stage to sing (actually a roadie in drag) and then walked off stage with Porky Pig’s exit line, “That’s all, folks!”
Farewell concert for The Police, debut for ‘Public Television Rocks’
It’ll be the last chance to see the Police perform, not only in the band’s year-long reunion tour, but perhaps forever. On the evening of Aug. 7 [2008], hoards of New Yorkers will be in the bowels of Madison Square Garden, inching toward their seats.
All around them will be signs saying “Public Television Rocks.” When they sit down, there will be public TV promo on their chairs, and when they look up, a sizzle reel of past WNET shows featuring the likes of Rod Stewart, Paul Simon and Tina Turner will be playing on huge video screens.
Even nonmusical programs will get the treatment. “Public television rocks your house,” for instance, touts how-to shows.
The slogan isn’t as sober and Congress-ready as CPB’s My Source campaign or as human-growthy as PBS’s Be More phrase, but it may work better on the evening of Aug. 7 as the decibel level passes 100.
If the concert sells out the arena’s 18,000 seats, and if the average ticket price is just $120—it’s probably higher—this may be one of the biggest benefits ever for public TV, grossing more than $2 million.
Three weeks before the concert, organizers at WNET/WLIW, the two stations of Educational Broadcasting Corp., won’t risk a public estimate of ticket sales, much less the net proceeds after costs, but Ranfi Rivera, deputy general counsel, program business affairs, reports that the band has just agreed to permit additional seating in the huge area behind the stage.
The New York stations have hooked up with some smaller rock events, but this will be the first big exposure for the slogan “Public Television Rocks.”
The members of The Police, the biggest rock trio in the world 25 years ago and still not gone to seed, put aside well-documented personal animosity and toured the world for a year. Their 54 shows in 2007 earned $133 million, making the Police the top touring act of the year, according to the music data firm Pollstar. Their ticket sales were double Justin Timberlake’s and triple Josh Groban’s.
For now, WNET and WLIW execs aren’t sure exactly how they will use the phrase “Public Television Rocks,” but it probably will be applied to some kind of syndicated service based on the fact that millions of baby boom rockers have matured into their years of extensive-TV-watching, making them good donor prospects as well.
Laura Savini, co-director of the rock project and marketing v.p. for WLIW, likes the idea of developing a rock-related “umbrella” package that other stations can use for programming and fundraising. Her boss, WLIW President Terrel Cass, says they’ve been talking about program possibilities with “some pretty heavy producers.”
Neal Shapiro, president of the parent licensee EBC and of WNET, observes that Americans increasingly accept rock as a form of music worthy of serious attention. And WNET’s new e.p. of Great Performances, David Horn, ran a well-received rock showcase, Sessions at West 57th, in the late 1990s.
Add to the mixture this big benefit concert.
The band had helped a number of other causes during its tour, including Amazon rainforest and Free Tibet activists. Why did the Police make the public TV stations such a prominent beneficiary?
One factor, says Shapiro, is that Sting, the vocalist and bandleader, enjoyed doing Sting: Songs from the Labyrinth, a WNET co-production documenting his foray into 16th century English lute music. The show aired on Great Performances in February 2007 and its soundtrack was the top-selling classical album of 2006.
In addition, Shapiro said, Sting grew up with public television in England. And drummer Stewart Copeland had been involved with WLIW in pledge programs, Cass adds.
As Cass tells it, the band’s proposal for the benefit concert came through Jay Coleman, head of a top entertainment marketing firm, EMCI.
Coleman took the proposal to WNET’s president emeritus, Bill Baker, but it wasn’t the kind of glittering corporate tie-in that Coleman usually handles, such as linking the Rolling Stones with Sprint or Michael Jackson with Pepsi.
This time he was tying a famous rock band with the public-interest legacy of its choice.
Baker relayed the idea to WLIW and “Laura Savini went nuts,” Cass remembers, but a lot of others were uneasy about it. For one thing, the concert date was little more than three months away.
For another, as the broadcasters were surprised to learn later, the Police will be playing three concerts in the metro area earlier in the week, one in northern New Jersey and two at Jones Beach on Long Island.
A pile of the stations’ money was at stake. Though the Police will donate its performance and Ticketmaster will forgo commissions, the stations had to guarantee a hunk of the costs of staging the event and renting the Garden. Though Shapiro claims he never felt like he was sailing straight toward an iceberg, he says, it was not the kind of decision that public TV execs face every day. “We had to take a deep breath,” he says.
The stations had to commit to the concert two or three weeks before it was clear that it would break even, according to Cass.
On May 6, the plan went public. Shapiro appeared at a press conference with the band members and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, though the mayor gave more time to the band’s $1 million matching gift to MillionTreesNYC, the city’s scheme to reforest parts of the city and shrink its enormous carbon footprint.
“We have a long history in New York,” Sting said. “We came here first in 1978. We want to leave a gift that will last for decades.”
But he was talking about the trees.
To move those 18,000 tickets, the stations have launched into what Savini calls 360-degree fundraising.
“It’s been truly an amazing experience between the two stations and the way they’ve come together,” says Ranfi.
To have posters slapped all over the city, they hired a guerrilla posting company. Ticketmaster, the promoter Live Nation, Madison Square Garden and Citibank donated e-mail lists in the tri-state area, says Savini. TV programmers scheduled a performance show from the band’s Synchronicity tour in the 1980s and bought a new retrospective doc on The Police.
For publicity as well as revenue, the organizers set up an auction with help from the Kompolt online auction agency and MissionFish, the arm of eBay that works with charity.
Bidding closed last week on the auction’s first wave on eBay, with four donors bidding a total of $39,700 for packages of front-row seats or closeup “snake pit” standing room and other special goodies involving the band and their opening act, the B-52s. In the second wave, Aug. 4-14, eBay will dispose of one of Sting’s basses, a Fender Telecaster played by Andy Summers, and a set of Stewart Copeland’s drums.
Even for the biggest bidders on eBay, however there are some things you can’t exactly buy. Though one couple laid out $12,000 for access including admittance to the soundcheck before the show, they got no guarantee that they’d be called up on the stage with the band. Sting will make that choice.
Web page posted Aug. 9, 2008
Copyright 2008 by Current LLC
