The Biz

Diners should sometimes be cautioned against looking into the kitchen of a restaurant they plan to eat in. So it goes with live music shows: the audience comes to be entertained, not edified. There is no need to look behind the proscenium curtains to see how the tour sausage is made. Too bad, since these days there’d be a lot to see, including the category of playback systems for live tracks and effects, and people to operate those systems. The expanding dominance of pop divas and divos has only accelerated the need for complex backing tracks in the live mix, as has the demand to have the recording-studio experience recreated live on stage for every show.

Next Time You May Not Have to Leave the Airport

With touring budgets tight, the image of rock stars turning first-class cabins into flying blow bars is so 20^th century. And besides, airports are no fun. Between TSA intrusiveness and the fact that more people than ever are flying, small wonder that bus rentals are up. Being on the road these days means being, literally, on the road.

If you look at the top 20 tours of the current decade (2010’s, that is, ranked by total ticket sales, with some artists making the top 20 list with more than one tour), we don’t encounter an artist whose first hit occurred in this century until we get to One Direction, who came in at number 6 with their 2014 “Where We Are” tour. Other than that, though, we don’t see a twenty-something band or performer until we get to Taylor Swift, who came in at number 14 with her (appropriately titled) 1989 tour in 2015.

How do you find work? Boring. Ba-da-boom. No, seriously… it’s easy to fall into the sense that what live-sound mixers do is incredibly unique. After all, at the apex of the profession, they’re responsible for making the music industry’s top artists sound as good as possible every moment on stage while at the same time being responsible for making sure the 16-year-old girl in the 35^th row of section D gets every bit of value and pleasure out of the $105 earned from babysitting that she spent on that ticket. Further down the food chain, the glamour may diminish somewhat, but not the responsibility — every Friday night has a story, and whoever is mixing sound is in charge of its soundtrack.

Inside every little universe within the big one, we all share clocks time-based on their own chronological markers, and for live sound, the clock tends to start around this time every year as the major tours begin to roll out. The good news is that things look about the same as they did in 2016, which was a very good year for music touring.

Chances are, the 90-day travel ban so suddenly imposed by the Trump administration in late January on travelers that strictly limited arrivals from Iran and six Arab countries in the Middle East and Africa won’t affect the music touring business. At least not right away, especially with last month’s decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which rejected the administration’s bid to reinstate the travel ban. In either case, expect an on-again/off-again legal melee on the subject in the months to come and the uncertainty will continue. However, it’s always the unintended consequences that get you.

One of the byproducts of the vastly increased emphasis on live music in recent years is the need to rehearse it, and these days that takes a lot more than a suburban garage and acquiescent neighbors. As a result, the number of rehearsal facilities geared for high-end professional applications has proliferated in recent years, and the size of the rooms in them has also increased, to accommodate more sophisticated production capabilities — even duos in hotel lobbies might sport a fogger or moving lights.

Music festivals and the cities that host them have long had a fractious relationship, going all the way back to the original Woodstock in 1969. Los Angeles, Miami and New York have all put the brakes on EDM-themed music events in recent years, with drugs and drug-related deaths as the main point of contention. In other cases, some festivals’ own success have been their downfall.

I’ve previously written about the importance of credits in the fields of technology arts. Earlier this year (FRONT of HOUSE, July 2016, page 40) we discussed the significant benefits of having work credits available in some form or another. Aside from the satisfaction of recognition that comes with a job well done, there are the more tangible rewards when those credits act as calling cards and résumés. Allowing potential employers to identify and track down someone who got “that” sound on a record is what leads to the next gig and the next one. It’s how careers are built.

The virtual reality section at last month’s AES Show in L.A. was in an appropriate location, on a second-level connecting walkway between halls in the Los Angeles Convention Center. Not just because nearby Hollywood is its own alternative universe, but because VR itself occupies its own media mezzanine tier at the moment, in between reality and fantasy, and between how we see the world now and how we might see it — and us — in the future. It was also separate from the growing live sound contingent at the show, where the AES has now come, somewhat reluctantly but inevitably, to embrace the fact that recordings are no longer the center of music’s universe.

Be afraid, be very afraid, but don’t despair: The world will get scarier — you just need to get the right costume.

t’ll be Halloween in a couple of weeks, so it’s time to toss a little scare out there. During a deep dive into the changing production-rehearsal studio market recently, I learned that the average size of rehearsal rooms is getting bigger.

The smartphone giveth, and the smartphone taketh away. The proliferation of video cameras in connected phones was a boon to the music industry, which early on saw it as a replacement for MTV, a way to put artist clips in front of every Facebook and Instagram user on earth and stimulate ticket sales. But as smartphone proliferated, those clips became more like leaks in a boat than floats for it. Besides, artists were noticing that concertgoers were standing or sitting in front of them but staring into their phones instead of the stage. Talk about an ego deflater. Richard Branson, the Virgin impresario, has criticized contemporary music shows as “soulless,” where “everyone stands around looking at their phones.”