10 ms·

This is a technology problem. Media technology (radio, recordings, television, and movies) has essentially killed live performance of all kind compared to what

by jaco6 2y ago

This is a technology problem. Media technology (radio, recordings, television, and movies) has essentially killed live performance of all kind compared to what it was once like. Bars and hotels that used to rely on gig musicians can now play a Spotify playlist over the speakers. Repertory theatres once existed in every small and medium sized city in the country, each supporting several actors earning salaries sufficient to raise a family—all wiped out by television. It would have once been unthinkable for even a small city of <=100,000 people to lack multiple live entertainment options 7 days a week. No more—we’re all at home, watching our particular chosen thing, listening to our particular chosen album, playing our own chosen game. Some will claim this has been an advancement. “How lame,” they say, “it must have been to have to go to the Local Entertainment Venue and just listen to whatever act was on that night. Nowadays I can listen to Acid Techno Super Hop, my particular chosen favorite, as much as I want.” But the losses in communal behavior have been significant. Most critical is the disappearance of dance. Dance is a fundamental human behavior, stretching back to Paleolithic times. It is nowhere to be seen in many cities today, because no one has any occasion to do it except weddings, at which it is very common now to stand around awkwardly after the bride and groom have fumbled through some rehearsed step.

dyauspitr 2y ago
Having lived in NYC, Broadway, off broadway, off off broadway etc. look like they are thriving. I don’t think recorded media comes even close to the novelty and spectacle a theatre production is. Have small towns really lost all their theatres?
- jemmyw 2y ago
  The town I live in has 6000 people and there's a play or live music event in the town hall every couple of weeks, maybe more often in summer. I don't go to many, one or two a year, but presumably enough people turn out.
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    In the small towns around me the town halls are not for profit and nobody is doing the events to make money/earn an income but as labours of love.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  I think it's more accurate to say it became a "premium". I could probably find some live music at a rinky dink mom-and-pop cafe in a far out suburb even as late as the 90's if I tried. By now, that prestige of a live music seems to only really come from a bigger joint, or as more of a passion project than as an expected way to get customers in. >Have small towns really lost all their theatres? It's mostly a thing regulated to colleges. So it will depend on that. I haven't seen a smaller town without a college that still has traditional theatre around, personally. Though I have seen forums where that scene would obviously have hosted such events, abandoned.
  - shkkmo 2y ago
    I see small venues that regularly host live music all over the place. It definitely drives business for the bars, but there doesn't seem to be much money in it for the musicians.
- jaco6 2y ago
  New York City is the greatest concentration of wealth on the planet. The continuation of theatre there should come as no surprise. I am speaking of the cultural shift in entertainment, from a variety of local live options on most days of the week to just television in most places across the country. I should also emphasize that the persistence of community theatres that mostly recycle the classics (endless Shakespeare, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and The Crucible) is not a substitute for actual thriving local entertainment, but a shadow and a memory of what once was.
- epolanski 2y ago
  One of the most culturally developed and wealthiest places on earth has lots of live spectacles.. Color me shocked. On the other hand, I my 150k people city in southern Poland there was no shortage of entertainment, theaters, dance halls and parties 50 years ago under the communist regime. My grandparents partied all of the time, their pictures are an endless collection of parties, literally people bringing a sausage, a potato salad, few vodkas to some elementary school or industry plant warehouse and having fun from 6 pm to late at night. They went to see live boxing, soccer games, theater, concerts, movies. I'm 37 none of my friends lives like that, none. There are many more restaurants, probably 20 times as many. I'm strongly convinced that people used to have more fun once. My grandma thinks 100% the same. She constantly wonders why are people much better now under any measurable metric like education or wealth, yet they seem to really do nothing in their life.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - selimthegrim 2y ago
    I take it milk bars were not somewhere to linger with friends?
- ta_1138 2y ago
  It's not that they lost all of them, but that they make far less money, while the top performers in NYC do well. It's not unlike what happened to soccer as television got cheaper and cheaper: You can go watch your town's third division team, or you can watch Real Madrid play on TV. In 3rd division nobody can be professional, in 2nd division you make less money accounting for inflation than 30 years ago, but the top players in the top teams are even bigger stars, now that the entire world can watch them play every game. And on theater, let's not forget that many parts of the spectacle are almost impossible to take on the road. You aren't going to feed a production of Phantom of the Opera in a small town for 3 months: National tours rely on 2 weeks per large-ish metro. And when you are only going to stay there for 2 weeks, there are things you just can't get away with, economically speaking. The equity Hadestown tour would need to remodel way too much to accoout for the lift on broadway. The non-equity tour, which plays even shorter windows, can't even rely on the turntable on the floor. The car in Back to the future isn't going to fly over the audience, do half as much movement, or get fire effects on the scenario. And even if you look in Broadway itself, many don't recoup their own costs. For every Hamilton or Lion king there are many shows that don't last 6 months.
