Just Saying -- the soapbox thread

[matmosphere]

I balk at the price of most concert tix these days so maybe I've officially hit old age. 

Sadly, I do not do big concerts anymore. This is mainly due to the change in getting tickets to them. Endlessly getting "Early Notices", "VIP Access", etc. and only to find that once you actually do get into the system, most of the good tickets are gone or sold out. Businesses like Ticketmaster doing contracted sales to 3rd party vendors (Stubhub, etc.) before anyone can get them has killed the concert-going experience. The day they stopped letting people get in line at venues for tickets and made it a cash-grab online operation was the day it was all over. Getting tickets today is akin to participating in a horrible Ebay auction where your pulse is pounding and you are constantly clicking or mashing buttons to try to get a $60 face value lawn seat ticket for $300!

Yeah, I never go to shows that cost more than $30. I figure that no later how much I want to see a particular band I don't generally like shows in big venues. Plus I fell like there are plenty of good bands to be seen in small venues for way less money.

[davent]

Yeah i do, well did club shows, general admission & no seating, get in line for the doors opening, stand for the show and it's 5, 6, 7 hours before you get a chance to sit down again in a restaurant after the show. Last show was July 4 2019, Drive By Truckers, Lee's Palace Toronto. Shows are just slowly starting back up again, nothing to speak of so far.

[matmosphere]

Yeah i do, well did club shows, general admission & no seating, get in line for the doors opening, stand for the show and it's 5, 6, 7 hours before you get a chance to sit down again in a restaurant after the show. Last show was July 4 2019, Drive By Truckers, Lee's Palace Toronto. Shows are just slowly starting back up again, nothing to speak of so far.

That's pretty much exactly what I was thinking. There are very few shows I have been to in the past decade or two that involved buying tickets in advance.

[davent]

Yeah i do, well did club shows, general admission & no seating, get in line for the doors opening, stand for the show and it's 5, 6, 7 hours before you get a chance to sit down again in a restaurant after the show. Last show was July 4 2019, Drive By Truckers, Lee's Palace Toronto. Shows are just slowly starting back up again, nothing to speak of so far.

That's pretty much exactly what I was thinking. There are very few shows I have been to in the past decade or two that involved buying tickets in advance.

Always advance tickets or there'd be no chance of getting in,  pay face value for the tickets months in advance, i do get in line at the venue early and end up with no one other then my wife between me and the stage.

[midwayfair]

I think I've lost the "don't be on FB" war and it blows.

I found out that some of my best musical friends put out an album ... in November 2019. I've shared multiple gigs with them, recorded them and produced songs for them, and I had no idea. They're not the only ones. I actually missed the release of another album I played on for basically the same reason: I think it really is so difficult to be a musician without Facebook that most musicians don't use anything else to communicate with people. I lose a subscriber every time I send a mailing list e-mail, and the online stuff I do use like forums aren't exactly a way to keep in touch with too many people I know near home.

There is at least one local venue (that I've played several times) that won't use anything else to book shows. Can't call, can't e-mail, can't talk in person. Have to use FB.

It was kind of easy to ignore this problem when I was in school and couldn't play shows or even most of the time find time to go to any, and during the pandemic when no one could play shows and I wasn't going anywhere and didn't get frequent reminders that I didn't have any clue what was going on.

[jimilee]

That sucks Jon. I feel your pain. I was on Facebook when it was invitation only. Dropped off about 7 years ago , too much drama. Now, I feel like I don't hear about shows or albums. Hell, I feel like forums are moving over to facebook groups. Cant enter any contests or even keep up with what's going on at work anymore.


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[Aentons]

I think I've lost the "don't be on FB" war and it blows.

Fuck Facebook. And the horse it rode in on...

[midwayfair]

That sucks Jon. I feel your pain. I was on Facebook when it was invitation only. Dropped off about 7 years ago , too much drama. Now, I feel like I don't hear about shows or albums. Hell, I feel like forums are moving over to facebook groups. Cant enter any contests or even keep up with what's going on at work anymore.

It's not just the shows and albums, it's indicative of how hard it is from both sides to keep up with people who are sort of locked into FB as a primary way of communicating. Another friend and bandmate (not like some random acquaintance), who I've had text conversations with several times during the pandemic just had their second baby and I found about it a month afterward. I'm not some super social person, but I feel like the nature of communication about friendship has fundamentally changed, to the point where it wouldn't even occur to one of my close friends to mention his family's second baby on a text, because of course everyone's already known for a while. I'm completely disconnected from community in a very fundamental way now. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and it's very different from the last time I reactivated my account, at the worst possible time, for about a year. I originally ditched the account in 2013, then reactivated it in like 2015 or 2016. I have actual data from that experiment about how disconnected I became from the music community in Baltimore, because I had almost no gigs for two years (at least not my own -- I was playing guitar and mandolin for people at the time though) and then I had lots of gigs in 2016 many of which came just from responding to a Facebook post. If I needed to rely on this to put food on the table, I would probably starve if I didn't use it, so it's no wonder to me that most musicians I know are on there and heavily invested. (By the way, when I got rid of my account in 2013 or whenever, I actually nuked the account: I deleted all my posts and removed everyone from my friends list. This time I just deactivated it.)

