[Dancecult-l] liveness

[Luis-Manuel Garcia]

Hi all,

My apologies for this horridly short response, but I'm preparing to make the
transatlantic move from Paris to Chicago to Canada and back to Chiago this
Saturday, so "comprehensive", "well thought-out" and "profound" are all
luxuries I can't afford at the moment.  With that caveat, here it is:

In response to what Michael just said, I've noticed a familiar phenomenon
for EDM events both in central Canada (near Toronto), in the Chicago-Detroit
corridor, and here in Paris and continental Europe more broadly.  All of my
connections in the EDM scene here in Paris refer to the July-August period
as "festival season," and start putting aside vacation days and money to
attend festivals.  I think part of what makes for consistently high
attendance at festivals is, counterintuitively, the high investment it
demands from most attendees.  If you live in Paris and you're a student or
recent graduate with the hopes of attending I Love Techno in Belgium or
Sónar in Barcelona, you need to finance travel, accommodations, tickets to
the main event as well as the many near-compulsory afterparties, money for
overpriced drinks and/or other intoxicants, and so on.  This means that you
often have to start planning some of the details of your trip well before
the festival lineup has been announced.  If the lineup ends up being
disappointing or at least uninteresting, many people have already invested
too much money and effort to cancel at the last minute.  This is especially
true of multi-day events like DEMF in Detroit (which historically has
announced playlists very late) and WMV in Miami (whose all-important
afterparties tend to coalesce at the last minute).

Having said that, I suspect that the annual aspect of the festival also
means that a good lineup one year can't always save a declining event.  If
attendees have been disappointed too frequently in past years, they may fail
to make the necessary preparations for the next year, and find themselves
out of money or too busy at work/school to make last-minute travel plans
when the lineup suddenly improves.

While there certainly can be a lot of scrutiny brought upon the lineups of
festivals (witness the endless kvetching on techno-313 listserv or
DetroitLuv),  it's true that most people I know ask "Are you going to Mutek
next year?" and not "Are you going to see Krikor at Sónar tomorrow?"  The
interval between planning and going is much longer, so the focus tends to be
more general.  Ultimately, I think festivals just demand a higher level of
investment on the part of the attendee, and this entails a slower market
dynamic.

puzzled by his turn to microeconomics,

Luis-Manuel Garcia
University of Chicago
Ethnomusicology, PhD
etc.

On 6/25/07, Michael MacDonald <halfsharpmusic at yahoo.ca> wrote:
>
> This is a really interesting question. Since you mentioned Glastonbury and
> then asked about 'liveness' I have to suppose that you equate festival with
> liveness. I've been working on festival culture for the last four years and
> there is a reallying interesting disconnect between liveness (going out to
> see a performer or group at a live event) and a festival. For instance it is
> very common to hold a festival event in Canada during the summer and draw
> 10-15k people. However, if you were to take the main headliners of the
> concert and put it in a venue you would draw less than 400. I just started
> working on EDM this year and so far, with very few examples mind you, I'm
> noticing the same results.
>
> All this to say that 'liveness' and 'festival-ness' do not seem to be the
> same thing. One festival director I interviewed called this the 'eventer
> effect' that is when people are drawn by the human spectacle of the event
> instead of the advertised musical entertainment. Some Canadian folk festival
> have actually stopped advertising their lineups because they have noticed
> that it doesn't affect attendance numbers. This does not seem to me the case
> for any event that is held 'in-doors'. Which seems like a unusual
> pre-requisite however these types of events seem to work best when held in
> outdoor environments.
>
> Again, since I'm just starting to cross over from folk festival research
> to explore EDM festivals I can only suggest what I've seen up till now. I
> should say that my decision to cross over was not my own choice. It was
> because there is a certain percentage of the audience that attends both
> festivals and more artists ,at the request of younger artistic directors,
> are performing at both. I would be very interested in the thoughts of other
> list members.
>
> Michael MacDonald
> University of Alberta
> Music Department
> Ethnomusicology
> PhD student
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: slightly muddy <slightly.muddy at virgin.net>
> To: Dancecult-l at listcultures.org
> Sent: Monday, June 25, 2007 4:39:25 AM
> Subject: [Dancecult-l] liveness
>
> this is really directed to non-uk members of the list:
> In Britian there seems to have been a resurgence of, not to say
> obsession with live music in the past year or so. The past weekend has
> been marked by virtual blanket media coverage of the Glastonbury
> festival, for example. Whilst I am aware of other festivals and such
> like in the US and Europe, I wonder whether the emphasis on liveness is
> a phenomenon to be found in other parts of the world?
>
> p g-b
>
>
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