Month: December 2012

This is really good. There is deep insight here into how and why audiences exist, and my experience with the Open Ears Music Series affirms these ideas. Click the link to read the whole thing.

A Simple Reason Why Audiences Are So Small For New Music Concerts « Elissa Milne:

“Live concerts (or any live events) are built on a fan-base, so if you have no fans you have a limited chance of attracting an audience. This holds true for a pub band as much as it does for a purveyor of experimental sound art. Any performer needs to build an audience if they want to have an audience.

Now I do appreciate that there has been an aesthetic of writing with no thought for connection with listeners, but seriously people, if you write with no consideration of how you are building your audience you can hardly be surprised when you don’t have one.

And yeah, it’s your audience. It’s not the audience for ‘new music’ or ‘experimental music’ or ‘art music’. It’s the group of people in your neighbourhood, community, workplace, internet forums, facebook groups and twitterfeed who are interested in what you do. That’s what an audience is: it’s a bunch of people who care about your work so much that they want to participate. By being there. By being close to the action. By giving you money so you’ll keep doing what you do.”

(Via @pbailey.)