How can the live music experience be improved?

[adamjackson]

Here's my premise: My home listening music experience has improved vastly. I still have my turntable, record collection, nice speakers but more and more I'm very satisfied with my phone and my headphones. I collected music for years but the variety I have access to now is unprecedented.

So what's been happening at concerts?

To me festivals are uncomfortable and plagued with bad sound, mostly bad music, and stupid activities.

Small venues offer the same things they always have. Some musicians complain poor sales makes it impossible to make a living. So I think, you're the artist, you're the professional entertainer, if you want to make a living at it you need to get me to buy a concert ticket. But what are they doing to give me a good bang for my buck? How is the experience being enhanced?

Let me ask this then. What musicians are doing something that will draw you in? To make you NOT want to play with your phone?

It may sound like I don't love live music. I do. But I'm not as inclined as I used to be to get out there.

Any thoughts?

 

[Rahere]

1. There's an old management principle: you get two out of three, pretty, quick and cheap. You want income, ie cheap's not on, so you've got to make it pretty, ie popular, and quick, ie cutting-edge. That means you have to lead the genre, having something relevant to say.
2. If you're unknown, you've got to get airtime to get that across. That's how most University and Hospital Stations work, freebies. Once slightly known, you've got to get out there. Pub venues are still around, and some are still focused on specialities. They also need your help in getting known.
3. Also play the University circuit. At this stage, you're not covering costs.
4. Stage 2. You reliably fill a venue. Your access to charity is disappearing, they'd love to keep you a wage slave. There's nothing worse than a poor A&R support telling you what you're going to write to be commercial. What happened to point 1? Venues start to charge, there's a dearth of mid-range places in the UK, at least, they've all been forced out of business by locals who live such boring lives they go to bed at eight. The Law of Demand and Supply starts to apply: venues are now charging, your position gets worse. This is where I am as a live performer, the major UK venue I've worked with has gone off on a manhater agenda. I'm alpha from my career, MGTOW (the masculist answer to feminist emasculation), I'm developing away from them, in a model they wanted me to pursue, I'm gigging there next week under a different hat. It'll be interesting.
5. You really need success now, something to build a repertoire - which is not things you can play, it's things the audience wants to hear. A professional practices until he cannot get it wrong... (which under this scenario isn't playing all the right notes in the right order, rather the power to do this)..
6. At this stage, you might think you can do side stages at festivals. If so, do small ones first - Fire In The Mountain and the like, and see if you can run workshops. There's nothing like teaching for learning.

 

[Rahere]

I've separated this one as it's the opposite viewpoint - the audience. A live performance must be a dialog, and so the audience, which you haven't picked and varies in quality, has a significant input. If all they want is a live performance of exactly what's on the CD... If, on the other hand, it's a performance of Stomp with (as is likely for something so drum-related) upwards of half a dozen drummers in the audience, the drum-talk can quickly leave the score, as people answer back with new suggestions and questions. Most of the audience hear something happening, yet don't pick up on the punctuation. And once in a blue moon, someone has an epiphany. Whiplash moves to a new level. The audience wants its expectations, whatever they are, as a minimum. I did one of David Byrne's tour last year, we came on slowly through the audience, signing them up as we went. Someone headed to the bar finding themselves in the chorus line, so get the beat and pass it on. Break the glass wall and take them with you. That's the task of the performer, this is the season of Pantomime, He's behind you - OK, enough of the drummer jokes.

That's the problem with a culture trained in sit-up-and-watch X-marks-the-spot where the performer was buried. Why aren't you involved? I am - I kept my inner kid, so my vocalises go places. It's like this conductor, utterly untrained, yet what musician wouldn't want to work under him? The first link is aged three - this is aged four. Then they gave him a band, who ignored him. It confirms that that one was born. In my case, Gareth Malone came to listen to me for half an hour last year - creating the ideation that you can reverse Beecham's bon mot that the English don't like music, they love the sound it makes - so we're actually about sounds. Chord structures which take us places. Harmonies and dissonance and rubbato. MIDI and pitch correctors be damned. It's not the dots, it's how they come together - this you know, I'm saying it so you know I know. Tone, impulsion, you name it.

A lot of that's vision and expectation, with a dash of inspirational performance communicating excitement to the audience. Emotion appropriate to the piece. You tell a tale. Tell it every time.