Much of my life revolves around gigs, either attending them or arranging them. I’m also involved in small and medium-sized venues and festivals, so I’m tempted to set out my feelings about the live music scene at the moment. I know that the impressive work of the Music Venues Trust has brought this topic to the forefront of people’s minds in the last few years.
I’ve been prompted to share some thoughts by something that happened this morning. A gig that I was looking forward to going to by an American band in a local venue was suddenly cancelled. In my disappointment, I contacted the promoter to try and find out the reason. I knew that several of my friends would also be likely to be disappointed, having looked forward to the show. It’s not an entirely new band but it’s a band that has rarely toured in the UK before. The promoter told me that after months of promotion and the tickets being on sale, they had sold a grand total of zero tickets. This was a situation that couldn’t be ignored because, as we know, every gig comes with its attendant costs of venue hire, staffing, payment for the band etc, etc. At some stage defeat has to be admitted and the plug pulled in the interests of everyone involved.
The night before, I’d been to a show locally where the performers were outstandingly entertaining and everyone present enjoyed every moment. The problem was that there weren’t many people present, I’d say maybe around 30, and as an experienced promoter I could tell that the evening must have made a resounding loss both for the artist and for the venue. And on a personal level I have a couple of shows coming up that aren’t selling, even though they are established artists who have played sold-out shows for us in the past.
We are all used to the phenomenon of small festivals cancelling shortly before the event on account of low ticket sales, the two most prominent examples this summer having been Red Rooster and Kernofornia. The blame is often laid at people spending all their money on stadium shows or huge festivals like Latitude or the Hyde Park sessions, but just this week some of the biggest open air events for years, featuring artists like Eric Clapton, have also been cancelled for lack of interest. In a strange contrast, there seem to be more smaller and medium-sized festivals than ever before, most of which seem to flourish. Similarly, where I live in the Southampton area, this summer has seen a series of big open-air shows by mainstream artists such as Paul Weller and OMD and the whole thing has been an enormous success, with wall-to-wall sell outs. “Pub Rock” is more lively than it has been in years, with pubs turning to live music as a way of getting customers in, even though almost all of the bands are cover bands. Not really my thing but any band is better than none at all.
People are casting around trying to interpret all this but it’s hard to find any hard and fast explanations or indeed solutions, because there is no clear pattern. One thing I know is that there are individual “scenes” for certain types of music, for example the metal scene remains popular, there’s a surprisingly vibrant and widespread blues scene, and again in my area we have venues such as the Joiners in Southampton which brings joy to my heart by advertising nightly shows by bands I have never heard of with Sold Out stickers on them. This tells me that there is still a thriving interest in and following for young indie bands, as there always has been.
In my own little field of “Americana” there is a faithful audience for touring bands from America and Canada, although the scene is actually a lot smaller and more insular than it might appear, It’s noticeable that many tours are playing much smaller venues and an increasing number of house concerts. Some venues like The Bear in Luton and the Kitchen Garden Cafe in Birmingham are tiny and you can see artists there who a few years ago would have played in places several times their capacity. Although this indicates a scene on the wane, there is the phenomenon of country artists who can swiftly accumulate followings big enough to fill the likes of Wembley. Who actually reaches that level seems to be largely random.
Now I am going to risk being lambasted for saying something that has so far been unsayable. One reason for empty venues and cancelled tours is that there are just too many artists and not a big enough audience. As a promoter, I get approached several times a day by agents punting singer-songwriter types. I dutifully listen to the songs and in the main they are very good, but it’s simply impossible to book all of them. The audience, despite its enthusiasm, simply can’t go out every night of the week or indeed afford to do so, so they have to become selective. I regret to say that if I put on every show I got offered, almost all of them would be empty. This is, I emphasise, no reflection at all on the quality of music or the performance, it’s just that there is no longer room for all of them. I’m really sorry!
Demographics are important here too. Our audience tends to be people in their 50s and 60s. Not wanting to be morbid, but they won’t last forever and is there any sign of a new generation? No, there isn’t. I recently read an article about only a tiny proportion of chart hits nowadays being by actual bands. Luckily these things do go in cycles and my mentioning of the Joiners gives me heart, knowing that there are young music lovers happy to go out and support their favourites. There will always be bands around but people’s entertainment habits vary. Remember when we thought live music had died for ever when the dance and clubbing scene came along? Nowadays there are addictive phones and gaming consoles too.
