Last night I attended the Madison performance of Little Big Town, an alt-country group whose current national tour is sponsored by Country Financial (which is where I got the backstage invite…thanks Sean). And in the pre-show chat for the sponsor’s guests, they were asked about how they managed to endure as a band before they got their break. The answer, of course, was with hope, with scrappiness, and with day jobs. They would rent a cheap van to get to gigs. They would scrape and save and barter and borrow for their equipment. They would follow the same trail as almost any other wanna-be professional ensemble.
It just so happened that their trail led to a record deal, a national tour, a series of featured performances on broadcast television, and a series of hit singles.
Such rags-to-riches stories in entertainment always leave me wondering (because it’s my job to wonder): What’s the difference between this profitable band and the many nonprofits that tell a portion of the same story (the scrappy, resourceful, hopeful story)?
The answer, of course, is profit.
Little Big Town, and the thousand other bands and ensembles that make music together any way they can, are essentially nonprofits, until they’re not. Just as Yo Yo Ma was a nonprofit enterprise until he wasn’t. Or Kathleen Battle. Or Cirque du Soleil. They may not be formed as tax-exempt corporations, but they operate with essentially the same principals — driven by passion and purpose, sustained by the act of making things from nothing.
In venture capital and equity investment, there is a magical moment when promise turns into profit, when founders or owners or early investors harvest the cash resulting from their early passion and productivity. It’s called a ‘liquidity event,’ and usually takes the form of an Initial Public Offering or a buy-out by another company.
While its easy and convenient to label genres of music and types of performers as either nonprofit or for-profit, as commercially focused or community focused, neither is a particularly productive definition for what’s really going on. Artists create work because they are compelled to create. Whether those creations find their way to a ‘liquidity event’ or not is a matter of the market, the moment, and the media that find what they make.
In the case of instrumental artists in the straight-ahead jazz and classical fields, it’s usually quite difficult to put forth music that is even differentiable to the ears of most consumers. I suppose you can have a pretty good ‘hit’ if a large group of aficionados in a given category buy a record, but more often a hit is something that catches fire across larger segments, and most people can’t tell one sax or one trumpet player from another.
So you’re left with the song itself: In the case of jazz, the core melody and/or chord progressions of the song are often not strongly imprinted in the listener’s ear either, since chords are stretched, bent and played with (that’s usually the whole point…) and improvisation plays a large role. In the case of classical, a substantial majority of what’s recorded is not original material but is instead the Nth recording of older works, already available, often at a lower price point. In both cases, the song/material itself isn’t a viable source of differentiation either.
I don’t mean to imply that these limitations are universal–only typical. Miles Davis, for one, overcame these hurdles and created a style that was recognizable and differentiable to listeners everywhere.
Very few liberties are taken with the production of straight-ahead jazz and classical, so the sound of various groups and their instruments will usually not be altogether different. Somewhat, but not a lot. Contrast this to pop bands in nearly all genres who treat studio production as a vast artistic playground all its own. For them, the number of variables and choices vis a vis sound production is staggering.
Lastly, possibly the biggest item, vocals. If your music has vocals, differentiation becomes far easier. Doesn’t mean that it always happens–there are copycat songs and production techniques that make one [new] singer sound just like an established [hit] singer–but it gives you a much better shot at being *able* to differentiate.
Without the ability to even make it past the first step–differentiation–the broader public generally won’t get to the second step–consideration and assessment–to actively listen and say, “Hmm, do I like this? Who is this? What is this?” Instead it becomes categorized in the brain as generic; generic jazz, generic classical–even generic opera if the voice is not sufficiently different than others and the tune is not appealing. Things never progress to the preference stage or the purchase stage.
Kudos to Little Big Town for working hard, staying passionate and putting something out there that people could differentiate, enjoy, and get excited about! It’s hard enough for bands like them, let alone the non-vocal jazz and classical types.
Just my two (or three?) cents.
I am reading Steve Jobs by Isaacson. We have a unique opportunity in which the very private Jobs enlists a superb biographer to tell the whole story. Over and over again the story stresses the contrast between for example, Woz, his co-founder, who was perfectly happy to give his computer boards away to amateurs and Jobs’ insistence on commercializing carefully-crafted products. We all profit from Jobs’ profit-seeing instincts. Otherwise we would never have heard of either of them.
I find the liquidity article rather disturbing. Is everything a commodity for commercial sale today? True, sales are great, and we need to sell our work to survive from our work. And is profit the defining result of quality and truth? Maybe I misunderstood the entire point. We are now in a crucial fight for the soul of humankind. Liquidity event? I’m for justice and community and well-being, both financial and otherwise.