Concert List

We spent months preparing for the Gemini Soul tour, booking concert in Phoenix, Hollywood, Fresno, Santa Cruz and Orange County. we covered it all -  a publicist, advertising, free ticket give-aways, flyers, posters, concert listings, postcards. we tried holding a charity benefit. we tried having an occasion band. we tried free promotional concert at colleges. we tried passing out free admission cards on the street. and still only a scattering of people came to each show.

The individuals who did attend always raved about the music, as did the doormen, the bartenders, the club managers. ” You are the best performer I have ever seen play here, and I have heard a lot of bands,” was a typical response. So where was everyone?

Live music in the U.S. is dying. Several decades ago, a performer could count on regular club dates. Unknown jazz artists could “do the circuit” and make at least some resources. Not anymore. I talked to the manager of a two-thousand seat theater. She said anybody in the industry is talking about how difficult it has become to fill Clubs, and speculated that people have a lot of entertainment choices at home — the Web, iPods, cable television, Netflix — that there is less incentive to go out on the town. Fewer people are willing to take a chance on unknown music. As a consequence, a lot of Clubs can’t afford to pay artists and expect you to play for ideas — which is fine to get a career going, but how could you sustain that?

Live music as viable entertainment hangs on in some ways. Me’Shell Ndegeocello, thank goodness, might draw a large crowd on a Monday night to San Francisco’s The Independent. Festivals and cruises still feature performers (although they’re increasingly interested in musicians with national reputations – which begs the question, how does one get a national reputation?). But if skill ed guitarists prefer Mick Fleetwood (co-founder of one of the the majority successful performers of all time, Fleetwood Mac) might fill only half of that two-thousand seat Venue, and if Yoshi’s resorts to giving away free tickets to Lee Ritenour’s second show, where does that leave us?

Have we become too accustomed to music at the press of a button, night and day, and worse yet, a lot of of us now expect it for free? Radiohead released their latest CD  Internet and asked buyers to pick how much to pay. Only 38 % of those who downloaded the CD  paid anything. The rest — an unbelievable 62 % — felt they should get the album for free! [Forbes.com] Because of the band’s stature, they still made a considerable amount of money on the sales, but at those percentages, a four-person performer selling only 10,000 CDs at an average of $8 apiece would make just $30,400. That amounts to less than $8,000 per individual, not including any deduction for production costs.

I recently located a dozen inter-connected English-language web sites based in Russia selling my music as well as music by big-name performers, unauthorized, for download for less than $1 per compact disc. If most performers cannot make resources performing and cannot even make resources from compact disc  sales Online, how’ll our culture be able to nurture and sustain the next wave of performers? prefer climate change, all of us will glibly go about thinking nothing 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.