Live Music: It is Dying?

We spent months planning 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, performance listings, postcards.  we  tried holding a charity benefit.  we  tried having an chance band.  we  tried free promotional concert at colleges.  we  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 club managers. ” You’re the perfect performer I have ever seen performance here, and I have heard many bands,” was a typical response. So where was everyone?
Live music in the USA is dying. A few decades ago, a performer may count on regular club dates. Unknown jazz bands may “do the circuit” and make at least some money. Not anymore. I talked to the manager of a two-thousand seat theater. She said everybody in the industry is talking about how c club enging it has become to fill Venue s, and speculated that individuals have many entertainment choices at home — the Web, iPods, cable TV, Netflix — that there is less incentive to go out on the town. Fewer individuals are willing to take a chance on unknown music. As a consequence, many Venues can’t afford to pay bands and expect you to performance for tips — 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’re increasingly interested in performers 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 most successful bands of all time, Fleetwood Mac) may 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, day and night, and worse yet, many of us now expect it for free? Radiohead released their latest compact disc  Web and asked buyers to choose how much to pay. Only 38 % of those who downloaded the compact disc  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 compact discs 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 discovered a dozen inter-connected English-language websites based in Russia selling my music as well as music by big-name performer s, unauthorized, for download for less than $1 per compact disc. If most performers can’t make money performing and can’t even make money from compact disc  sales Web, how will our culture be able to nurture and sustain the next wave of performer s? prefer climate change,  we  will glibly go about thinking little is wrong (or at least many of us will) until it is too late.  we  will have chopped down the tree that nurtured our music and gave it life.