- kiba 2y ago
  I do improvisational comedy, which is a form of theater. it's a niche thing where I will see basically the same faces around town, and that's in a major metropolitan area.
  - DavidPiper 2y ago
    Fellow hobby improviser here (Sydney, Australia). My impression so far is similar: I'd say about a 5-10% rate of new faces attending shows and related gigs. Comedy festival shows are a slightly different story, but I'm not sure how effectively they lead to new recurring audience members. I also see venue sizes and hire as one of the largest risks/problems with greater popularity. Venue hire is expensive AF, but smaller gigs in places like pubs suffer all the same problems as described in the article. A show has to be significant enough for someone to turn off Netflix, Spotify or a podcast AND leave the house AND commute to a venue, for MULTIPLE people*, all at the same time. * I assume most people go to shows with other people, unless they're already embedded in the community.
- dayvid 2y ago
  The increase in real estate costs severely limits the opportunities for musicians to play live. I've seen some cover bands randomly at bars, but it's rough out there. I also remember in my youth in Miami there were numerous clubs just for different genres of music for Hardcore, Ska, punk and everything in between where people would play local shows. It's all but dead now.
  - eszed 2y ago
    This. But also Baumol's cost disease: live performance can't be made "more efficient", so (real) wages plummet.
- eszed 2y ago
  > Have small towns really lost all their theatres? Yes. I spent the first half of my life as a working actor, and this has been a decades-long process. By "my day" ('90s - '00s) I looked at CVs and heard stories from older actors and said "there was a theatre [by which I meant somewhere that offered paying work] there?" Summer-stock, where I did a lot of gigs in my twenties, is nothing like what it was then, and I'm sure I would get that response from young actors now, if they heard my stories. Even the larger venues are on life-support. CalShakes closed down this summer. OSF is struggling. Many places have community theatres, but those are like garage bands: hobbies, pursued for recreation and socialization, where no one draws a wage or has professional aspirations. (And, you know, the vast majority of the attendees have personal ties to the cast and crew.) It's grim.
- sharadov 2y ago
  It's not just small towns—I live in San Jose, and I like blues and jazz. A few venues played live blues, and one closed during the pandemic. Even San Francisco does not have many venues, given how vibrant a city it once was. Previously lived in LA, even there venues were closing left and right even before the pandemic. It's the taste in music too, high rental costs for venues. Another reason we want to move to NYC once our kids are off to college.
Affric 2y ago
100% There are some great recordings of music out there but fundamentally their sum is worthless up against a society where there is music and dance being performed all the time. Maybe modern medicine and food abundance is worth it but the imitation of art is a poor substitute.
tarr11 2y ago
> Most critical is the disappearance of dance. Have you looked at TikTok? It is full of young people performing incredibly complex dance moves.
- alsetmusic 2y ago
  Some teen dancing on a streaming service is very different from a venue charging admission and beverages for a couple hundred people spending an evening out.
- Loughla 2y ago
  Still incredibly isolated with the thin veil of being interactive because you get likes or whatever. We've traded social connection for micro-dopamine hits. And I don't think I'm being an old man shouting at clouds. I think it's genuinely worse.
  - lmm 2y ago
    That's what the old men shouting at clouds always think. "Social connection" and "micro-dopamine hits" are two different phrases for the same thing. Connections through social media apps can be every bit as deep and genuine as those made through standing in the same building.
    - teractiveodular 2y ago
      It's not particularly deep and genuine to double-tap to add a heart emoji to a video of a skimpily dressed complete stranger you "met" 5 seconds ago and will never see again unless Tiktok's algorithms think that would result in greater ad revenue.
      - lmm 2y ago
        It's exactly as deep and genuine as saying hi to a stranger in a bar (and if you think the barman is any less profit-oriented than the Tiktok algorithm you're naive) or whatever the back-in-your-day paradigm was.
wbl 2y ago
There are plenty of folk and partner dances in many big cities.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  I don't have the same definition of "plenty" that you do. In any case, it is much, much less than in generations past.
  - analog31 2y ago
    Indeed, during my parents generation, the big cities had huge dance halls that were filled every weekend, if not every weekday too. My parents remember going to those places, as did my in-laws. In fact, I got a gig with a band that had been a major touring group in the past, and mentioned it to my in-laws. They said: Oh yeah, we danced to that band in the 50s. They frequented the ballrooms that dotted the Chicago suburbs. Of course I credit it to people being cooler back then. And one of my relatives remembers from her early childhood the music scene in pre-war Berlin. There was an opera on practically every corner. And movie theaters. Those are virtually gone too. Today I play music for a folk dance group, and they have weekly dances, but a dozen people showing up is a lot.
    - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
      I think it's less people cooler and more they didn't care. There is too much pressure to be cool now. The now ingrained trope joke that white people can't dance doesn't help. If I'm a young white male the last thing I'm going to do to impress young women is the thing reinforced over and over that I suck at/makes me a joke.
