That hedline (yes, that's spelled right. It's an antiquated newsroom thing. We also call the first paragraph of a story a "lede") is a little misleading. It's the end of the year. Of course we are going to look back. It's one of those human nature issues.
That being said, or actually typed, looking back is only useful if you use it as a way to look forward. In other words, don't pine for a simpler, easier time, but look back to see trends and cycles and use those to try to figure out where you are going.
Example: It is no secret that this has been a pretty brutal year in terms of ticket sales. Some very big-name, A-list, always-counted-on-to-go-clean-on-every-show tours found themselves papering some venues, and Clear Channel was offering unheard of deals like $10 lawn seats for KISS. I am a big fan of music biz blogger Bob Lefsetz, and it seemed that almost everything he posted all summer was somehow related to established acts unable to sell enough tickets.
And yet, in the midst of this, I hit three shows that were all total sell-outs (in the good way), and there is a common thread between Sting with the Royal Philharmonic, James Taylor and Carole King and Roger Waters' The Wall Live shows. They were all special. They were all things you could not count on being able to see again.
So, here's what I take from all of that. We have seen a awful lot of "classic" acts out touring for the past decade as the music biz paradigm has shifted from one where the tour was to promote the album to one in which the tour is the whole deal, and there is often not a new record attached to it. But, to steal an insight from Mr. Lefsetz, how many times can a classic rock act tour on the strength of 30-year-old hits without bringing something additional – something special – to the table?
I think that this last summer started to show us the answer to that question. I expect to see more of stuff like acts that used to be big headliners doing smaller and smaller venues, just to stay out there and keep some cash flow happening. I expect to see more package tours. There was a series of them like the United We Rock tour with Kansas, Foreigner and Styx that Maryland Sound did such a great job on. We're gonna see more of these "bang for the buck" tours.
And then there will be the dozen or so shows every year that people are willing to pay a premium to see. The act could be young, or in their 60s, like the ones I noted above. But if there is a sense that something special is going on, then people will come.
Last "looking back" thing. I may have written about this before (as time goes on, my memory about what I have written in almost two decades of doing this gets a little less focused). But I saw a commencement speech that Steve Jobs gave at Stanford some years back in which he talked about how seemingly-mundane decisions can be the catalyst for incredible change in your life, and that you can't project and see what those events will add up to in the future, you can only connect the dots looking back.
For instance, me ending up at the helm of FOH was the result of a seemingly-impossible string of events that started with being told that the mag I had edited for most of a decade was going to a "business model with no head count" (I swear, that is a verbatim quote from the guy who "downsized" me) to making a call to a guy who I used to work with, letting him know I was a free agent, to that guy making a phone call to talk to a specific person in an office but that person not being in, so talking to someone else and mentioning my canning, and the person he had not set out to talk to saying, "I think I heard that Terry Lowe was starting an audio magazine" to complement his successful lighting and staging title to a phone conversation between Terry and myself that same day, an interview the following day, and a job offer 48 hours after I was let go.
If you tried to write a string of events like that into a movie or TV show or book, people would say, "Come on. There's no way that could happen in the real world." But it did. And when I was making a life-long friendship through playing music together at a party in Nashville with the person whose phone call started this chain of events, there was no way I could have known where it would go.
But looking back, it all somehow makes sense.
