Well obviously a new record impacts their ability to sell tickets. It puts the band's name in magazines and on websites, creates chatter, involves TV appearances and radio/media attention, etc.stip wrote:if they were only motivated by the paycheck wouldn't they record more?
However, as with 'reunion' tours, you do face a precipitous law of diminishing returns as a legacy act. If this is Paul McCartney's first album of new material in five years, that's exciting. It gets a lot of articles written about it, and some various other buzz. But not as much buzz as the first Rolling Stones album in nearly a decade. And both of them get more than Springsteen, who has put out 6 records in the last 10 years. And while Bruce works his nuts off promoting to build that missing buzz, he still does plenty of regional tours that are far from packed houses. Basically, he takes the kind of 70% sold out shows that Pearl Jam would use to justify skipping the south for years and that Paul McCartney will never see, and treats them as a special challenge.
Now, I personally don't think Pearl Jam's release schedule is built on much more than their semi-retired indifference, but I also think that touring is a comfort food to them. If it becomes work, certain members are probably not all that interested. It has to sell itself, and "selling itself" is a term that can mean different things as you get older and more accustomed to sitting around the house.
There's a quote from Neil's manager along the lines of "If the goal was to make more money from touring, we'd probably just put out fewer records," (I think he also commented once that they upped their income substantially in the 80's by hiding out in county fairs for a few years, so it was a big deal when they came back to arena gigs) which almost exactly mirrors something the promoter I used to work for said about Eric Clapton...basically, it was "they guy's got great timing. Just enough new stuff to drive his fee up, but not so much that he scares the audience away." And at that time, Clapton was putting out records every 3-4 years.
