Photo by Tanya Peterson
In between cutting up tracks, designing album covers and coming up with structured tagging approaches for our media files, I’ve been trying to reduce my explanation of everything that surrounds DMP down to an elevator speech.
It’s a great exercise in communication design and a hell of a lot harder than it sounds:
- There’s the collaborative angle of what we’re doing — bringing together disparate creative communities to work together leading up to a live event and beyond. Mad fun, growth and hyper-local networking.
- Then there’s the promotions angle — providing an opportunity for the same folks to record and create media that can be pimped into perpetuity online and within local, meat space environments. Opening doors for future opportunities.
- And there’s the exposure angle — presenting local, original acts to a community for zero cost, which reduces the barriers for enjoying local acts to absolutely nothing. Hell, the show is free, the photos and video can be experienced online and the live albums can be download for free. Broadening the market for live music.
And that only touches upon the most obvious angles of the project. So how the hell do I go about collapsing all that into a 2 minute, understandable, oral description that I can drop in an (imaginary) brief elevator ride for a journalist, potential sponsor or interested participant to digest straight away?
Eh… I stopped trying to force it, and instead jumped straight to a tagline to describe the essence of what we’re doing:
FREE. LIVE. MUSIC.
Take it as “hey! there’s free, live music over here” or go deeper with something along the lines of, “it’s time to free up live music for people to enjoy everywhere” or something more elemental like, “be free to live in music.” Any way you read it, it speaks to our core values and approach, but delivered outside the staccato context of a banner or poster can it communicate enough?
Probably not.
As chance would have it, I stumbled across a Techcrunch article today by Michael Arrington from October 2007, which presented a well thought out position on recorded music’s inevitable march towards being free.
While I don’t buy into the absolute take on recorded music becoming completely free — label music is being affected as such, but with the cost of recording a CD being so low now, anyone can create one for the masses of people outside of San Jose who aren’t yet close to being 100% digital — the conversation that ensued in the trackbacks and comment thread was thought provoking.
This one comment by an anonymous “Aaron” made me stop in my tracks:
As someone who has been involved in the live music scene - as a fan, performer, producer, stage manager, and mixer - I really hope this does cause labels and even more artists to push for performances as the ‘real’ medium of the music. There are millions of people who would download for free albums by artists they would pay up to a hundred bucks to see live.
I’ll probably buy Radiohead’s new album for five or ten bucks (hopefully 95% profit for Yorke and the guys)… but if I drive down to the Shoreline to see them live I’ll end up paying thirty to eighty dollars.
The byproduct of this, I hope, is that people will get more interested in local music. Right now, it’s a chore for most bands to bring anybody (besides friends and family) out to a show, and the better venues have a pretty harsh chicken and egg policy in terms of letting new bands in (you cannot play shows unless you can bring 100 people, you can not build up a fan base until you’ve played shows!).
If this can create a push for a larger emphasis on live shows, which creates a demand for national headliners to bring in more local openers, that could encourage people to go see the locals when they headline shows, thus exposing them to even more local bands and hopefully turning them into people who are fans of local music in general instead of just specific bands. [...]
Exactly… sort of… I mean, people will always gravitate toward certain genres of music and they’ll always have favorite musicians and bands, but if we can cultivate the bug of simply enjoying the experience of a live performance, then we’re doing much more than promoting individual bands, putting on live shows and creating art within the framework of a music industry gone awry.
Not to be grandiose, but we’re actually contributing to a movement; one dedicated to focusing the wandering eyes and ears of music appreciation towards live, local and original music.
If musicians can bring it to their performances, consistently, they’ll build their rep within their communities — both local in the meat space and online where they choose to interact. Those artists will be able to make a living off their art. And if that movement takes hold — artists making “a living” as essential components of their communities — we’re then talking about independent musicians having access to the production and distribution tools — once only available to large labels — at an extremely affordable cost. This continuing advancement of technology allows such artists to independently grow their community of fans, both online and off, near and far.
Since the aggregate of music fans seem to already be moving in this direction of supporting live performances — rather than purchasing the prefabricated products of label marketing divisions — the hard work of convincing people of the value of live music is somewhat behind us. The work remaining for next gen-labels is similar to what every stage performer attempts to deliver to their audience — the goods.
So back to work we go in both defining what exactly that means and then executing on our vision.
I agree. Completely, totally, couldn’t have said it better myself.
AND I think there is more. There is community, and the role of the musician or singer in the community, to aid in the observation of certain events. Deaths, celebrations, commemorations…
I very often try to imagine the small community before mass culture. And there would be a singer or musician in the group who was there to help the group celebrate, mourn, commemorate, tell a story, whatever. And that role was known by all and was neither revered or dismissed. It was as essential as the role of the blacksmith or the cooper. That role is being lost — they even have canned music at some churches now.
I really do try to remember that role. When I sing at a funeral or when I am singing at the Green Bean or at Merlefest. That live music, live singing, has a primal effect on the listeners, congregants, whatever you want to call them.
I recently sang at the funeral of a man I didn’t know, but who is a member of my community. I felt like it was my job to sing him over to the other side. A job no more grand than the gravedigger’s, and no less necessary.
And right now, I have a friend who is dealing with a difficult issue in her family, and I wish there were a traditional song that would be sung for that occasion. Something that is equal parts love, sorrow, triumph, forgiveness, and hope.
that’s great insight into you as an artist, laurelyn. i mean, i can feel your desire to connect with or comfort your community when i experience you performing. you emanate that vibe.
and while you’re probably not alone in your approach, you’re definitely in the minority of how musicians view what it could mean to perform. that’s both a shame and understandable. i mean, what would we do without all the noise — physical and emotional — that so many musicians toss around haphazardly?
in this day and age, your approach to community is more punk than punk.