Brad Kava of The Mercury News spoke to Ozzfest promoter Sharon Osbourne by phone on Tuesday (February 6) about the organizers' announcement that admission to the 25-city heavy metal tour will be free this summer.

Sponsors will pick up the tab for the tickets, bands will not be paid to perform and expenses will be covered from sales of food, drinks and merchandise.

It will be the first national tour ever to do so.

"We needed to change something and we didn't want to change the format," Osbourne said.

"We were putting offers to all these bands we wanted to tour with and they were coming back to us with exorbitant prices that would have meant we had to put the ticket prices up, which I won't do. With Ozzy's audience being younger, they can't afford any higher prices."

Gary Bongiovanni, analyst with Pollstar, the concert industry trade magazine, said: "I don't think this will become a new business model, but it is a great marketing tool for them."

"They want $300,000 plus to do an hour's work onstage," Sharon Osbourne said of some young bands. "I'm just not doing it. Last year nearly destroyed us, paying, paying, paying, and we just can't do it again."

Tickets would be paid for and distributed by sponsors, such as Jägermeister, which will present acts at the second stage, located in amphitheater parking lots.

Osbourne, 54, said she plans to upgrade the festival's midway atmosphere, losing the tattoo parlors and cheesy carnival games and replacing them with interactive booths sponsored by technology and video game companies.

"There has to be another way to do it,'' she said. "If you get the sponsors that believe in you and you get new great cutting-edge bands that just want an audience, we'll give them the audience and we'll let everyone in free."

Last year, though, she said, the fees earned by bands, including about $325,000 a show for the group SYSTEM OF A DOWN, almost sank the festival.

"They're taking four years off, we paid them so much, and we're still working," she said. "I'm not doing that again."

This will only work if they get a really, really, good lineup. (ie. Kreator, Mastodon, Arch Enemy, HellYeah + some emo nu-crap and maybe a few geezers: Scorpions, Van Halen, Fastway....(just kidding)

At New Ozzfest, Freedom Ain’t Free
2007-02-07
Lee Bains

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Announcing yesterday that this Summer’s Ozzfest will be a free event, Sharon Osbourne waxed altruistic, saying, “[We] want the kids to be able to afford to come out and have an incredible experience. If we continued with the traditional touring festival model, we would have no choice but to raise ticket prices again this year.” Osbourne locates blame in the bands for those spikes in ticket prices, saying that ticket costs have “steadily climbed as artists demand more and more money for summer tours.”

According to an anonymous source, over the last few years, the mall-metal matriarch has actually charged developing bands up to $75,000 for the opportunity to tour on the festival’s second stage. So if a free Ozzfest isn’t a reaction to money-hungry bands, what is it?

Well, it might have something to do with the $1.5 million loss, as reported by an anonymous source, that LiveNation—the festival’s promoter—is rumored to have suffered as a result of last year’s Ozzfest. John Vlautin, Vice President of Communications for LiveNation, declined to comment on the profitability of their ventures.

Osbourne plans to offset the profit lost by free admission “by getting bigger sponsors to be involved with the festival and underwriting the festival.” According to Vlautin, Jagermeister and Monster Energy drink have already signed on.

Loaded with "ground breaking" policy changes, Osbourne’s press release announces the festival’s generous allowance for bands to book their own gigs during the tour, even in the same town and on the same night as an Ozzfest show. In the past, Ozzfest has required bands to sign a contract stipulating that they not book shows within 150 miles of an Ozzfest market from the time the date is announced until the last day of the Ozzfest tour. Although Osbourne’s gesture may initially seem gracious, should artists expect fans to dish out the door charge at an indoor venue later that night rather than pay nothing and see them whip up a sea of moshing kids at a festival?

With these changes, Osbourne concedes, “[There] aren’t any major headlining acts that would tour all summer for nothing,” implying that Ozzfest will ride on the involvement of developing bands. Whereas Ozzfest used to require a buy-on for these up-and-coming bands, they now simply require a loss; bands will play for merch money. “They can sell their T-shirts, CDs and whatever else they've got,” allows Osbourne.

As of yet, the Ozzfest lineup has not been announced and calls to Ozzfest’s P.R. firm, were not returned by press time.

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