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Last year a mate of mine was doing his usual annual "follow Bob Dylan around Europe" trip concentrating this time on concerts in the UK. About 4 of them as I recall. Some Dylan fans do all of them.
Anyway he bought tickets for one concert local to me and invited Management and myself to join him. In the end he decided he could not make this one so I decided, since they were pretty good tickets near the stage and directly in front, that I would take a couple of pics on the phone and shoot a few seconds of video just to say thanks for the tickets. I was all of 10 seconds before one of the 'security' staff rushed up and told me I was not allowed to use the phone and to delete the files.
There were others doing much the same with no comments being made but I was almost next to an end of row seat so an easy target.
The pics and the video were pretty poor quality from my phone. It's not great in low light. So there was no way I could have made use of them commercially. Most would be likely to find the same results.
I suspect that what they were really worried about was people hearing on video the rather poor sound quality, though to be fair it was, at least as far as the band were concerned, better than the last time I saw him in Cardiff about 18 years before.
The subject of "Image Rights" has become a very significant potential money generating source for 'celebrities' and the origin of the concept in the US has driven perceived values to be far higher then they really should be. But it's just one of the commercial games one can play if one has enough money to buy a seat in the game.
In the end they will be curating images which, for the most part, have no real interest for any one once a price tag has been attached. A few images may be valuable as recurring sales. For older images I would guess the values will fall away eventually.
If you own the images and the market leading means of publishing them I'm not really sure how the model could work if you stop "selling" through your own regular outlets because you cannot make them profitable.
Where else do you turn to try to recoup your investment?
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