70,000 Tons of Metal Cruise To Sink On Own Mistake

    

     Ok, maybe it won't but combining heavy metal bands with a cruise is either the dumbest fucking thing I've heard or pure genius.  If you haven't heard yet, there is a metal festival called 70,000 Tons of Metal booked on board of a cruise ship.  The trip lasts four days and takes you from Miami, Florida to Cozumel, Mexico and back.  The ship plays host to 40 bands including:  Amon Amarth, Epica, Finntroll, Moonspell, Raven, Saxon, Sodom, Sonata Arctica, Stratovarius, Trouble, Uli John Roth, and Witchburner.  Tickets start at $666 not including taxes ($249) or booze on the boat.  Kicking off next January should give metalheads enough time to save right?
     Turning a boat into a metal venue has never been attempted before and most likely with good reason.  You're looking at $915 to do this shabang and that's without alcohol, however pricey that gets.  This is not to say that every metalhead drinks but it's about equivalant to saying not all metalheads have tattoos.  The ones that don't are few and far between.  Put that at over a grand and that's without the cost of the plane ticket to Miami and back home.  I don't think with everything said and done that this can be done for much less than $1500. 
     Maybe I'm way off on this assumption but I feel with the price and the bands that are booked(so far), this is going to be a failure.  At this point, the 12 bands confirmed aren't hitting the right demographic.  The biggest fans of these groups aren't big enough fans to justify the expense.  If the organizer wants to keep this a mostly real metal show, they're going to have to pull out all the stops here.  Give me Slayer, give me Priest, give me Lamb of God, give me Cannibal Corpse, give me the big fucking players in metal.  If not that then the show will have to get a lot more mainstream and book bands who have fans with money to burn.  Get Motley Crue, get Disturbed, get Metallica, get Linkin Park.  I don't mean to stereotype but these bands tend to have higher income fans that can afford to blow all this money.
     The boat has 2,000 tickets for this show.  Times that by the ticket price alone and you're looking at $1.3 million for a rock show.  With the bands they currently have booked, these bands have probably made just over $1.3 million combined (kidding, slightly).  My point is this, shit or get off the pot.  We have so many big tours to spend this kind of money on that are definitely more badass than this one.  Wacken, Download, With Full Force, and Summer Breeze all have stellar line-ups and I haven't even tackled the great U.S. tours.  I realize there are still a boat load of bands to book and the organizer/booking agent are probably in deep water right now but some big names better start surfacing or this tour will sink. 

Editor's note:  My apologies for the lame nautical references bundled in one sentence.  I figured I would wait rather than diving right in.