Behind the Music
Posted on | March 12, 2010 | 4 Comments
Thank heavens for second chances.
Last fall I heard a fantastic piece on NPR’s On The Media about the changing landscape of the music business – how changes in distribution (notably technology) have wrecked the existing support model and sent the industry into a tailspin. “Hunh,” I thought. “A lot of this sounds familiar – I should write about this.” And then I promptly forgot.
This week, OTM rebroadcasted that piece – also available on their website – and it was deja vu all over again.
“Everything that’s gone wrong in the news business went wrong first in the music business,” goes the opener, and I realized – in some ways, everything that went wrong in the music business went wrong in the theatre business first. Sure, video killed the vaudeville star – but more recently, and closer to home for us Chicagoans, the Storefront Revolution democratized theatre-making, took distribution channels out of the hands of an elite few and gave artists unprecedented control over when and how their art could be seen. It also created (or exacerbated) a system wherein a lot of work is done for very small audiences for no money. What we have now is - depending on your view – a flowering of artist-driven, home-grown volkstheater; a true Hobbesian meritocracy; or an infestation of self-serving artistic puppy mills.
While I’m sure most of you have at least a passing understanding of the effect mp3s have had on music retailers or have opinions on LiveNation and TicketMaster – listen again with an ear for the parallels with us poor players – and how we might go about changing it.
Part 1: Facing the Free Music
The negotiations between Napster and the RIAA reminds me of prolonged talks between members of the nascent League of Chicago Theatres (first as the Off-Loop Producers Association of Chicago and then as the Producers Association of Chicagoarea Theaters) and Actors Equity (the union for stage actors), trying to get terms that would allow Equity actors to work in Chicago without bankrupting small theatres. Back in 1983, a group including former Victory Gardens MD Marcie McVay and current Goodman ED Roche Schulfer successfully lobbied for the creation of the Chicago Area Theater (CAT) contracts.
What is especially trenchant is the perspective from the RIAA rep in the story on the, “lost opportunity” – how even though the music execs looking to litigate against Napster were huge music fans and felt that the Napster experience was ’so cool,’ common ground couldn’t be reached – to the regret of everyone involved.
What’s more, Brooke’s comment that “the stuff we used to pay for we can now get easily for free” hits me especially hard – both as an actor myself (who spent very little time off stage this past year yet only made $250 for performing) and as a producer via a very small company. The flowering of small, independent theatres is very much built on the talent, time and energy of artists. What’s more, a variety of forces have contributed to a trend that seems to value the contributions of designers over directors or actors – it is entirely common for designers or other technical positions to get 3-4 times what an actor gets, if the actors get paid at all.
Beyond the prima facia fairness issue, I get more and more concerned when I meet young actors who internalize this tacit value system – they see getting cast as a favor done for them. Occasionally, I see small theatre AD’s doing the same, taking actors for granted or outright exploiting them for what is, essentially, a vanity project. I am far from a strident capitalist, but its times like these when I put some stock in the fact that paying for something makes you value it more.
Part 3: Played Out
The mechanics and economics of producing live music has more obvious connections to the theatre biz. Rick Karr sets up this section thusly, “Most musicians historically have never actually earned their livings by selling records or downloads. Instead, most musicians have earned their livings by putting butts in seats, playing live, touring.” He notes that, for example the average Rolling Stones tickets are three times more than they were in the 70s. And – and here’s the terrifying “our enemies, our selves” moment given what I said above – the reason fans are paying more is “because the consolidated promotion conglomerates beat their local rivals by paying more to artists.” As concert promoter John Scher says, “You simply can’t compete with them. All you can do is choose to be a second-class citizen.”
Here’s another salient point : “Only the top superstars ever got rich off of royalties,” says Rick Karr – and later, John Scher says,
“But if you look now at what are considered the sort of younger superstars, you know, you look at Radiohead, you look at Coldplay, you’re looking at acts that have been around for 15 years. There’re very few, very, very few artists that have become arena or amphitheater headliners with any staying power. There are, every year, a couple of artists, often in the urban world, that become very, very big for a short period of time, but the American Idol model, it’s about now, not about three or four or five years from now.
So, will it correct itself? I think it’ll correct itself, but there’ll be the Dark Ages of the concert promotion business probably for anywhere from five to 10 years.”
