This is today’s Art Chansky’s Sports Notebook as heard on 97.9 WCHL. You can listen to previous Sports Notebooks here.
N.C. State wants royalties on the Rolling Stones tongue-in-mouth logo.
Didn’t N.C. State make enough money on its share of the gate for the Stones concert Wednesday night? After all, the ticket prices ranged from a face value of $115 to $813, depending how close you sat to Mick and the Septuagenarians.
So even if the average ticket price was 400 bucks and 50,000 ducats were sold, the usual 50-50 gate split netted State out a tidy 10 million on the concert one-off. And now the school wants a share of the parodied Wolfpack logo that the Stones put on their merchandise sold at the show.
First Amendment rights allow anyone to parody any logo without paying a royalty, but State is seeking some share of the merchandising. With fans outraged by the price of tickets for the Stones’ 50 and Counting tour, why would State want to turn some of the bad publicity on itself? For, what, maybe another half-million-dollars?
That’s called biting the tongue that feeds you. After all, the Stones could have played at Duke like they did 10 years ago and probably would have if Wallace Wade Stadium wasn’t under renovation. Or they might have come to Kenan Stadium if the field wasn’t being resurfaced. So they went back to Raleigh, as they did in 1990 when the sound wasn’t very good and, I guess, still wasn’t that good Wednesday night.
Whatever, you can bet this will be the Stones’ last visit to Carter-Finley, or North Carolina, unless Jagger wants to keep touring into his 80’s. Give the bloke his due for leading the greatest rock and roll band in the world for the last half century. No one forced you to pay the ticket prices, yet the concrete carcass in the fairgrounds was full.
State’s self-righteousness is a little absurd. Why not get a one-night permit to serve beer inside the stadium and make another million, instead of letting fans get sloppy drunk in the pasture and come into the stadium sloshed free of charge.
As for the doctored logo, the school’s lame marketing staffers couldn’t see the humor in it – or a great publicity opportunity of it licked them right in the face.
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