      - analog31 2y ago
        Indeed, and this is reinforced by a couple of stereotypes. These are repeated in web forums frequented by musicians: People won't dance to a tune that is not absolutely familiar -- why a small handful of "classic rock" hits continue to be played. Second, the purpose of the music is to keep the women dancing, and the purpose of the women dancing is to keep the men drinking. Disclosure: I've played in a lot of bands, in a variety of styles.
TeaBrain 2y ago
Technology definitely plays into it. As an aside, I stopped in an a old bar recently that was long known for regularly having live jazz and the bartender mentioned that they hadn't had live music since the covid lockdowns.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lmm 2y ago
Organised dancing is no more "critical" than cursive. Every generation thinks their version of entertainment and social bonding was better and what the kids are doing is inferior and dumb. And the reason young people are doing less in-person socialisation is less because home entertainment has gotten better and more because in-person socialisation has gotten worse, especially in America where people have nowhere they could socialise in walking distance, can't afford a car (and would get arrested for drunk driving if they could), can't afford to get molested in a techbro fake taxi, and if they tried to cycle they'll get run down by a boomer in a giant truck who was playing candy crush.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
> This is a technology problem. Media technology (radio, recordings, television, and movies) has essentially killed live performance of all kind compared to what it was once like. Not sure I agree, or maybe just partly. Radio has been around for over a hundred years. Movies too. Bars and hotels have been able to play recorded music on cassette, then CD, now streaming, for at least 70 years. This decline of the working musician is a much more recent phenomenon.
- seb1204 2y ago
  Radio and TV have not had the addictive effects that 'social media' has on many. So many people of all ages struggle to put their phone down for an extended amount of time. So many choose to scroll or swipe instead of socializing outside/with others.
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    I agree it’s more of a social media problem than a general technology problem
GuB-42 2y ago
> Most critical is the disappearance of dance What is that idea that people don't dance? How and where people dance change, but people still dance. Example are: - Professional dancers, and other performers with a dance component - Partner dancers, who usually do in in some sort of club - Partygoers, going to night clubs, music festivals and raves - Fitness, doing aerobics or whatever name the latest "dance as exercise" thing has - People in house parties, dancing with friends for birthdays, new years,... - People dancing in front of a camera, for some social media - Street dancers - People just dancing alone at home Maybe there are less balls with live musicians, but there are new trends related to dancing. Remember flash mobs? Where people just get together, dance for a few minutes and leave. And TikTok, one of the most popular social network today was built on people doing silly dances, and it is still a major component.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
spandrew 2y ago
I don't think this is it. At least, you're not pointing your ire at the right tech. Instrumental acts aren't as popular as they once were. In the cities recorded beats make up more than half the gig. These are performed by a musician on a laptop. They might have dancers, for some entertainment. So the gig pool is lessened. The article so much admits the stars, as they call them, made the most money off of Band People. They had more gigs, so they could cobble together a career. Music has always been a precarious living. Then add in the downturn of nightlife in general. Restaurants and bars tell the same story: young people aren't drinking. Businesses built on already slim margins are getting squeezed beyond break even. Is an indy band going to make up the difference in admission or cost-to-perform to a struggling bar? Dubious. If they have a following maybe; but then those artist aren't struggling anyway. Young people are also making less money at a time when prices are sky high. A night out drinking even just a couple of beers can easily surge to over a hundred or two hundred dollars depending how hard you go. When I was in college that would've been ~$30-40. For every 3 times I went out with friends, they can afford only 1. Live music and performance offers an experience that passive consumption, like TV and Radio, just can't emulate. If the prices come down the economics of music will make sense again. Until then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ninetyninenine 2y ago
Dance wasn’t critical. It was something people did at night when they had nothing to do sitting around the communal fire. It’s not critical. Critical are the communities and communal activities. Those have disappeared. We need to live in environments where people eat in communal environments not centered around nuclear families. That’s the critical piece that is missing and making everyone feel empty. Music and dance is but an aspect of this. Generally humanity evolved to live in tribes and that is where we are most content. In modern times the closest where I’ve seen this is living in dorms or places with shared kitchens and communal eating areas. This promotes the type of communities that make humans happiest. There was a wave of business plans and startups that tried to tackle this problem by building apartment communities that are more “social”. One that exists nowadays is https://www.flow.life/en/ https://www.flow.life/en/. But these businesses get it all wrong because they lack the communal kitchen and eating areas. The environment needs to have a forcing function to make people form communities not have it as some optional social event. The former makes people much much much closer and the bonds much stronger. Anyone who’s lived in such an environment can attest to this.
