Streaming Music

We spent months planning for the Gemini Soul tour, booking shows in Phoenix, Hollywood, Fresno, Santa Cruz and Orange County.  we  covered it all: a publicist, advertising, free ticket give-aways, flyers, posters, performance listings, postcards.  we  tried holding a charity benefit.  we  tried having an occasion band.  we  tried free promotional shows at colleges.  we  tried passing out free admission cards on the street. And still only a scattering of people came to each show.
The people who did show up always raved about the music, as did the doormen, the bartenders, the club managers. ” You are the perfect performer I’ve ever seen play here, and I’ve heard a lot of bands,” has been a typical response. So where has been everyone?
Live music in the United States is dying. Several decades ago, a performer could count on regular club dates. Unknown jazz bands could “do the circuit” and make at least some resources. Not anymore. I talked to the manager of a two-thousand seat theater. She said anyone in the industry is talking about how difficult it has become to fill Club s, and speculated that people have a lot of entertainment choices at home — the Internet, iPods, cable TV, Netflix — that there is less incentive to go out on the town. Fewer people are willing to take a occasion on unknown music. As a consequence, a lot of Clubs can’t afford to pay bands and expect you to play for ideas — which is fine to get a career going, but how could you sustain that?
Live music as viable entertainment hangs on in some ways. Me’Shell Ndegeocello, thank goodness, could draw a large crowd on a Monday night to San Francisco’s The Independent. Festivals and cruises still feature performers (although they are increasingly interested in musicians with national reputations – which begs the question, how does one get a national reputation?). But if skill ed guitarists like Mick Fleetwood (co-founder of one of the most successful bands of all time, Fleetwood Mac) could fill only half of that two-thousand seat Club, and if Yoshi’s resorts to giving away free tickets to Lee Ritenour’s second show, where does that leave us?
Have  we  become too accustomed to music at the press of a button, day and night, and worse yet, a lot of of us now expect it for free? Radiohead released their latest CD  On-line and asked buyers to choose how much to pay. Only 38  percent of those who downloaded the CD  paid anything. The rest — an unbelievable 62  percent — felt they should get the album for free! [Forbes.com] Because of the band’s stature, they still made a considerable amount of resources on the sales, but at those percentages, a four-person performer selling only 10,000 CDs at an average of $8 apiece would make just $30,400. That amounts to less than $8,000 per individual, not including any deduction for production costs.
I recently located a dozen inter-connected English-language websites based in Russia selling my music as well as music by big-name musician s, unauthorized, for download for less than $1 per CD. If most musicians can’t make resources performing and can’t even make resources from CD  sales On-line, how will our culture be able to nurture and sustain the next wave of musician s? like climate vary,  we  will glibly go about thinking nothing is wrong (or at least a lot of of us will) until it’s too late.  we  will have chopped down the tree that nurtured our music and gave it life.