And again:
What’s terrible about it is, forget the promoters. It’s the public. When you’re looking at 250- and 500-dollar tickets as being the norm for big shows, and if, you know, you’re going to spend 250 dollars to see the Rolling Stones or to see U2 or to see Madonna or Paul McCartney or, you know, any of the giant acts, that’s probably the one concert you can afford to go to all year.
Sound familiar? To me, this is as close as we’re going to get to a case-study in why the old model – both the production/promotion side and the side agitating on behalf of artists – won’t work in the long run – and in fact, never worked for the majority of people.
And let me say this, no matter what you think of Broadway in Chicago (full disclosure, the side project was last year’s recipient of the BIC/League of Chicago Theatres “Emerging Theatre Award” – and the small, one-time cash award the company got as part of that is what allowed TSP to bring me on as MD) – the non-profit world reflects the same lop-sided incentives and runs perilously close to the “there can be only one” scenario. The Goodman, Steppenwolf and Chicago Shakes each have operating budgets in the area of $15-16 million dollars – the next closest theatre is difficult to determine for a variety of reasons, but whether its Black Ensemble Theatre, Victory Gardens or the Court, the budget range is $3-4 million. That’s a gap of 400% – 500% between Theatre #3 and Theatre #4.
I do want to be clear here – I’ve been in rooms with BIC folks and folks at the big non-profits: they know the model doesn’t work. And despite what you may believe as you scraping out your existence and making your art with table scraps and gaff tape: mo’ money does in fact mean mo’ problems. It’s very hard to make radical changes to your business model when you have investors, unions, and hundreds or thousands of employees – people who have stake in what you’re doing and, in some cases, rely on you for their own livings. Take my word for it or not, but I walk out of those rooms knowing that there is no Great and Powerful Oz, and that he can’t go back because he doesn’t know how it works. The answer is in my own backyard – and they’re looking at us for innovation.
Part 4: Charting the Charts
This piece has some really interesting revelations about the way large media companies determine popularity – and answers my long-held questions why country and rap seemed to come out of nowhere and suddenly take over the airwaves in the late 90s (hint: it was a technical change in the way the music industry determined popularity. So never mock my love of databases, people.)
The OK Go story – about major label attempts to co-opt the band’s underground popularity into mainstream success, called by Billboard’s Rob Levine a manifestation of the “Snakes on a Plane fallacy” – pings my own theory of “The Myth of Steppenwolf:” the idea that any group of reasonably talented and passionate kids can get together, form a theatre company, become movie stars and have their company become a $16 million machine while still retaining its storefront roots. It ain’t so – when it started to enjoy more mainstream success, the ‘Wolf co-opted – or was co-opted by – another system: first the Broadway-success model, then the Large-Regional-Non-Profit model. My argument has, is, and will be that the future is smaller and more sustainable – and that we’ll all be better off when we stop trying to fit our art and culture to the model, and start making a model in our own image. (And lookie-lookie – there goes OK Go making its own model. Here’s the same announcement again, with cute dogs.)
To get back to counting popularity again, there is also something to the issue of data bias, via Chris Molanphy of Idolator.com:
Ten years ago at this time, the kinds of albums that were topping the chart regularly were Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears. But we’ve started to see some albums topping the charts recently that are beloved by probably a middle-aged audience. I’m thinking of Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, who scored his first number one album in over 30 years, with Modern Times, because who are the last people still going to record stores and buying physical albums? People in their 40s, 50s, 60s.
Again – this makes me think of Regional Theatre programming – they get their feedback from people who see traditional theatre which, surprisingly, reinforces the idea that you should program more traditional theatre.
There’s another bit in here that I find particularly interesting for us in the theatre, but perhaps not for the reason you might expect. Eric Garland is “co-founder of the company BigChampagne, which tries to track all the ways music spreads these days.” Mark Phillips is the NPR Reporter.
ERIC GARLAND: One of the things that we’ve looked at for a number of years is something that we call “songs per fan.” How many songs from this artist is the average fan interested in? You know, an artist like the Dave Matthews Band, if someone is interested in one song, they are likely interested in more than five songs. I chose that example because that’s a very elite club. You know, I would put the Beatles in that company.