- analog31 2y ago
  >>>> Generally humanity evolved to live in tribes and that is where we are most content. Now that place is work. For me playing in bands is another place.
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    I believe few people would describe work as the place where their tribe is or where they feel most content.
- dimal 2y ago
  > Dance wasn’t critical. Says you. For me it is. I suspect for many others it is. I have restless legs syndrome. It’s a neurological disorder that makes your legs and feet feel like they have to move. A lot of people have it. Doctors prescribe drugs for it. What actually helps me? Dancing. This is just one of many good effects I get from dancing. My legs and body need to move. I’m not a good dancer. I look like an idiot. But I absolutely have to dance.
pjmlp 2y ago
I can assert that on the European cities I move around, there is usually some kind of Salsa club, eventually extending to other themes like Tango, Bachata, Kizomba, Zouk,...
- yazantapuz 2y ago
  Also in Argentina. Lots of social clubs and vecinal associations that offer this. Maybe what op is talking about is a US thing?
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Even in US, I would imagine stuff like Salsa, Westcoast Swing, among others, are relatively common.
    - dghlsakjg 2y ago
      They absolutely are. Any city will have ballroom, swing, salsa, tango, etc... Even in rural areas you will find line dancing. This is aside from informal dancing at bars and clubs which exists in every place I've ever lived in (6 countries in the Americas so far)
    - wintermutestwin 2y ago
      Those genres of music/dance require you to actually learn how to do them properly. The music is also not very popular. Personally I love listening to your two examples, but my point stands.
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        Maybe it stands in US, not in the European places fully crowded I occasionally visit.
RHSman2 2y ago
Yes technology but the thing underlying it is convenience.
treflop 2y ago
I live in a small suburban US town and I’ve seen live music 6 times in the past 2 weeks? I go dancing regularly?? I have three tickets next week to see <$30 bands. I can’t relate to any of this.
- glorpsicle 2y ago
  I'm happy to see this, but you are but one person, and probably an outlier. GP was clearly talking about society in general.
  - grugagag 2y ago
    Maybe it’s just a temporary thing, eventually people will get sick of AI and being marketed digitally at every breath they take. Old things do come back, you know?
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      Never at the wave they were at at its peak, no. Why are we making predictions on society based on hopes, anyway? If your goal is to find a cozy little dance floor and you're in a populated enough city, the you'll find whatever genre of dance you want with a small few core people. You just need to hope you like that core. But that's not an option for everyone be it due to their living situation or the rising costs of everything.
  - freeone3000 2y ago
    Idk, someone is buying those tickets. I go to a dance party every month or so. But also… you are not forbidden from dancing. You can just do it. So if you want to go dancing and don’t, that’s on you.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      No one is stopping me from just dancing alone in my house. I feel thst misses the social point of dancing though. And again. Anecdotes. There's no dance parties in my town. I need to travel 40 minutes to another city and pay $20 for 3 hours of dancing every month. Not worth it for me in any regard.
mpweiher 2y ago
> Bars and hotels that used to rely on gig musicians can now play a Spotify playlist over the speakers Muzak was a thing long before that. So I don't see how that can be the cause.
mdgrech23 2y ago
wow oh wow what a great comment. I think the reason dance went away is a lot of men engaged in predatory behavior while drunk, that is that would approach the woman from behind and "grind" himself on her which is really just sexual assault. I often think about how we replace things with technology and say it's better. Bread is another example in my opinion. Towns used to have bread makers, well respected and well paid. Now, at least here in the USA we replaced the bread makers with machines. We got rid of the bread makers and ultimately replaced them with engineers who design the machines and repair men. Even they've been replaced, once designed there's no need for the engineer and it's often cheaper to buy than repair so the repair man too went away. What we're left with is subpar bread. How is any of this progress?
- bombela 2y ago
  I suspect you can make better bread more consistently with machines. But that would requires trying to make good bread. Not trying to make something passable for an American (and barely edible for a French) with the highest profit margin.
- immibis 2y ago
  I don't expect this has changed significantly in the past few decades.
ttjjtt 2y ago
In particular, intergenerational dance events have died from our society. I think you're on to something vitally important with this. I think about it often.
snowwrestler 2y ago
This is all true, but irrelevant to the article linked above, which is specifically about gig musicians in bands in the early 21st Century—long after the change you’re talking about. Bands are actually playing more live music today than they did back then, to help replace the revenue they used to get from recorded music.
faangguyindia 2y ago
Today musicians have more opportunities than ever My friend who used to make nothing today makes a lot by doing tiktok videos and offering private lessons for good money. If you want to perform live and make living as such yeaa opportunities are less there.
andrei_says_ 2y ago
Regular dancing (Tango classes, practicas and milongas 3-4 times per week) has been an indispensable contributor to keeping my sanity as a single person. When I stop for more than a couple of weeks my vitality and zest for life clearly diminish.

