Is Meet & Greet The New Revenue For Pop-Rock Stars?

Meet and greet the Biebs

I remember seeing these pictures in my Facebook/Twitter feed and reactions were all about mockery and disgust… What? Avril Lavigne makes her fans pay to take pictures with her? I want my nickel back! even wrote someone,.. haha, funny one, I found this very lame too, but the Guardian is totally right. Why is she receiving the blame suddenly when everybody does it? This is the perfect example of media manipulation, look at this awful rockstar who is asking  fans $360 to pause in a picture! Sure the joke was mostly about the fact that she had requested no physical contact with these people, and that she was doing it with this punk chanteuse’s conviction of hers, but who can really blame her for?

However, physical contact or not, the Guardian is very right, these meet and greets are the common currency of the pop-rock business. According to the Guardian, it will cost you $1250 for a VIP seat (in the first 10 rows) and a meet and greet (including picture) with Kiss. Gene Simmons is not a business man for nothing. But again everybody is doing it… Justin Bieber? According to this site, fans paid up to $4,000 for a seat and a picture with the Biebs at a fair show in Paso Robles… look at all these pictures of his girlfriend Selena Gomez, no wonder these people are so rich! When I say everybody, I am talking about major rockstars of course – although I am not sure Lavigne enters into this category. Live  Nation offers a lot of these packages including a meet and greet, here is one for Ozzy Osbourne, for Lady Gaga, Def Leppard … ‘Once in a lifetime Meet & Greet Experience represents the ultimate concert experience’ they claim, ‘With this package you get to meet your idol. The Meet & Greet Experience is one you’ll never forget.’

Probably they will never forget waiting on line for 5 hours and finally spend 10 seconds with the star? There are so many stories of disappointed fans who paid good money for a meet & greet and ended being rushed out as soon as the pic was taken… hey there’s money to be made!

Even close-to-unknown people organize meet and greet… Remember about Gil Reyes who made this documentary ‘Searching for Elliott Smith’? Probably not since the movie never got a distribution and has no chance to get one now that there is a second doc about Elliott Smith (‘Heaven Adores You’), but that’s a completely different story. Well, Gil had some $40 meet-and-greet after the screenings of his film, and I especially mention this because of some personal resentment, but that was plain ridiculous. And now these Avril Lavigne pictures don’t look so out of place.