The live touring season gets fully underway this month. There’s a lot riding on it because, while the housing market seems to be coming back, recorded music sales sure aren’t. Even with subscription and streaming services accounting for 15 percent of record business revenue in 2012, according to the RIAA, and digital revenue at 59 percent of total recorded music revenue, the big picture was down one percent from the year before.
The economic emphasis on touring is real — spending on concerts in North America surpassed spending on recorded music in 2009, and stood at $9.5 billion in 2011, up almost 20 percent from four years earlier — but all that road work can lead to tired road warriors. Combined with more complex sets, heavier loads, tighter time constraints and increasingly volatile weather, the potential for danger in live music production might be as high this season as it has ever been.
» Weather Concerns
Weather is always an important safety variable, and it’s the one factor that seems the most difficult to predict. The storms that led to structural collapses at the Big Valley Jamboree in Alberta, Canada (Aug. 1, 2009; one fatality, 75 injuries); Ottawa Bluesfest (July 17, 2011; three injuries); Indiana State Fair (Aug. 13, 2011; seven fatalities, 58 injuries) and the Pukkelpop festival in Belgium (Aug. 18, 2011; five fatalities, 140 injuries) all packed winds that took organizers by surprise.
Whether it was through heightened caution or improvements in safety procedures, training, rigging, storm monitoring or simple luck, there were far fewer fatalities and injuries from weather-related accidents during the 2012 touring season. Winds strong enough to tear down scaffolding erected for advertising banners in Cape Town, South Africa (Nov. 7, 2012; one fatality; 19 injuries) did not affect Linkin Park’s stadium show; the band, unaware of the chaos unfolding near the stadium’s remote parking areas, performed as planned.
More recently, winds were blowing in Miami’s Bayfront Park on March 14, 2013 and may have been a factor the night LED panels fell some 30 feet from the main stage structure during the setup for the Ultra Music Festival, seriously injuring two crew members. But the worst staging accident of 2012 — involving the collapse of part of the massive staging setup for Radiohead’s concert in Toronto’s Downsview Park (one fatality, three injuries) occurred on a warm, sunny day, with no more than a light breeze.
Other events have sidestepped high wind risk either through an abundance of caution — such as Insomniac Event’s decision to postpone, then cancel, performances on Night Two of the three-day Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas June 8-10, 2012 — or the ability of temporary structures to withstand high winds. On the last day of the first weekend at this year’s Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Wu-Tang Clan and other bands were able to tough it out and perform as scheduled at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, CA despite the sudden arrival of a powerful sandstorm.
If large, complex outdoor events require many months of preparation, the window for getting a good fix on what the weather conditions will always remain far shorter. Despite that unknown, however, there are now a variety of market-based solutions that attempt to reduce the ability for dangerous weather shifts to catch outdoor concert organizers by surprise.
» Technology to the Rescue
Weather Decision Technologies (wdtinc.com) sells dynamic, web-based and mobile interactive mapping solutions to media companies, but last year it also took on several high-profile concert-touring clients. The 2012 Heart Tour, by the classic-rock band of the same name, received per-show, event-specific meteorological data under WDT’s event venue safety information service, WeatherOps.
WDT, with offices in Norman, OK, (within the Midwest’s notorious “Tornado Alley”) and in Atlanta (also home to The Weather Channel), receives a copy of an artist’s itinerary. They’ll follow that, sending out color-coded updates and warnings to the tour manager’s mobile devices by which decisions regarding tour events, in relation to weather, can be made. Production crews can receive daily updates regarding the forecast in the next tour stop, up to seven days in advance.
Concert organizers can also benefit from the National Weather Service’s StormReady program (stormready.noaa.gov), which is designed to enhance awareness, preparedness, response, recovery, emergency public notification, and public education related to hazardous weather events. Linkin Park’s current world tour was the first to have been deemed “Storm Ready,” as have production staging systems vendors Brown United and Mountain Productions. Jim Digby, Linkin Park’s production manager, tells me that he’s heard that several other touring artists have begun the process of accreditation for that status for this year.
» Event Safety Guide
If you want some reading material for long bus rides or flights, the Event Safety Guide should be ready later this summer. It contains the collective wisdom of about 600 industry members ranging from manufacturers to riggers and touring production managers who make up the Event Safety Alliance (eventsafetyalliance.org). The text will include links to U.S. agencies and organizations, including OSHA, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) and stagehands union IATSE, and offer guidance on various aspects of live event safety, essentially creating a field manual for an industry that has till now been at the mercy of information scattered across thousands of local codes and regulations.
The Event Safety Guide will have a lot of useful information in it, we’re promised, but there won’t be anyone looking over your shoulder making sure that you’ve read it — it’s purely voluntary, with no enforcement behind it. What it does have, however, is at least some element of moral compunction — those who live on the road will collectively increase their own vigilance about their safety and that of others.
To be sure, there is now more regulatory scrutiny of staged events — in the wake of the Indiana State Fair disaster in particular, state and local legislators have amped up existing rules and added new ones. What Digby hopes to avoid with the new Event Safety Guide is any sense that it’s part of a legislative reaction to accidents, but at the same time he’d like to see it reinforce the need for collective industry caution. “This is an industry that has gone un-standardized to a large degree for years,” he says. “We have to make it clear that we’re not trying to restrict creativity when it comes to tour production designs, but we also want to show that safety standards can come from within, from people who know the industry, rather than from [legislation].”
Taking care of business from within the community is far preferable to more regulation in any industry, but it resonates particularly strongly in live touring, where music’s independent streak manifests itself most fully. But that’s especially important when revenues from live music are now the bread and butter of the biz. Anything that turns fans away from live music is economic anathema, because without taking the show on the road profitably — and in one piece — what have you got left?