by jaco6 2y ago

dyauspitr 2y ago

Having lived in NYC, Broadway, off broadway, off off broadway etc. look like they are thriving. I don’t think recorded media comes even close to the novelty and spectacle a theatre production is. Have small towns really lost all their theatres?

jemmyw 2y ago
The town I live in has 6000 people and there's a play or live music event in the town hall every couple of weeks, maybe more often in summer. I don't go to many, one or two a year, but presumably enough people turn out.
- _DeadFred_ 2y ago
  In the small towns around me the town halls are not for profit and nobody is doing the events to make money/earn an income but as labours of love.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
I think it's more accurate to say it became a "premium". I could probably find some live music at a rinky dink mom-and-pop cafe in a far out suburb even as late as the 90's if I tried. By now, that prestige of a live music seems to only really come from a bigger joint, or as more of a passion project than as an expected way to get customers in. >Have small towns really lost all their theatres? It's mostly a thing regulated to colleges. So it will depend on that. I haven't seen a smaller town without a college that still has traditional theatre around, personally. Though I have seen forums where that scene would obviously have hosted such events, abandoned.
- shkkmo 2y ago
  I see small venues that regularly host live music all over the place. It definitely drives business for the bars, but there doesn't seem to be much money in it for the musicians.
jaco6 2y ago
New York City is the greatest concentration of wealth on the planet. The continuation of theatre there should come as no surprise. I am speaking of the cultural shift in entertainment, from a variety of local live options on most days of the week to just television in most places across the country. I should also emphasize that the persistence of community theatres that mostly recycle the classics (endless Shakespeare, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and The Crucible) is not a substitute for actual thriving local entertainment, but a shadow and a memory of what once was.
epolanski 2y ago
One of the most culturally developed and wealthiest places on earth has lots of live spectacles.. Color me shocked. On the other hand, I my 150k people city in southern Poland there was no shortage of entertainment, theaters, dance halls and parties 50 years ago under the communist regime. My grandparents partied all of the time, their pictures are an endless collection of parties, literally people bringing a sausage, a potato salad, few vodkas to some elementary school or industry plant warehouse and having fun from 6 pm to late at night. They went to see live boxing, soccer games, theater, concerts, movies. I'm 37 none of my friends lives like that, none. There are many more restaurants, probably 20 times as many. I'm strongly convinced that people used to have more fun once. My grandma thinks 100% the same. She constantly wonders why are people much better now under any measurable metric like education or wealth, yet they seem to really do nothing in their life.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  I take it milk bars were not somewhere to linger with friends?
ta_1138 2y ago
It's not that they lost all of them, but that they make far less money, while the top performers in NYC do well. It's not unlike what happened to soccer as television got cheaper and cheaper: You can go watch your town's third division team, or you can watch Real Madrid play on TV. In 3rd division nobody can be professional, in 2nd division you make less money accounting for inflation than 30 years ago, but the top players in the top teams are even bigger stars, now that the entire world can watch them play every game. And on theater, let's not forget that many parts of the spectacle are almost impossible to take on the road. You aren't going to feed a production of Phantom of the Opera in a small town for 3 months: National tours rely on 2 weeks per large-ish metro. And when you are only going to stay there for 2 weeks, there are things you just can't get away with, economically speaking. The equity Hadestown tour would need to remodel way too much to accoout for the lift on broadway. The non-equity tour, which plays even shorter windows, can't even rely on the turntable on the floor. The car in Back to the future isn't going to fly over the audience, do half as much movement, or get fire effects on the scenario. And even if you look in Broadway itself, many don't recoup their own costs. For every Hamilton or Lion king there are many shows that don't last 6 months.
kiba 2y ago
I do improvisational comedy, which is a form of theater. it's a niche thing where I will see basically the same faces around town, and that's in a major metropolitan area.
- DavidPiper 2y ago
  Fellow hobby improviser here (Sydney, Australia). My impression so far is similar: I'd say about a 5-10% rate of new faces attending shows and related gigs. Comedy festival shows are a slightly different story, but I'm not sure how effectively they lead to new recurring audience members. I also see venue sizes and hire as one of the largest risks/problems with greater popularity. Venue hire is expensive AF, but smaller gigs in places like pubs suffer all the same problems as described in the article. A show has to be significant enough for someone to turn off Netflix, Spotify or a podcast AND leave the house AND commute to a venue, for MULTIPLE people*, all at the same time. * I assume most people go to shows with other people, unless they're already embedded in the community.
dayvid 2y ago
The increase in real estate costs severely limits the opportunities for musicians to play live. I've seen some cover bands randomly at bars, but it's rough out there. I also remember in my youth in Miami there were numerous clubs just for different genres of music for Hardcore, Ska, punk and everything in between where people would play local shows. It's all but dead now.
- eszed 2y ago
  This. But also Baumol's cost disease: live performance can't be made "more efficient", so (real) wages plummet.
eszed 2y ago
> Have small towns really lost all their theatres? Yes. I spent the first half of my life as a working actor, and this has been a decades-long process. By "my day" ('90s - '00s) I looked at CVs and heard stories from older actors and said "there was a theatre [by which I meant somewhere that offered paying work] there?" Summer-stock, where I did a lot of gigs in my twenties, is nothing like what it was then, and I'm sure I would get that response from young actors now, if they heard my stories. Even the larger venues are on life-support. CalShakes closed down this summer. OSF is struggling. Many places have community theatres, but those are like garage bands: hobbies, pursued for recreation and socialization, where no one draws a wage or has professional aspirations. (And, you know, the vast majority of the attendees have personal ties to the cast and crew.) It's grim.
sharadov 2y ago
It's not just small towns—I live in San Jose, and I like blues and jazz. A few venues played live blues, and one closed during the pandemic. Even San Francisco does not have many venues, given how vibrant a city it once was. Previously lived in LA, even there venues were closing left and right even before the pandemic. It's the taste in music too, high rental costs for venues. Another reason we want to move to NYC once our kids are off to college.