But let me put the question to you, if you look at the top of the airplay charts, the top of the sales charts, how many songs, on average, do you think people are interested in from those artists? Remember that the number can’t fall below one, right? It’s about 1.1.
MARK PHILLIPS: It’s a mathematical way of saying the average artist on the top of the charts is a one-hit wonder. And Garland says this effectively chops off the top of the charts, because one-hit wonders don’t make money like they used to. In fact, he says they’re so expensive to produce and promote that the real money is with smaller acts with more devoted followings.
This, to me, is the real take-away: I can say this with mathematical and anecdotal evidence at my back, the vast majority of theatres that pop up in Chicago are, in effect, one-hit wonders. Fueled by (most likely) the passion of the people making the theatre or (occasionally) touching a chord with the zeitgeist by doing something superficially “new,” they make a splash and get some steam. But because either (or both) the artistic foundation or organization/community building foundation are pathetically thin, they crumble. My take on this for the storefront gang: if you want to be doing this for a long time, don’t throw all your eggs into one basket (eg. your next show), relying on it to hit and carry you forward. Chances are, it won’t – and if it does, it probably won’t be the game-changer you thing it will be. Stay lean and build your fan base.
Part 5: “Why I’m not Afraid to Take your Money”
At the end of it, if you don’t want to listen to me, listen to a woman who could kick my ass and make me like it: Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls on how to fund your artistic pursuits:
Everyone has to stop thinking there is an answer. The answer is, there’s an infinite number of answers.
Rick Karr hits another nail on the head, right in the opener: I am so tired of having the fight with small theatres about asking for money – possibly getting back to the institutionalized feeling that ‘no one values art or artists.’ They see fundraising as “begging people for money so I can play.” Karr calls it “monetizing fans’ passion,” which is exactly right. We take for granted that anyone can do what we do – hell, most of us are making it up as we go along. But most people don’t, and they value people who do, otherwise no one would ever watch TV, read books, listen to music, or go to the theatre. Kicking in a little cash is one way of showing their support. Palmer has experimented all over the place – why can’t we be just as creative?
AMANDA PALMER: I’ve done free webcasts in which I’ve auctioned off props from the videos that I’ve shot and handwritten song lyrics and weird stuff from my apartment. People have bid hundreds and hundreds of dollars on this stuff. But a lot of it is not even really so much about the stuff itself as it is about their willingness to, to connect with me and support me.
And I’ve also done a lot of sort of flash mob shows using Twitter and my blog to get a bunch of people in a public space, and literally put a hat out and said, I gave you this show for free, I’m really glad you came. If you can afford to give me some money, do it. If you’re too poor, don’t.
I have been screaming about this from the rooftops of theatres all across the city. Palmer gets right to the heart of one reason we’re having such a hard time finding the money – again, replace ‘musicians’ with ‘theatre artists,’ ’studio’ with ‘major theatre’ and ‘putting it up online’ with ’small, independent theatre’:
AMANDA PALMER: I think what’s important to point out, that it was never the artists asking. It was Tower Records or the anonymous record label. It was never Madonna putting her hand out, saying, here’s my record, give me the money. You know, people kind of don’t like it. They want their artists and their musicians to be these sort of like pure beings who are like holed up in garrets wearing scarves and like painting and strumming their guitars and howling in pain, and like some product gets mysteriously delivered and then somebody else who doesn’t mind dealing with the money goes out with the hat.
Now, that you can make music directly available to your fans, I think it’s also time to destroy the myth that artists shouldn’t ask for money.
RICK KARR: Surely, there’ve got to be some downsides to this, though. I mean, nobody’s going to give you half a million dollars up front to go into the studio and make your record, right? Come on. You’re making it sound like it’s a perfect scenario.
[...]AMANDA PALMER: No, no, no, no, this – it’s definitely not ideal. And one of the advantages that I certainly had with my band, The Dresden Dolls, was that we signed back when it was sort of like the last wave of, you know, here’s a bunch of money to make a record.
But, an album can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce, with a gazillion people behind it or, you know, someone can pick up a guitar and record it into their Macintosh for zero dollars.
But if that person recording their guitar into their Mac and putting it up online sings about something that connects with millions of people, nobody will care what the medium was. All they’ll know is that they heard a song that made them cry and they want to hear it again.
