Short Trip to New Orleans

Today I arrived back home after a week long stay in New Orleans.  One of the MBA students organized a group of volunteers and also the trip to help out in the damaged neighborhoods of the city.  Since I had never been to that area, I was glad to go there.

The city, although the tourist bureau would wish you to think otherwise, is far from being restored.  In the poorer neighborhoods especially, destroyed and abandoned houses sit wretchedly in various stages of deterioration.  Long after Katrina drove the occupants from the homes, whole neighborhoods lie quiet and stagnant. Mold is the only living thing occupying structures where people once lived.  Our group was given various assignments.  We fixed leaking roofs, tore down and rebuilt walls, hung sheetrock, painted interiors, and a number of other things that needed to be done.  The whole MBA team was divided into small groups organized by skill or experience.  By day one group would paint in one place and another might be on a rebuilding team or a roofing crew. By night we were out to explore the city.  In spite of the damage we saw, New Orleans is still a beautiful city especially the French Quarter.  With its Bohemian look and feel it reminded me of being in Europe (maybe somewhere in Amsterdam).

Book Project: Immigration, VISA, and customs

Another important thing you want to do is to make sure that everyone traveling in your group has a valid passport, visa, or any other paperwork required to enter the country or countries on your scheduled tour.  If any of the members of your group have not traveled internationally they may not have one.  Likewise if they have not traveled recently they may need to renew their passport.  Do not make the assumption that because you have a valid passport that everyone else does.  

Dumpstaphunk & Inca Maya 12/8/08 @ the Georgia Theatre (Athens, GA)

After my visit to Fuzebox on Monday I decided to shed some of my accumulated energy that evening by getting out and going to the Georgia Theater to watch Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk band.  Neville’s band was appearing along with another funky band called Inca Maya.  Since it snowed in New Orleans that day, a rare occurrence in that southern city, creating excitement for those folks and footage for news programs, I figured I would talk about Neville’s Band whose members missed the wintry white weather of their hometown and conversely heated up the stage here in Athens.

Book project: Funding the Tour or Finding a Sponsor

Now I am going to talk about one of the less attractive yet most important elements in the preparation phase of planning for your tour, financing.  Do you have the money already?  Was your band forward-thinking enough to save a percentage of the revenue earned from paid performances in anticipation of a future expenditure such as the cost touring internationally?  In our particular case our band members had believed that we would someday tour internationally.  We had thought about touring in the United States and a few other countries and had saved part of the money we earned toward that end.  Even though we had managed to save a considerable amount it was not enough to cover all the expenses; visas, airline fares, lodging, meals, travel within Japan, gifts, and unforeseeable expenditures.  How then would we finance a sixteen-day tour of Japan. A word of caution here, don’t plan to use the money you may earn on the tour to pay your expenses.  Your first tour may not be as profitable as you hoped.  What follows is several possibilities for acquiring the funding you will need for your tour, but use your imagination this is not an all-inclusive inventory.  I am certain there are many more methods of bankrolling your tour than those I mention.

Fuzebox Inc. – Changing the Music Business Game?

While those working for the major labels are still trying to figure out how they can reassert control of the current music market, Les Ottolenghi and team seem to know the answer to that and proactively ponder the strategies that will be useful in future markets.  While Les concentrates on the business feasibility of different strategies, his team thinks more in bits and bytes.  Visiting Ottolenghi’s company, Fuzebox Inc., with Bruce Burch and Keith Perissi of the UGA Music Business Program, I was reminded of the Terminator ride at Orlando Universal Theme Park combined with the company Cyberdine Systems and its new Terminator technology.  Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not talking about any negative image that Cyberdine Systems may call up, I’m talking about the rush, excitement, and amazement that I felt viewing and learning about the goings-on at Fuzebox.

Recommended reading for your holidays – Feeds

I have only one more week left before I start all the traveling around Christmas. That makes me think about what to read over the holidays. The semester will be over, and I am ready to dump some of the MBA stuff in my brain into the garbage and replace it with some music business insights.  So, if you know a book that you think I  should really read, please go ahead and tell me.  Here is my recommendation for your holiday reading:

Create your own music business book.  After reading a blog story about the advantages of RSS-feeds for artists I realized how I use this technology myself already and want to share how you can do it, too.  First you need to find a feed reader.  I myself use Bloglines, but there are numerous others like Rssreader or Feedreader.  Now create an account in your feed reader and add the music business blogs that you want to follow into your reader.  Each time one of these bloggers posts a new message you will notice it in your feed reader and can check out a preview or possibly the whole post.  No more search marathons through your favorite blogs.  It’s all there!!!

Here is a small list of good music business blogs that will get you started:

Book Project: Preparation Phase – Touring Strategy

Preparation Phase

The preparation phase of your tour should begin as soon as possible after the tour dates are confirmed, ideally, about a year before the tour takes place.  You will probably feel as if the first few months crawl slowly by without much progress, but during these first few months there are tasks that must be completed and decisions that must be made that will determine whether your tour is profitable, coherent, and enjoyable or unprofitable, stressful, and troublesome.  Funding for your tour is one of the first items needing to be addressed.  Some sources of money are only available once a year so you want to be well aware of the timing of such a source if you intend to use any of that money to fund your tour.  I will talk more about that later, but let’s move on to touring strategy.

Touring strategy

One of the first things to consider is how you will conduct your tour.  Will you tour playing single-bill shows each night?  Will you try to tour on the coat-tails of a popular, or well-known local band?  Will you try to arrange with other groups to play multi-ticket shows?  Each alternative has its advantages and disadvantages. 

Book Project: The Japanese Jam Band Scene

Before I talk about any particulars in the Japanese jam band environment, it might be helpful to look at the jam band genre in general.  Just today while I was writing this, I received an email from a friend who wrote, “I’m never really sure what “jam band” is these days.  The genre seems to cover nearly every kind of music from bluegrass to blues to jazz.”  In this note my friend expressed a view that I have held for a long time.  “Jam bands” do not belong to any specific genre and can not be categorized simply by listing other types of music under the jam band umbrella.  Using the term “jam band” to refer to bands who built on the heritage of American rock bands such as the Grateful Dead and Phish ignores the fact that for example in the genre of World Music many bands are jamming.  Ignoring any philosophical discussion about what a jam band is, I wrote in an earlier blog that common elements for jam bands are fewer and often whimsical lyrics, more improvisation, continually changing set lists, and musicians who often bear a striking resemblance to Taliban soldiers.

Everybody twitters!?!

Here is my question:  Twitter, a curse or a blessing?

According to twitter.com, Twitter is “a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

I do understand that it is really helpful for bands to have a direct immediate connection to their fans.  A Friday noon reminder saying “We are playing at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta tonight!” can surely make a difference and mobilize some undecided fans.  But what about all those regular people who are already sharing TMI on their Facebook statuses?  Is this just another tool to spam me with their life stories now?  I was discussing this with our other Music Business Program folks, but we couldn’t figure it out.

So, here is a request:  If you are a twitter user, please tell us here what it is all about.  Why would anybody want to follow you?  Who would you want to follow?  Where is this going?