For America's young adults, the days of Wine and Roses - or iPods and Razor Scooters, if you will - appear to be officially over. Perry Farrell and the other backers of Lollapalooza learned this the hard way, today announcing that, due to poor ticket sales, the touring summer festival has been cancelled.
Farrell and the other tour organizers had apparently hoped to reinvigorate the once-popular concert tour by showcasing artists who - while they weren't necessarily household names - oozed indie cred, such as Modest Mouse, TV on the Radio, PJ Harvey, and Le Tigre. This reversing a trend toward filling out the bill with more mainstream acts (e.g. Metallica, Incubus, Audioslave) in the late 1990s and early part of the millenium.
Unfortunately, this strategy of indie-fication backfired, as, the dot-com bubble having long ago burst, 22-year-old English majors are no longer pulling down $75,000/yr. salaries as "content providers" at cash-flush internet start-ups. Yes, with the 1990s behind us, urban-dwelling, liberal-arts majors - the indie rock demographic - are returned to poverty. "Starving artist" is once more a literal role, and not merely a figure of speech. A fifty dollar concert ticket, which just a few short years ago might have represented half-an-hour's worth of work for a freelance web-scripter, may now be equivalent to a month's worth of food, for many of today's recent college graduates.
And while this reduction in financial standing may not spell doom for twenty-somethings (though it is posing major challenges to students who, owing to the present sky-high cost of an elite education, are graduating from college with up to $100,000 in debt - check out the Village Voice's series Generation Debt for more on this) it almost certainly means difficult times ahead for those who had become accustomed to taking advantage of this age group's nearly limitless discretionary spending during the past decade. Lollapalooza is just the first of what may become many major casualties of the up-and-coming generation's economic return to reality (yes, reality - perhaps I'm wrong, but was there ever a time, before the mid-to-late 1990s when a Philosophy major could expect to get a $50,000/year salary and stock options upon graduation? (as was the case with one of my friends - now laid off, by the way)). Purveyors of high-end goods aimed at the youth market - Apple, Volkswagen, Diesel - would do well to take note of Perry's perils.
