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Three things have happened to me in the past month that have me steamed. Steamed and worried. The first thing involves a seat-selling agency whom I will not give the dignity of naming. I'll just borrow my friend Marguerite's term for them and call them TicketBastard. Back in January I learned that one of my favorite groups was going to be playing in my area in April and that tickets were on sale. I immediately trotted down to the venue's box office in an attempt to buy a ticket. I was told, "Sorry, we can't sell the tickets here at the box office until 3 weeks prior to the event. It's the concert promoter's policy, not ours." I was then told that if I wanted to get tickets any earlier I'd have to go through TicketBastard.

Now, I don't think there are sufficient words in the English language to describe how much I loathe TicketBastard. I don't like any business that monopolizes anything, and I don't like any business that forces me to use a credit card. Like most debt-conscious people, I try to maintain a reasonable grip on my credit card debt. I also don't like all the stupid miscellaneous charges TicketBastard adds on to the cost of the ticket. On the rare occasions when I've dealt with them I inevitably end up humming that song from "Les Miserables": "Charge 'em for the lice, extra for the mice, 2 percent for looking in the mirror twice!"

So I counted off the days until 3 weeks before the event, knowing the whole time that I was probably going to get stuck with a really crappy seat. But hey, a crappy seat is better than no seat at all, right?

Two days before the 3-week mark I picked up a copy of the Village Voice. As I paged through the venue ads I saw a full-page ad for the venue where the band was playing. Sure enough, the band's name was there in great big letters. Right next to the band's name, also in great big letters, were the two words no potential concertgoer wants to see:

"SOLD OUT!"

The story doesn't end there. Soon after this happened I emailed a friend to rant about my experience. A few hours later my friend emailed me back. She'd checked out TicketBastard's website, and they still had tickets available. Translation: the show was not sold out, I just had to be willing to get gouged by TicketBastard in order to see it.

Now, my rant here is not against the venue, although I'd be perfectly justified in ranting against the venue for saying the show was sold out when in fact it wasn't. It is not against the actual price of the ticket ($26, which would have been very reasonable). And it's certainly not against the band (I won't mention any names, but their initials are Great Big Sea). My rant is against the practice of REQUIRING patrons to go through TicketBastard in order to obtain seats for a show, which is being done by concert promoters (including the promoters for this particular band) and some venues (although not this venue in particular). In all fairness, I suppose TicketBastard isn't entirely evil. For those who want to avoid the hassle of waiting in line in a box office and appreciate the convenience of doing business with a credit card online or over the phone, TicketBastard can be quite useful. But forcing this service onto patrons amounts to highway robbery.

The second thing that happened this month has little to do with music, but it fits in well with the theme. I have a couple of music friends who also do improv comedy. For the past few years the group with whom they perform has had a cozy little home in a small theatre in the NYC area. Recently I noticed that their event calendar hadn't been updated, so I emailed one of my friends in the group to find out what was up. It turns out the group's little theatre had been sold to a developer to be converted into an apartment.

Fortunately, this is one story that has a happy ending. The group quickly found another home nearby, and the break in their performance schedule will be nothing more than a mere blip. But this group was lucky. Many venues (music and otherwise) have faced similar circumstances and not been as fortunate.

The third thing that happened involves a relatively new Broadway production which I will not name here. A member of another band I follow landed a minor role in the production, so my friend decided to look into buying tickets. Wanna know how much the orchestra seats cost? $250.00. And no, I did not misplace the decimal point. $250 for a new show with no hugely famous cast members that at the time hadn't even been reviewed yet. It wasn't that long ago that jaws were dropping when "The Producers" started commanding $100.00 per ticket. And now we're being asked to pay more than twice that much for a show that hasn't even won a Tony yet?? Gimme a break! (Ironically, the same week that I wrote this piece, Crain's did a front-page story on the expense and unavailability of Broadway show tickets. And no, I did not steal the idea for this piece from them. I didn't see the Crain's article until 2 days after I wrote this. But it does prove that I'm not crazy—or at least, not THAT crazy. :) Also, this piece was posted to the Muse's Muse the day before the Tony awards.)

So—we've got promoters & TicketBastard conspiring to gouge the living daylights out of concertgoers, small performing venues being shut down left and right, smaller-time performers finding it harder and harder to get gigs, and non-millionaire arts lovers finding it harder and harder to attend good performances and still have enough left of their paychecks to afford little luxuries like food and rent. And I'm sure that many of you out there reading can think of similar experiences in whatever corner of the world you currently occupy. What does it all mean?

I think it means that the arts are in a state of crisis. It is hardly a news flash that the arts are struggling to survive--that’s been going on for years. But I think things are rapidly getting worse. It has always been my belief that the arts are dependent upon the masses for their very survival. If participation in music and theatre and art and dance is a privilege only available to the elite, these arts will suffer a slow and painful extinction. And while there are some out there who would argue that this is hardly a priority with all the killing and dying and pollution and corruption in the world, those of us who live and breathe the arts know in our hearts that this simply isn’t true.

How did things get this bad? How did things degenerate into such an awful state? And why are they so much worse nowadays? I don't claim to have any firm answers to any of these questions, but I hope to stimulate some dialogue on these issues.

Music is an art. We all know that. But for better or for worse (some would argue for much worse), music is also a business. And while artists certainly need to be able to earn a decent living, it would seem that as soon as it was discovered that the making of music could become a profitable enterprise, the art became corrupt. The same could be said for any art form, but I'm focusing on music here.

The mingling of art and commerce has always been a delicate balance. How do artists stay true to their art and still manage to eat on a regular basis? How do they make a living without "selling out"? How do venues offer patrons what they want to hear at a price they're willing to pay and still manage to stay in business?