Affric 2y ago

100% There are some great recordings of music out there but fundamentally their sum is worthless up against a society where there is music and dance being performed all the time. Maybe modern medicine and food abundance is worth it but the imitation of art is a poor substitute.

tarr11 2y ago

> Most critical is the disappearance of dance. Have you looked at TikTok? It is full of young people performing incredibly complex dance moves.

alsetmusic 2y ago
Some teen dancing on a streaming service is very different from a venue charging admission and beverages for a couple hundred people spending an evening out.
Loughla 2y ago
Still incredibly isolated with the thin veil of being interactive because you get likes or whatever. We've traded social connection for micro-dopamine hits. And I don't think I'm being an old man shouting at clouds. I think it's genuinely worse.
- lmm 2y ago
  That's what the old men shouting at clouds always think. "Social connection" and "micro-dopamine hits" are two different phrases for the same thing. Connections through social media apps can be every bit as deep and genuine as those made through standing in the same building.
  - teractiveodular 2y ago
    It's not particularly deep and genuine to double-tap to add a heart emoji to a video of a skimpily dressed complete stranger you "met" 5 seconds ago and will never see again unless Tiktok's algorithms think that would result in greater ad revenue.
    - lmm 2y ago
      It's exactly as deep and genuine as saying hi to a stranger in a bar (and if you think the barman is any less profit-oriented than the Tiktok algorithm you're naive) or whatever the back-in-your-day paradigm was.

wbl 2y ago

There are plenty of folk and partner dances in many big cities.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
I don't have the same definition of "plenty" that you do. In any case, it is much, much less than in generations past.
- analog31 2y ago
  Indeed, during my parents generation, the big cities had huge dance halls that were filled every weekend, if not every weekday too. My parents remember going to those places, as did my in-laws. In fact, I got a gig with a band that had been a major touring group in the past, and mentioned it to my in-laws. They said: Oh yeah, we danced to that band in the 50s. They frequented the ballrooms that dotted the Chicago suburbs. Of course I credit it to people being cooler back then. And one of my relatives remembers from her early childhood the music scene in pre-war Berlin. There was an opera on practically every corner. And movie theaters. Those are virtually gone too. Today I play music for a folk dance group, and they have weekly dances, but a dozen people showing up is a lot.
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    I think it's less people cooler and more they didn't care. There is too much pressure to be cool now. The now ingrained trope joke that white people can't dance doesn't help. If I'm a young white male the last thing I'm going to do to impress young women is the thing reinforced over and over that I suck at/makes me a joke.
    - analog31 2y ago
      Indeed, and this is reinforced by a couple of stereotypes. These are repeated in web forums frequented by musicians: People won't dance to a tune that is not absolutely familiar -- why a small handful of "classic rock" hits continue to be played. Second, the purpose of the music is to keep the women dancing, and the purpose of the women dancing is to keep the men drinking. Disclosure: I've played in a lot of bands, in a variety of styles.

