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We need to talk about Vegas!

We need to talk about Vegas!

OK, I kind of want this to be a genuine discussion topic, not simply an excuse for spleen venting or attacks on people, places, or things. But there are grumblings within the audio industry that need voicing in the wake of this year’s CES.

In short: where was everyone?

The show in a wider context was more successful than ever. More than 170,000 attendees visited the various halls and exhibition spaces scattered across Las Vegas; simply moving from one to another was to surf through a human sea of alpha geeks. The local news was, as ever, ablaze with the hottest new products from the show. However, the Specialty Audio section in the Venetian Tower was empty. If there were 170,000 visitors at CES then the Specialty Audio section got maybe a half of one per cent of the total number of visitors, if we are being very liberal with the numbers. Visitors to the audio section have been dwindling in recent years, but they dropped off a cliff between 2015 and 2016.

It wasn’t even in decline because of the soaring prices. The show is a trade event, and that trade is OK with dealing with products at high and low prices, but that trade was staying away in droves. Moreover this year, CES exhibitors at the Venetian Tower pitched up with a lot of high-performance, lower-cost products that would attract more than the usual high-ender community, and many of these products were touted to the wider media world. But that wider media world largely stayed away, too (Wired sent a two-man team to a handful of companies, and picked up Bang & Olufsen, Naim Audio, Sony, and Technics in the audio sector, but that was one of the rarities). Understandably, with thousands of exhibits on show, most never had time to leave the Las Vegas Convention Center.

There are possible reasons for this. First, and perhaps most encouragingly for the audio industry, CES has been eclipsed in our field by other shows; With possibly more than 10x the number of visitors than to the Venetian towers, Munich High-End is the most important of these challengers, but also Axpona, T.H.E. Show Newport Beach, and The Rocky Mountain Audio Fest in America, as well as shows in Hong Kong, Taiwan. Shenzhen, Beijing, and Singapore. International distributors are all looking to these events as more viable places where business in audio takes place.

In part, the success of these shows is predicated on the next possible reason for a disappointing CES. These are all shows with trade and public visitors. This not only adds significantly to the numbers attending a show, but gives buyers a hand’s on guide to what will and will not sell in the market far better than any forecasting, and in audio this free market research is extremely valuable. In past years, the combination of T.H.E. Show (first in what used to be the San Tropez hotel next door to the CES Specialty Audio event at Alexis Park), and until recently in the Flamingo hotel) and relatively lax entrance rules for CES ‘buyers’ meant the specialty audio section of the event was well populated by customers and trade alike. Gradually, as both CES toughened up its admissions policies, and Las Vegas realised just how much it can charge for a room during that first week in January, the public began to stay away and both shows began to feel deflated. I admit that I got this wrong: I though T.H.E. Show moving from Las Vegas to Newport Beach would make CES the ‘one-stop shop’ for audio events in America. Instead, it may have dealt it a death blow.

 

Perhaps most important though is the sheer costs involved for manufacturers in our sector. High-end audio is big and bulky and heavy: all things that make for expensive shipping costs. The fact that a number of manufacturers (who will remain nameless in the interests of not upsetting the Venetian staff should they decide to attend again in the future) said that equipment cost less to ship from one side of America to the other than it did to ship from the Las Vegas warehouse to their room doesn’t help matters. But, regardless, the costs are substantial for all involved. A distributor isn’t going to spend $5,000 or more in airfares and hotel bills per person visiting CES when they can see the same manufacturers for the equivalent of $3,000 or less in Munich. A specialist audio store in America isn’t going to spend $2,500 doing the same if they have a dedicated audio show coming to their region soon. A manufacturer isn’t going to spend $10,000 on a room, another $10,000 on shipping costs, another $10,000 on flights and hotels for the staff, and more if no distributors, dealers, or members of the public turn up.

If we are being truly honest, we in the media are tarts when it comes to shows: the media will turn up to the opening of an envelope if their company will pay them to do so. But our budgets are not infinite and it’s increasingly difficult to field large editorial teams to a show where everything is chargeable, and every cost increases by 200% when CES rolls into town. If the downturn in visitors this year causes a downturn in exhibitors next year, there will come a point where CES becomes unviable.

Perhaps this is inevitable. Perhaps CES already is unviable for the audio industry. Not everyone agrees with this, but we stagger our coverage of CES primarily because the tech world is so focused on shiny new gadgets in that first week of the year, our little world gets lost in a sea of wearables, drones, and autonomous automobiles. By waiting a week or two, we not only give ourselves time to ruminate on what was actually interesting, but allow these devices their place in the sun without being obscured by shiny things that burn out quickly. Faced with headline-grabbing products filling the column inches, the news footage, and the web pages of the tech media, audio rarely and barely gets a footnote outside of our world, despite companies spending large sums trying to get that ‘above the fold’ (that dates me!) coverage.

So, what do we do? Should the audio business simply abandon CES altogether? Should we approach the CTA (perhaps tellingly, the Consumer Electronics Association has now become the Consumer Technology Association) and try – as our Publisher Chris Martens has suggested – for an offshoot show in a different part of the country at a different time in the year for audio in all its guises (I don’t think we could include the audio-video industry, as ‘video’ at CES means LG, Panasonic, Samsung, and Sony taking up hundreds of thousands of square feet of exhibition space at CES proper)? Or should we just accept that CES is an expensive event that you have to do… just because it’s CES?

I open this up to everyone; not just end users, but manufacturers, distributors, dealers, other members of the press. Spread the word, too. And lets play this by Chatham House Rules – what’s said here is strictly off the record. If you prefer anonymity, that’s what Discus does well.

In other words, what happened in Vegas, stays in Vegas – but should audio stay in Vegas?

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