The key is – you have to really connect with your real fans, which means talking to them and listening to them. On Twitter this week (@dangranata) the 2am Theatre Crew has been talking about the Red Curtain in all it’s forms, and the one that’s most pernicious is our fear of our audience. We don’t want to hear what they have to say, not really. We want them to buy tickets, we want them to applaud and laugh at the right places, and we want them to go away. The thing that bugs me most about Storefront Theatre is that we have a double standard – we want to take creative power back from casting agents and ADs or Lit Directors at big theatres, to say “the hell with you, I can do this myself!” But we still want someone to do the “icky” stuff for us – selling tickets, promoting our shows, getting to know the audience, figuring out how to pay for everything. It’s a very Lear-like proposition, isn’t it? And we know how that ends.
But maybe that’s for the best:
AMANDA PALMER: People don’t love music any less. There might be a lot less money out there in the industry, but maybe that’s a good thing. [...] As far as the music is concerned, maybe it ups the ante. If you’re a teenager with a dream of being a rock star, maybe you’ll really think about why. Were you doing this to be rich and famous or [LAUGHS] are you doing this because you really love music and you want to connect with people, and you’ll do it even if it just means you make a living wage? If that’s true, I’m – you know, I’m a fan [LAUGHS] of the new system.
This post was made possible in part by the redoubtable Bil Gaines, who purchased a frothy Great Lakes Eliot Ness for me, thereby staving off complete mental breakdown for another day.
Buy me a beer?Small Ball, Long Ball
Posted on | February 4, 2010 | 7 Comments
Happy New Decade, everyone.
Now let’s get started.
We’re going to begin, naturally enough, with baseball.
Baseball is an individual sport masquerading as a team sport. A team is made up of a group of specialists who don’t necessarily have to like each other. A game is made up of dozens of contests between those individuals – the guy pitching and the guy at bat, the guy running and the guy trying to tag him. But, of course, the game is decided by the sum of those contests – so really the only way to win is as a group. But then again, players are ultimately captains of their own careers: it’s actually far, far more common for someone to switch teams several times than to stay loyal to a single franchise.
There are basically two strategies to winning games: stack the team with sluggers, tell them to hit the ball as hard as possible every time they get up to bat and rack up home runs. Or try to manufacture runs based on the strengths of your individual players: bunts, sacrifice flies, stolen bases, bloop singles.
Personally, I’m a big fan of small ball. Not only do I think it makes the game more interesting, I also think it’s more sustainable – those sluggers are going to cool off, or get injured, or go to another team at some point. But, I have to admit, the big hits are the things that make ESPN’s highlight reels, and it’s a lot easier for fans to get excited about a big name. And, to be sure, there really is nothing like the crack of a bat and that swell of the cheers as the ball is up there, going … going … gone!
But it makes no sense for me to pop out to center in order to advance the runner if the next guy up is looking to crank it over the far wall – better for me to get on base and get 3 runs instead of 2. So: everyone involved needs to know what kind of team they are on – and what the strategy is for winning.
And this is my point about theatre.
There are basically two overarching reasons to produce theatre: to put on shows, or to build a company and community around your work.
“But Dan,” I hear you protest to your screen, “I want to do BOTH!” Of course – no one puts on a show without wanting people to see it and be affected by it, and you can’t build a theatre company without, you know, putting on shows. And in the same way, even the heaviest batter sometimes pulls one down the line. But knowing where you want to be helps you make decisions along the way that ultimately determine how fast – if ever – you get there.
So you need to be honest with yourself and as a company: are we primarily just interested in putting on particular plays, or am I interested in doing something *through* the plays we put on? And then: is this a long-term or short-term thing?
Is your lineup primarily built around a couple of sluggers or a rocket-armed pitcher? Do you have a plan for if they slump, get hurt or get offered a better contract? Individual careers will always grow faster than organizational reputations – which is the hidden cost of ensemble-based companies.
Is your goal to win every game? Is your bench strong enough to support that kind of sustained, day-to-day effort? If you’re looking to make a big splash, make your mark and kickstart your individual resumes, then pushing your starters is the way to go. But if you’re looking to take the pennant and the Fall Classic beyond, you need to think long-term, think strategically, and keep everyone healthy for the long run.
And: what happens when you win the Series, what then? Do you pull a Marlins and sell off the team? Do you have a plan and the resources to keep the big stars around?