[jimilee]

I get it. Only keep in touch with a few friends through text. Not a single ex band mate has reached out unless they need something not pertaining to music. Very frustrating and a little depressing. Me and my wife keep to ourselves. Facebook just isn't the society I want to be a part of, but you make very valid points. To keep up as a musician, he'll even part of society, it's a necessary evil.


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[Willybomb]

Hell, I feel like forums are moving over to facebook groups

I agree with this and feel like it's a bad thing.  Forums are fantastic collections of knowledge for the most part, and a facebook thread in a group isn't the same as browsing the topics or doing a search.

[midwayfair]

Hell, I feel like forums are moving over to facebook groups

I agree with this and feel like it's a bad thing.

Yeah, FB and the like are uniquely ill-suited to any collective knowledge task since its results don't show up even in Google results and the content is designed to be dynamic (a timeline) rather than the static display of a forum. Discord is very slightly better because it's better organized but it's still not designed for acting like a library.

[Aleph Null]

I think I've lost the "don't be on FB" war and it blows.

I gave up on FaceBook in 2016...mostly because I realized it made me a lazy friend. It was easy to post something and assume that everyone you'd want to know would see it and never actually take the time to connect with people. It was also easy to assume that friends would post everything they'd want you to know. I'd fallen out of the habit of pursuing friendships. Since quitting, I've made a concerted effort to stay in touch with the people I care about by other means, but unfortunately, it would seem FaceBook has made lazy friends out of all of us. Even if I put in the effort, for most old acquaintances, I've basically disappeared.

I haven't played a gig in years, but that's because I have small children to take care of. I can't imagine what landscape awaits me should I ever try to start gigging again. What are the youths doing nowadays? They're not on FaceBook. Are they learning about shows from TikTok?

[jimilee]

I think I've lost the "don't be on FB" war and it blows.

I gave up on FaceBook in 2016...mostly because I realized it made me a lazy friend. It was easy to post something and assume that everyone you'd want to know would see it and never actually take the time to connect with people. It was also easy to assume that friends would post everything they'd want you to know. I'd fallen out of the habit of pursuing friendships. Since quitting, I've made a concerted effort to stay in touch with the people a care about by other means, but unfortunately, it would seem FaceBook has made lazy friends out of all of us. Even if I put in the effort, for most old acquaintances, I've basically disappeared.

I haven't played a gig in years, but that's because I have small children to take care of. I can't imagine what landscape awaits me should I ever try to start gigging again. What are the youths doing nowadays? They're not on FaceBook. Are they learning about shows from TikTok?

Very well said, that's exactly what it does.


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[midwayfair]

I gave up on FaceBook in 2016...mostly because I realized it made me a lazy friend. It was easy to post something and assume that everyone you'd want to know would see it and never actually take the time to connect with people. It was also easy to assume that friends would post everything they'd want you to know. I'd fallen out of the habit of pursuing friendships.

I was the same.

Unfortunately, I am and always have been a lazy friend. Being on or off facebook didn't change that about me very much.

I also have no idea how anyone finds out about shows, but if I had to guess the most effective is still direct communication, or at least the appearance of it, until you get to the point where there's a critical mass of people who will tell others. That was always the most effective way.

EDIT:
The last person to post something to my timeline (in 2016) is dead. He died in 2019. I don't know how and I certainly didn't hear about it.
I played in his band for a couple years. We weren't close friends anymore as he'd kind of gone off the deep end in several ways.
Frigging surreal.

[Aleph Null]

I was the same.

Unfortunately, I am and always have been a lazy friend. Being on or off facebook didn't change that about me very much.

I also have no idea how anyone finds out about shows, but if I had to guess the most effective is still direct communication, or at least the appearance of it, until you get to the point where there's a critical mass of people who will tell others. That was always the most effective way.

EDIT:
The last person to post something to my timeline (in 2016) is dead. He died in 2019. I don't know how and I certainly didn't hear about it.
I played in his band for a couple years. We weren't close friends anymore as he'd kind of gone off the deep end in several ways.
Frigging surreal.

I'm not saying I'm very good at it, but I'm trying. It's well documented that men loose friends as they age, starting after 25 or so. There's a lot more that plays into that phenomenon than FaceBook and I don't think it will be completely solved with more texting and coffee dates on my part. I have become downright aggressive about inviting people to do things (brewing, dinner parties, play dates, camping {vaxinated and spaced out, of course}) and I'll be sure to join clubs, attend open mics, and church services once my whole household is vaccinated. 

In some ways falling out of touch with people has been a relief. I stopped using FaceBook (2016) because the politics was making me hate my friends. I can't imagine what seeing some people's takes on vaccines would do to my opinion of them. I'd rather remember them fondly than watch them go off the deep end.