[Harp-L] Death of live music....

["tomsmics" <tomsmics@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm late on this thread, but here are my thoughts:  The blues scene is dying because there are few new members of the crowd.  Look at the facts:  Only two blues magazines now when there were four, the audience that was so large in the '80s has now aged and doesn't go out as much, clubs are still following their crazy policy of starting bands at 10-11 p.m., when many people over 40 just don't want to be heading home post-midnite, club owners can now get satellite radio and pump in classic Muddy, Wolf, etc., rather than have a band, parking and rents are a much bigger issue today in the inner city than they were ten years ago,  it's very difficult to market new performers these days with the death of locally programmed radio, the emergence of the I-pod (a nasty device that lets most of its users confine their listening to music they heard in their 20's-30's, i.e., they never listen to anything new), etc.  The era of "big ears" that grew in the 1960s and '70s has pretty much ended, and most people just listen to the same thing over and over, never exposing themselves to anything new.  A sad development, but one that bodes poorly for the live music scene....Tom Ellis/Tom's Mics