TeaBrain 2y ago

Technology definitely plays into it. As an aside, I stopped in an a old bar recently that was long known for regularly having live jazz and the bartender mentioned that they hadn't had live music since the covid lockdowns.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

lmm 2y ago

Organised dancing is no more "critical" than cursive. Every generation thinks their version of entertainment and social bonding was better and what the kids are doing is inferior and dumb. And the reason young people are doing less in-person socialisation is less because home entertainment has gotten better and more because in-person socialisation has gotten worse, especially in America where people have nowhere they could socialise in walking distance, can't afford a car (and would get arrested for drunk driving if they could), can't afford to get molested in a techbro fake taxi, and if they tried to cycle they'll get run down by a boomer in a giant truck who was playing candy crush.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

> This is a technology problem. Media technology (radio, recordings, television, and movies) has essentially killed live performance of all kind compared to what it was once like. Not sure I agree, or maybe just partly. Radio has been around for over a hundred years. Movies too. Bars and hotels have been able to play recorded music on cassette, then CD, now streaming, for at least 70 years. This decline of the working musician is a much more recent phenomenon.

seb1204 2y ago
Radio and TV have not had the addictive effects that 'social media' has on many. So many people of all ages struggle to put their phone down for an extended amount of time. So many choose to scroll or swipe instead of socializing outside/with others.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  I agree it’s more of a social media problem than a general technology problem

GuB-42 2y ago

> Most critical is the disappearance of dance What is that idea that people don't dance? How and where people dance change, but people still dance. Example are: - Professional dancers, and other performers with a dance component - Partner dancers, who usually do in in some sort of club - Partygoers, going to night clubs, music festivals and raves - Fitness, doing aerobics or whatever name the latest "dance as exercise" thing has - People in house parties, dancing with friends for birthdays, new years,... - People dancing in front of a camera, for some social media - Street dancers - People just dancing alone at home Maybe there are less balls with live musicians, but there are new trends related to dancing. Remember flash mobs? Where people just get together, dance for a few minutes and leave. And TikTok, one of the most popular social network today was built on people doing silly dances, and it is still a major component.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

spandrew 2y ago

I don't think this is it. At least, you're not pointing your ire at the right tech. Instrumental acts aren't as popular as they once were. In the cities recorded beats make up more than half the gig. These are performed by a musician on a laptop. They might have dancers, for some entertainment. So the gig pool is lessened. The article so much admits the stars, as they call them, made the most money off of Band People. They had more gigs, so they could cobble together a career. Music has always been a precarious living. Then add in the downturn of nightlife in general. Restaurants and bars tell the same story: young people aren't drinking. Businesses built on already slim margins are getting squeezed beyond break even. Is an indy band going to make up the difference in admission or cost-to-perform to a struggling bar? Dubious. If they have a following maybe; but then those artist aren't struggling anyway. Young people are also making less money at a time when prices are sky high. A night out drinking even just a couple of beers can easily surge to over a hundred or two hundred dollars depending how hard you go. When I was in college that would've been ~$30-40. For every 3 times I went out with friends, they can afford only 1. Live music and performance offers an experience that passive consumption, like TV and Radio, just can't emulate. If the prices come down the economics of music will make sense again. Until then ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ninetyninenine 2y ago

Dance wasn’t critical. It was something people did at night when they had nothing to do sitting around the communal fire. It’s not critical. Critical are the communities and communal activities. Those have disappeared. We need to live in environments where people eat in communal environments not centered around nuclear families. That’s the critical piece that is missing and making everyone feel empty. Music and dance is but an aspect of this. Generally humanity evolved to live in tribes and that is where we are most content. In modern times the closest where I’ve seen this is living in dorms or places with shared kitchens and communal eating areas. This promotes the type of communities that make humans happiest. There was a wave of business plans and startups that tried to tackle this problem by building apartment communities that are more “social”. One that exists nowadays is https://www.flow.life/en/ https://www.flow.life/en/. But these businesses get it all wrong because they lack the communal kitchen and eating areas. The environment needs to have a forcing function to make people form communities not have it as some optional social event. The former makes people much much much closer and the bonds much stronger. Anyone who’s lived in such an environment can attest to this.

