Marc Geiger helped create Lollapalooza, now he wants to save live music
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The number of working pro musicians has dropped by something like 95%, so has the amount of live music.
Partly due to recorded music of course (weddings would have had a band, now they have a DJ), and in the last 20 years because music is 'something else'.
Visit the Billboard 200 right now, and you'll see that almost none of it cay be 'played live'.
What's to play (?), an mp3?
Chief Keef went on tour and his performance was, walking out on stage cranked up with his buddies, while they played his track over the loudspeakers. They didn't even bother to remove the lyrics or change the track. Just played the track. Then he drunkenly stumbled around the stage, incoherently mumbling some of his own rap words against the already mostly incoherent rap lyrics on his own track.
Crowd goes wild.
I went to a 'Brazil/France/USA' rap-fusion thing in Montreal, I was very excited, the track started, the 'hype man' with 'big hair came out' and said 'heyo' , then 'yo yo yo', then 'ayeee' about ever 10-15 seconds, getting the crowd going.
But he wasn't the hype man - that was the act.
That was his 'performance'. Just saying 'yo yo yo' a few times now and again over some track. And people paid for that.
Modern pop acts are no longer musicians, they are 'creative famous people'. Music is just one 'angle' on being famous, it blends in with TikTok/YouTube/Instagram as one big smear of 'trying to be popular'.
So there's a lot of good serious music, but it's a side-show like it never was before, so there probably needs to be some conscientious efforts to support it.
We spend some money supporting 'Orchestral' music partly out of a benevolent view, we're likely going to have to do the same for 'live music'.
> buying at least 51 percent of the equity in those businesses
A consolidation is the worst possible outcome. The less diversity in ownership, the narrower the conception of what sort of acts get booked and the less artistic adventurism. We don't need SaveLive to reproduce the "success" of TicketMaster in keeping out those who won't play by their rules.
I would rather see all these venues die, and then have new independent ventures sprout up to fill the void.
https://www.amazon.com/Song-New-Day-Sarah-Pinsker/dp/1984802...
"Inside YouTube’s plan to win the music-streaming wars"
It would not play back in Firefox because "there was an error licensing this video" after I had already paid them.
It will work in Chrome. Last time I'm doing that...