So-called Legacy bands are going through a fruitful era at the moment, but even they have to be careful not to put themselves into halls that are too big. There’s a trend for two or three acts from the 80s to tour together in order to flesh out the audience. In my own little scene, I know exactly which bands will sell out and I’m always right, but it doesn’t stop me booking bands that I know won’t sell out, just because I love the music – very selfish, I know. Most acts have a maximum audience ceiling and the old days when they could be booked into bigger and bigger halls with confidence are largely gone, although of course there are exceptions. I’ve really loved watching new young trio The Molotovs go from nothing to huge venues in the space of a year.
At a small venue level there are a couple of phenomena to mention. First are the begging internet posts imploring people on bended knee to buy their tickets well in advance because otherwise the show could be cancelled owing to a perceived lack of interest. This is a really awkward one, because I fully understand and appreciate anybody not wanting to book tickets months in advance knowing that there was a chance that the gig might not take place. Nowadays it’s possible to keep an eye online on how tickets are selling and how many are left, so there’s little risk involved in leaving it until near the actual time. This also removes the risk of unexpected things cropping up which make it impossible for you to attend. Press adverts are few and far between nowadays because they are expensive and, as we know, there’s not much money around, so most promoters and artists rely heavily on internet posts. You can always tell when a show isn’t selling as the posts get more and more frequent. Connected to this is another matter which I find just heartbreaking. This is when artists go online themselves and implore people to buy tickets, effectively admitting that they’re not particularly popular and putting the blame on people for not wanting to come and see them. This kind of emotional blackmail can be really embarrassing. As a writer, I can fully identify with the situation but do I plug my books online to make people aware of them? I certainly do, but do I beg people to buy them? No I don’t, because they are capable of making their own minds up about whether they are interested in either my writing or the topics I’m writing about, just as any of us make decisions day by day about what we’re going to do, buy etc, and of course what shows we’re going to see.
Probably the most upsetting words you’ll hear as a promoter are “Oh, I wish I’d known about it, I’d have loved to come”. People’s capacity for failing to notice advertising is extraordinary. Reaching neutral people is really difficult if they’re not Facebook friends or on your mailing list. How are you going to reach them? Word of mouth is still by far the best method. Here in Winchester I have a dear friend who regularly rounds up his extended friendship group and drags them along to most of our gigs, for which we are eternally grateful. Interestingly, though, if he is not keen on a particular artist and therefore doesn’t put the word out, none of his friends attend without him.
Where does that leave our beloved small venues, yes, those ones without which the music industry could not exist because that is where new talent is nurtured? I remember the impotent rage I felt when writing my book about the Joiners Arms, where the vast inverted pyramid of the live music business was revealed. The most important foundation, the small venues, struggled while the big concert promoters hoovered up the money and gave nothing back. It’s true that MVT has started to make some small progress in attempting to rectify the situation, but for most small venues little has changed. One of the oddities is that they remain to a huge extent reliant on alcohol sales to bring in a certain amount of money to subsidise the loss-making shows. Through a combination of high beverage prices and changing habits, it’s nowadays rare for people to go out and do a substantial amount of drinking while listening to music. In fact I’ve always thought it was a rather odd connection. Why is it necessary to drink alcohol while listening to a band? But that’s how the scene is structured and so it remains.
The small venues are as adaptable as they are able to be, and virtually none of them have entirely avoided the tribute band / comedy circuit route. Good luck to them. Our friends at the Brook in Southampton have for years successfully used the profits from tribute evenings to subsidise more “credible” shows. True patrons of the arts! While the dedicated music venues struggle, there has been a notable uptick in the amount of shows being held in unlikely places such as people’s back gardens and local churches. I put on shows like this myself but in a way I feel guilty because we’re able to do it because we don’t have the overheads that a conventional venue has. Run entirely by volunteers and not for profit, we don’t have to battle with rent, rates, staffing, VAT and all the other travails of a traditional music venue. Could we unwittingly be adding another nail in the coffin? I genuinely don’t know, but it does enable us to give quite a lot of extra work to impoverished musicians who can’t find it elsewhere.
I can’t come to any conclusions about all this. I’ve just set out a few random thoughts that came into my head because I’m sad enough to spend a lot of time thinking about these things. Sometimes I think that maybe people just don’t want to go out and listen to bands anymore and that’s all there is to it. Lots of things in my lifetime have changed irrevocably because society has changed so much. Could this could be just another one to add to the list? I do hope not.