Unfortunately, all too frequently the answer to these questions is that they don't. Anyone who's passionate enough about music to be surfing a website like the Muse's Muse knows of talented artists who gave up on trying to make a living through their art because they simply weren't making enough money to survive. We all know of artists who made bad artistic choices because those choices offered good money. And many venues either survive by jacking up their prices or don't survive at all.

Big business has played a major role in this corruption. Here's an experience I'm sure many people out there will recognize. Let's say that a major artist is doing a concert at the huge venue nearest you, and that tickets will be available through TicketBastard starting at 12 noon on a certain date. You call or log on to TicketBastard at 12:01 p.m., and you discover that the closest seats you can get are in the nosebleed section. How can this be? How did all of those seats magically sell out in just one minute? Well, the answer is that they were snapped up ahead of time by corporate sponsors before they were made available to the general public. This practice all but ensures that the average Joe or Jane will never be able to purchase good seats at a major show. So when you're sitting in the nosebleed section at the concert and you look around and you see all the advertising banners, you know who to blame for hogging up the good seats.

This is just one example of how plain greed has polluted the arts. But it isn't just greed, it's also the economy, something over which even the most altruistic artistic entities have no control. Inflation has made things cost more, which means expenses are greater for everybody—the artists, the venues that hire them, and the patrons who pay money to see them. The astronomical cost of gas alone has had a significant impact on the music industry. As my friend Mike put it:

Back in the 80's and 90's, when gas was about $1/gallon, it was super-cheap for bands to tour. Just hop in the van and go from town to town, making just enough to break even or make a little profit. Now that gas is $2.50-$3.50, not so much!

With fewer acts actively touring, that means fewer "name" attractions on the bill, which means that more clubs will probably close - especially in places with less of a music scene. I mean, New York will always have a good variety of low-mid-and-high price venues due to the sheer volume of active musicians in the area, but places like, say, Indianapolis...Low paying clubs with astronomical gas prices means bands just aren't touring as much, which leads to fewer clubs and less of a music scene.

Combine greed with inflation, and the result is a highly toxic cocktail. A cappella luminary Barry Carl sums it up this way:

Productions cost more to put up, ergo investors have a bigger nut to recoup; [venue] rents have gone through the roof, forcing producers to hike ticket prices; Unions have plagued [venues] for years with ridiculous demands, and the owners and producers have had no choice but to cave or lose their shows. This also reflects in higher ticket prices. Orchestras everywhere have either folded or found ways to increase their musicians' salaries - usually by hiking ticket prices. Touring has become much more expensive and risky... Another factor that skews prices is the fees paid to stars in any of the aforementioned areas. They take such a big slice of the pie that there's less left over for everyone else. Inflation is a piece of this, since everything seems to cost more all the time, and as we know, income has not kept up with expenses for most of us, so there's less discretionary income left over for show tickets. Nobody in the 'circuit', whether it's venues, promoters, unions, artists, labels, etc., seems to be willing to 'take less to get more'.

Finally, Barry points out that another often overlooked contributor to the sorry state of music is the current state of the medium itself:

Digital media mostly sounds like shit. CDs generally sound awful, and mp3's are a sonic joke. Classical music suffers the most, but pop music sounds pretty terrible, too. Remember - digital music is SAMPLES of an analog wave form. SAMPLES. That means PIECES, rather than the whole thing. Digital sound is a representation of an analog sound with PIECES MISSING. The manufacturers of the medium would like you to think that it's as good or better than older analog recording and reproduction methods, but it's not...Those are lies, pure and simple. The most popular music delivery system available today, the iPod, plays mp3's mostly, and mp3's have even more pieces missing than plain old 44.1/16 bit CD tracks.

Those missing pieces are IMPORTANT. Those missing pieces are what you hear when you hear live music or the infrequent analog recording. They are the pieces that give music texture, emotional heft, and life. One of the big reasons that music is in such a slump is that, aside from the feverishly formula driven record companies extruding more crap than a sewage treatment plant, the hordes of people who've grown up on digital media have a much more tenuous emotional attachment to music than those who have grown up with analog reproduction and live music. Listening to a digital recording of a symphony or opera is a tiring, uninspiring journey through carefully filtered high harmonics, discordant byproducts of the digital process. These artifacts do not exist in the real world, or in live and analog music. They tire the ears and the brain - in fact it has been proven that digitally reproduced music has an entirely different (and mostly negative) effect on the nervous system than analog music does!

(NOTE: To learn more about what Barry said in that last sentence, please click on the links below.)

http://www.moultonlabs.com/index.php/more/so_whats_so_good_about_digital_anyway/P1/

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/10/8/134958/152

Higher sample rates and bit depths help some, but the industry settled early on for a low standard that it is now stuck with, and people have accepted it as the norm. Hence concert attendance, and interest in live music in general has fallen off remarkably in the last twenty years...Millions of folks walk around plugged into their iPods, listening to vague simulacra of music, thinking that they're hearing the real thing when they've settled for very poor copies.

These are some of the factors that have contributed to the current financial crisis being faced not only by the music industry, but by the arts as a whole. But what can we average people do about it? How can non-millionaires like us possibly put a dent in this? We're all just a bunch of Davids fighting one hell of a Goliath (or maybe several Goliaths). How can we possibly make a difference? In my next column I'll explore some possible solutions.

Special thanks to Barry Carl and Michael Anderson for sharing their thoughts for this piece.

If you have a suggestion for a column or would like to be considered as a columnist yourself, feel free to write to me at .


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