Music Shows

We spent months preparing for the Gemini Soul tour, booking performances in Phoenix, Hollywood, Fresno, Santa Cruz and Orange County.  all of us  covered it all: a publicist, advertising, free ticket give-aways, flyers, posters, performance listings, postcards.  all of us  tried holding a charity benefit.  all of us  tried having an opening  band.  all of us  tried free promotional performances at colleges.  all of us  tried passing out free admission cards on the street. And still only a scattering of individuals came to each show.
The individuals who did attend always raved about the music, as did the doormen, the bartenders, the venue managers. ” You are the perfect band I have ever seen performance here, and I have heard a lot of bands,” has been a typical response. So where has been everyone?
Live music in the America is dying. Several decades ago, a band may count on regular venue dates. Unknown jazz performers may “do the circuit” and make at least some resources. Not anymore. I talked to the manager of a two-thousand seat theater. She said everyone in the industry is talking about how difficult it has become to fill Club s, and speculated that individuals have a lot of entertainment choices at home — the Internet, iPods, cable television, Netflix — that there is less incentive to go out on the town. Fewer individuals are willing to take a opening  on unknown music. As a consequence, a lot of Clubs can’t afford to pay performers and expect you to performance for ideas — which is fine to get a career going, but how may you sustain that?
Live music as viable entertainment hangs on in some ways. Me’Shell Ndegeocello, thank goodness, may draw a large crowd on a Monday night to San Francisco’s The Independent. Festivals and cruises still feature performers (although they are increasingly interested in artists with national reputations – which begs the question, how does one get a national reputation?). But if skill ed guitarists like Mick Fleetwood (co-founder of one of the most successful performers of all time, Fleetwood Mac) may fill only half of that two-thousand seat Club, and if Yoshi’s resorts to giving away free tickets to Lee Ritenour’s second show, where does that leave us?
Have  all of us  become too accustomed to music at the press of a button, day and night, and worse yet, a lot of of us now expect it for free? Radiohead released their latest CD  On-line and asked buyers to select how much to pay. Only 38  percent of those who downloaded the CD  paid anything. The rest — an unbelievable 62  percent — felt they should get the album for free! [Forbes.com] Because of the band’s stature, they still made a considerable amount of resources on the sales, but at those percentages, a four-person band selling only 10,000 CDs at an average of $8 apiece would make just $30,400. That amounts to less than $8,000 per person, not including any deduction for production costs.
I recently located a dozen inter-connected English-language websites based in Russia selling my music as well as music by big-name artist s, unauthorized, for download for less than $1 per CD. If most artists can’t make resources performing and can’t even make resources from CD  sales On-line, how will our culture be able to nurture and sustain the next wave of artist s? like climate vary,  all of us  will glibly go about thinking little is wrong (or at least a lot of of us will) until it is too late.  all of us  will have chopped down the tree that nurtured our music and gave it life.