When I think of what ails Chicago theatre and contributes to individual burnout and the perennial birth-ascension-death of small companies, the issue is not that people have short- or long term-goals. It’s that people have long-term goals and short-term strategies, or short-term goals and long-term strategies. People who want to build the next Steppenwolf throw everything they have – favors, money, energy – into their upcoming production, leaving nothing left to build on for the next show, and the one beyond. Or people form 501(c)3 companies and kill themselves trying to come up with a lofty-sounding raison d’etre when all they want to do is put on plays they like with their friends.
So my thing is: when you are thinking of forming a team, have a conversation both internally and as a group, about what your goals are, then plan accordingly. Don’t try to build a stadium when all you need is a well-groomed, well-placed sandlot. Or don’t wear out your players before the All-Star Break if you’re hoping to make it to October.
What I’m talking about here is a mission.
Now I want to be clear, I am saying “mission” as opposed to a “mission statement.” Ideally, the two should be related, but it is far, far more important to have a clear mission than a mission statement.
Because a mission is, in effect, how and why you do what you do. What is it you are trying to achieve by mounting a play or plays? The extent to which you answer that question clearly and honestly – and the extent to which that answer is clearly and honestly understood by everyone in the organization – is the single biggest determinant of long-term success.
And yes, you will always have multiple goals, but there needs to be one big one that everyone agrees on: this is what we do, and this is why we do it.
What kind of player are you? What kind of team are you?
Buy me a beer?You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.
Yogi Berra
The Absurd Hero
Posted on | October 15, 2009 | No Comments
Whenever I think about my choice to be an actor, I think about Camus. I’ve mentioned Frenchy McFrencherton before in this context, and you can blame my Freshman year reading list for that. But mere hours before The Man Who Was Thursday explodes into the world, I’m finding my Froggy friend has a special resonance. (Why all the Franco-bile? Come see the show!)
The Absurdity that Camus refers to is this: we inherently do not want to be limited, powerless, and mortal – it’s human nature, coded in our DNA and hardwired into our brains. Yet the very same biology – the very same Nature – that makes us want these things constrains us, castrates us, kills us. We live in a world that programs us to want more, yet gives us less. It’s the basic joke of Creation. It’s crazy. It’s Absurd.
The Heroes (in Camus’ line of thinking) are the folks who face that chasm – knowing it cannot be bridged – and keep going. Who don’t delude themselves. He likes actors because, it is in a real sense our job to be constantly reminded of our own mortality.
Camus draws a finer, more psychoanalytic line around the relationship Shakespeare poetically points up when talking of the world as stage: to convey emotional reality, drama (sometimes symbolically and sometimes literally) compactifies human experience into a few hours. Likewise, the actors playing their parts travel in a few hours “the whole course of the dead-end path that the man in the audience takes a lifetime to cover.”
In Thursday I, of course, get the same frisson I get from every show: here I get to laugh at death, I get to be someone I will never be. I get to live a different life than the one time and circumstance have outlined for me.
But this story, in particular, is chock full of Absurdity. Syme and his comrades face off against forces that may not only end their lives, but may end the world as they know it. They struggle against a world that seems to be actively thwarting their attempts to bring order and sense to it.
Camus also says the actor’s lot brings to light another troubling fact about ‘reality’: “He demonstrates to what degree appearing creates being.” And Thursday is the Absurd Conflict on steroids – not only are things not as you wish them to be, they are not what they seem. And what they really are could not only kill you, it could kill you. Right. Now.
I love playing Syme because his Victorian British stiff-upper-lippedness is the perfect vehicle for raging against the conundrum of chaos: he really is an Absurd Hero – he believes by sheer force of wit and will he can make the world make sense. He believes he has to. Truth be told, that’s not very far from myself. And, as Camus predicted, I love getting to play out this little drama when I know it’s only that – play. Even as things don’t play out quite as Syme expects, Dan knows that it’s a show: if things are going right, scene five follows scene four. I know what’s going to happen – which is something I have over Syme. Dan can laugh with the audience at what Syme and his comrades go through – because it is funny. It’s crazy. It’s Absurd.
And maybe because it tricks me, for a few hours, into believing I have control over my own ultimate destiny.
The Man Who Was Thursday opens tonight. And I promise you an absurdly entertaining evening.