analog31 2y ago
>>>> Generally humanity evolved to live in tribes and that is where we are most content. Now that place is work. For me playing in bands is another place.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  I believe few people would describe work as the place where their tribe is or where they feel most content.
dimal 2y ago
> Dance wasn’t critical. Says you. For me it is. I suspect for many others it is. I have restless legs syndrome. It’s a neurological disorder that makes your legs and feet feel like they have to move. A lot of people have it. Doctors prescribe drugs for it. What actually helps me? Dancing. This is just one of many good effects I get from dancing. My legs and body need to move. I’m not a good dancer. I look like an idiot. But I absolutely have to dance.

pjmlp 2y ago

I can assert that on the European cities I move around, there is usually some kind of Salsa club, eventually extending to other themes like Tango, Bachata, Kizomba, Zouk,...

yazantapuz 2y ago
Also in Argentina. Lots of social clubs and vecinal associations that offer this. Maybe what op is talking about is a US thing?
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Even in US, I would imagine stuff like Salsa, Westcoast Swing, among others, are relatively common.
  - dghlsakjg 2y ago
    They absolutely are. Any city will have ballroom, swing, salsa, tango, etc... Even in rural areas you will find line dancing. This is aside from informal dancing at bars and clubs which exists in every place I've ever lived in (6 countries in the Americas so far)
  - wintermutestwin 2y ago
    Those genres of music/dance require you to actually learn how to do them properly. The music is also not very popular. Personally I love listening to your two examples, but my point stands.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Maybe it stands in US, not in the European places fully crowded I occasionally visit.

RHSman2 2y ago

Yes technology but the thing underlying it is convenience.

treflop 2y ago

I live in a small suburban US town and I’ve seen live music 6 times in the past 2 weeks? I go dancing regularly?? I have three tickets next week to see <$30 bands. I can’t relate to any of this.

glorpsicle 2y ago
I'm happy to see this, but you are but one person, and probably an outlier. GP was clearly talking about society in general.
- grugagag 2y ago
  Maybe it’s just a temporary thing, eventually people will get sick of AI and being marketed digitally at every breath they take. Old things do come back, you know?
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Never at the wave they were at at its peak, no. Why are we making predictions on society based on hopes, anyway? If your goal is to find a cozy little dance floor and you're in a populated enough city, the you'll find whatever genre of dance you want with a small few core people. You just need to hope you like that core. But that's not an option for everyone be it due to their living situation or the rising costs of everything.
- freeone3000 2y ago
  Idk, someone is buying those tickets. I go to a dance party every month or so. But also… you are not forbidden from dancing. You can just do it. So if you want to go dancing and don’t, that’s on you.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    No one is stopping me from just dancing alone in my house. I feel thst misses the social point of dancing though. And again. Anecdotes. There's no dance parties in my town. I need to travel 40 minutes to another city and pay $20 for 3 hours of dancing every month. Not worth it for me in any regard.

mpweiher 2y ago

> Bars and hotels that used to rely on gig musicians can now play a Spotify playlist over the speakers Muzak was a thing long before that. So I don't see how that can be the cause.

mdgrech23 2y ago

wow oh wow what a great comment. I think the reason dance went away is a lot of men engaged in predatory behavior while drunk, that is that would approach the woman from behind and "grind" himself on her which is really just sexual assault. I often think about how we replace things with technology and say it's better. Bread is another example in my opinion. Towns used to have bread makers, well respected and well paid. Now, at least here in the USA we replaced the bread makers with machines. We got rid of the bread makers and ultimately replaced them with engineers who design the machines and repair men. Even they've been replaced, once designed there's no need for the engineer and it's often cheaper to buy than repair so the repair man too went away. What we're left with is subpar bread. How is any of this progress?

bombela 2y ago
I suspect you can make better bread more consistently with machines. But that would requires trying to make good bread. Not trying to make something passable for an American (and barely edible for a French) with the highest profit margin.
immibis 2y ago
I don't expect this has changed significantly in the past few decades.

ttjjtt 2y ago

In particular, intergenerational dance events have died from our society. I think you're on to something vitally important with this. I think about it often.

snowwrestler 2y ago

This is all true, but irrelevant to the article linked above, which is specifically about gig musicians in bands in the early 21st Century—long after the change you’re talking about. Bands are actually playing more live music today than they did back then, to help replace the revenue they used to get from recorded music.

faangguyindia 2y ago

Today musicians have more opportunities than ever My friend who used to make nothing today makes a lot by doing tiktok videos and offering private lessons for good money. If you want to perform live and make living as such yeaa opportunities are less there.

andrei_says_ 2y ago

Regular dancing (Tango classes, practicas and milongas 3-4 times per week) has been an indispensable contributor to keeping my sanity as a single person. When I stop for more than a couple of weeks my vitality and zest for life clearly diminish.