It’s tough enough to be a record executive these days. Your budget’s shrinking, your staff keep leaving to join tech startups, and you keep having to figure out which one of your interns is the one who’s leaking your biggest acts rough mixes to BitTorrent.
At least you always had SXSW to look forward to, right?
Apparently, [...]

If the pile of mail in my inbox is any indication, regular readers of my blog are wondering where I have been for the past few weeks!Believe it or not, Lori and I treated ourselves to an honest-to-goodness vacation, our first in about six years. We went totally off the grid for a little more [...]

In researching an upcoming article on music booking agencies, I keep running into a trend that’s got me thinking about how musicians really get paid for live performance in a web-enabled music industry. When Coldplay offered concert tickets via an online auction back in 2005, I remember hearing moans from fans and from music activists who griped that [...]

I was talking with a musician the other day about why it’s so hard to find places to play lately. We’re in another real estate surge nationwide, which means that all the cheap spaces and run-down buildings that are great for rock and jazz venues can suddenly fetch double or triple their current leases upon [...]

In general, this story about a favorite Irish pub in Boston is inspiring. For every club owner that moans about how hard it is to grow a following and stay in business, this should be mandatory reading. These guys lost their lease, and business boomed so much that they’ll be back in a bigger location [...]

With all the internet radio and YouTube stuff happening this week, this news nugget nearly slipped by me:
The EFF managed to get a patent revoked that prevented many artists and clubs from offering quick-turnaround CD recordings of live performances. A Clear Channel subsidiary had patented the idea to make quickly-burned CDs of live performances available [...]

In Host Your Own Concerts, I wrote about churches as a viable type of venue for concerts you can stage on your own. The trend’s really taking off, with more megachurches hosting evening entertainment. While most of the events are spiritually connected, like the Left Behind movies, you can often find a church music director [...]

Tom Hespos writes from the point of view of a music fan, frustrated that he feels left out when his favorite bands come to town and he doesn’t know about it until it’s too late. For too long, record labels and music managers have just assumed that fans will find out about gigs on their [...]

Instead of selling every seat in the house for $30, INXS recently staged an auction on Ticketmaster. The highest priced ticket sold for $500, the lowest for $3. Nine Inch Nails used a similar model, and watched online scalping drop substantially. Venues and ticket sellers are finally clued in to the idea that pricing for [...]

Readers of Host Your Own Concerts know how I advocate advance ticket sales as a great way to guarantee attendance at your next gig. eTickets.to is a new UK-based service that’s offering flat-rate ticketing, and seems to offer the same functionality as Mollyguard (another favorite of mine) at a different pricing structure. eTickets.to offers flat-rate [...]