Rock 'n Roll is here to stay; old guys and gals won't go away

Welcome to 2011. A couple days ago I was filling in a form, and I got to enter 1/1/11. Never again in my lifetime!

As the new year begins I was reading about 2010 concert tours. Apparently some of the musicians and entertainers made lots of money, while others lost out due to the economic distress in the US and European markets. Using only elementary math skills as taught in our Excel Math curriculum, here's a summary chart I constructed from the data:

This table shows gross ticket sales in US$; blue for US sales and green for international sales.

The industry seems to track sales trends by analyzing the top 50 tours.

• 2010 ticket sales of $1.7 billion were down 15% from 2009's $2.0 billion
• 2010 tickets sold total of 26.2 million was down 12% from 2009's 30 million
• 2010 per-ticket prices averaged $65 were down 2% versus 2009's average of $67

Not all numbers are going down. Age of performers is up and average age of audiences is up.

I'm sure for some people these are distressing numbers. I don't go to concerts very often - perhaps a couple per decade. But these factoids impress me:

• the average top touring star is 46 years old (average age of a top recording star is 29)
• there are more touring performers in their 60's than in their 20's
• only 2 top performers began touring in the last 20 years (Lady Gaga & Michael Bublé)
• Leonard Cohen, Tina Turner & Cliff Richard are in their 70's; Chuck Berry is 84

Finally, here's a pie chart to show you the distribution of ages of the top touring performers. Notice how many grey-hairs are at the top of the chart!

I wonder what the trends are for readers of this blog? By the way, we now have had readers from 150 countries! Thanks for stopping by and visiting us at Excel Math.