Big Moves

Frogs Gone Fishin' leaves on a three month journey today: two weeks of tour followed by a springtime residence in my favorite city in the world, New Orleans. It will still be very much a journey living in New Orleans, even after establishing ourselves in (yet another) 3-month sub-lease. Making a living playing music in New Orleans will be slightly different than in our favorite state in the world, Colorado. Gigs have been plentiful in the mountains and the front-range area where clubs are not necessarily saturated with live talent year-round like clubs in New Orleans are.

Club owners in NOLA are particularly opposed to technology it seems, oftentimes rejecting the internet and even voice-mail as means of booking acts, leaving you the sole option of patronizing the club over and over until contact with the elusive owner has been made.

That said, certain elements of the New Orleans music scene are much more accessible to the average musician. For example, I've opened for artists like Rebirth Brass Band, Talib Kweli and Juvenile in NOLA, whereas we struggle to find opening spots in Denver, due in large part to the fact that many major artists who come to Denver are controlled by large corporate entities ie; Live Nation (more on some big moves there in a bit). It is the accessibility to bigger acts and better musicians that makes NOLA an attractive place to spend our spring. We love the Denver/Boulder/Mountain region and plan to return, but the funky knowledge we will gain, just by inhaling the swampy musical molecules floating around The Gulf Coast, will benefit our Colorado friends in the long run.

Between packing up my limited personal belongings before the move, finishing the Lay It Out So You Can Play It Out series, and all the other band and For/Sure Productions business going on, I've still had some time to stay analytical about the music business at large.

I read an article on Forbes.com the other day, titled "The Microsoft of the Entertainment Industry". The piece analyzed a potential merger between two music industry behemoths: Live Nation and Ticketmaster. You already know these companies well. The last time you went to see Madonna or Jay-Z at your local sports arena, you probably bought the tickets from Ticketmaster and noticed the tiny text on the top of the stub that says "Live Nation Presents...". These large conglomerate companies have been one of the few ticketing/promoting options in the business for several years now.

It seems that last year Ticketmaster starting buying up stake in promotion companies, while Live Nation was busy trying to start its own ticketing entity. Now it looks as though the individual companies have found a better way to reduce competition: a high-level merger! This news is particularly interesting after the jam community went abuzz last week when Live Nation bungled ticket sales for the highly anticipated return of jam-giant Phish.

We've all heard about monopolies and how bad they are for the marketplace. In the case of companies like Wal-Mart and Starbucks, the consumer can sometimes benefit from increased accessibility and lowered costs, despite limited market diversity.

Music is not a commodity, however. It is an art. True, some music serves a functional purpose, like a military march or some folk songs which help to transmit cultural information. But, Madonna is not a necessity for the transmission of cultural ideals! She is a luxury, a recreation that deserves fair market competition, or the consumer ends up losing, hard.

Concert prices are high enough as it is. I know that within our promotion company, For/Sure Productions, we debate a lot about how to keep ticket prices down. We could care less about a ticketing agency's break-even point. With a TicketNation merger, all that would go out the window.

Sometimes Big Moves hurt the Little Guy.

Scene Building

Over the past year or so, I’ve realized that my music and our band fit into a multi-tiered system of clubs, promoters, fans and musicians that makes up what most people refer to as "the music scene". Before, I always conceived of a scene composed solely of bands and their "groupies". I was naive to the business aspect of the music business at that point in life, and have come to realize that the everyday club owner has as much to do with the music scene as the next band or musician.

But it is how different bands and musicians coalesce, coexist, break apart and reform inside a given scene that really interests me. Right now I can count approximately twenty-five musicians I know, spread amongst 6 or 7 bands in Denver/Boulder, who are all between the ages of 21-25, went to all the same high schools and universities, and most importantly, have all played with each other in various projects for the last eight years or so. It is great to think that the same kids I grew up with, playing music in basements and garages, are now cutting albums and playing at festivals.

A case in point occurred last week when a good friend and highly visible member of the scene, let's call her Whitters for anonymity's sake, turned 22 years old. It was decided that a birthday party BBQ and backyard jam were in order. Several of the aforementioned 25 musicians were contacted by telephone and before we knew it, most every band in our scene was represented in the backyard, jamming aplenty.

This is a great example of what I refer to as "scene-building", an oft-overlooked aspect of the music business. The fact that Whitters herself is a musician and adept poet demonstrates that creative people tend to gather together. It is the friction between creative concepts in these settings that produce an even more fertile scene for bands to grow up in.

We would have had a party for Whitters the other night, regardless of any "scene" that anyone is involved with. In fact, that is one underlying prerequisite for a scene itself: that its members share more commonalities than just the qualities the scene is identified as having. In other words, we would have been in the backyard drinking beer even if French Moustache Art of the 1970's was our bag.

Unless your favorite pastime in life is being lonely, you gotta love your scene.