“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” ~ Hunter S. Thompson
Every so often, old ideas get bandied about the SL live music community in the guise of new ideas. Cover charges is the one currently making the rounds…again.
The ugly truth is that cover charges will never work because (a) the product isn’t worth it to the majority of the SL population, (b) it goes against the performer’s best interests, (c) there’s no way to secure streams, and (d) most SL venues shouldn’t be supported.
I have issues with people who whine about SL venues needing funds. The begging and flogging for “tips” that goes on to “support” music venues and clubs in SL walks the line of repulsing me. During concerts at my venue, I spam occasional room gestures to tip the performers, and I do that no more than 3 times per hour. I never ask for tips for the venue, although I do thank people when they do tip. This is my choice and certainly my music venue is no longer much more than a small gathering place where we have concerts once a week when we’re in the mood.
The claim that having a music venue means you are supporting the SL music scene is, with a few exceptions, complete bunk. Having a music venue is, largely, an act of vanity. Everyone wants to be king/queen of their particular hill. Some do so as a patron/patroness of the arts, as I’ve always tried to be. Others seem to feel it’s the responsibility of the community to finance their vanity projects. These latter types are generally cast from the cloth of those who buy their gall in the economy-sized value bags so they never run out.
If you are going to have a venue in SL, then it should be able to support itself without shamelessly begging and passive-aggressively assaulting guests. In the past, people supported venues by considering them an advertising expense for a commercial area and a means to improve search rank. When my shops were highly ranked in search and generating income, I paid L$3000 – L$5000 per performer hour back when that was unheard of. Ever since the restructuring of search rank, venues have been scrambling for a new model, as well they should. Innovation is part of longevity. Sadly, there is no prerequisite for owning an SL venue. You don’t have to have an IQ above a gnat’s, nor is there any particular requirement to have business or building savvy. In the real world, you have to have connections, investors, a plan; in SL all you need is a parcel.
The vast majority of SL live music venues should close. Most of them are tacky, unimaginative, lag-infested builds that have no standards or character and their owners do nothing more than post an event and, sometimes, pay a performer. There are exceptions, but the truth is that 90% of the venues in SL have no right to ask for tips, let alone to think about imposing a cover charge. This fact brings us to the next unhappy truth about SL live music, which is that 90% of the performers have no business charging people to listen to them play. There are good performers in SL, but they are a small minority. The third inescapable truth is that the listening audience rarely knows the difference.
So, let’s add this all up. You have a majority of people who have no business owning venues, combined with a majority of people who have no business performing, divided among a listening audience that really doesn’t know the difference. The math isn’t pretty and if that’s all their was to it, live music in SL would be nothing more than the shameful red-headed-step-child so many think it to be. However, it should be compared against the real world social math to treat it fairly.
Music performed in public is largely a social thing. In physical reality, bar bands aren’t necessarily worth paying to hear. They’re hired to keep people dancing, thirsty, and buying booze/coffee. Most of the people in the bar don’t care how good or bad the band is, as long as they’re in that tolerable range so they can dance and have a good time. In SL, the social aspect is the same. Audience members rarely distinguish the mediocre talent from the quality performers. They want to hear mostly familiar songs, hang out with friends, and enjoy themselves. The venue owner’s end is different; there’s no consumable to compensate for the coffee, booze and hot wings that make money. Trying to squeeze the audience members or undercut the performers isn’t an option. It’s in-fighting among a small population and you can’t keep expecting the same stones to bleed fresh funds.
New money has to come from outside the sphere. The obvious answer is to look toward places that are making money in SL — businesses that have a reason to keep their names out there in the community. Most venues, however, do not have the population to draw the interest of advertisers by themselves.
My Two Cents Solution
I’ve had an idea for a while that I’ve reached after long conversations and bouncing off others. It would require someone with advanced scripting skills to be willing to create a system for the live music community. This individual would also be required to have and maintain a good reputation as well as demonstrated ethics. There just aren’t enough people in the SL live music community I care to help to take on a project of this nature, but if there’s anyone out there that thinks they can make it sail, here’s my two cents on how to do it.
The Venue Display
The display would be the user-end part of the system; a non-transfer item that any venue owner could get for a set price, presumably from a central location or XStreet. It should be offered at a nominal “start up” fee (L$1000 or so) to cover coding and update expenses and discourage freebie idiots. The item itself would be a tastefully presented “billboard” that would flash a new advertisement every two minutes (or an optimized amount of time to allow the majority of concert goers to rez) and provide a basis of X impressions per hour at every venue that features a display. Each place in the rotation would include the visual image (512 x 256 or some other standard png) and a means for people to get LMs/SLURLs and/or to join groups.
The venue owner would incorporate the display into their build, making sure it’s placed in a prime location to be exposed to the most traffic. The display would gather data from the location for a period of 10 days in a “gathering” mode, and assign the location a rank based on the number of unique avatars that come within an established visual range of the display. After the 10-day gathering mode, the display would be activated, continuing to gather traffic data for the venue’s ongoing participation in the project, but once activated the venue becomes eligible for payouts.
Ad-End Boxes
Advertisers would be sought for the signs by venue owners and interested parties. Anyone wooing an advertiser would give them a box, similar to an XStreet “magic box” and a rental box. The advertiser would rez the box and put in their ad (or possibly the UUID of their ad image), LM/SLURL, and any other necessary items for the display. This could possibly be controlled via notecard.
The boxes would need to somehow be coded by the venue owner or interested party so that the “salesperson” avatar earns a commission of, say, 10%, thus providing incentives to those persons who secure advertisers. If no commission code is input, the full amount goes to the venue pool.
The advertiser would pay L$X to have one spot in the display rotation, although there would be nothing prohibiting them from having multiple boxes and paying for multiple rotation placement. Payment could be made to the boxes, similar to the way rental boxes work.
Payout
All payments (except for the cost of the displays, which would go to the administrative party) would somehow be collected into a pool. This pool would then payout each month. First, commissions would be paid out appropriately to those who sold and cultivated advertising. Then payout would go to venue owners that own the displays on a sliding scale determined by the venue’s location rank. There would be a minimum required rank for any payout to discourage gaming the system and to weed out lesser productive venues.
Considerations
1. Holding onto money is tricky and icky. It would likely require a dummy avatar and/or web-based system and there would have to be some assurance for that sytem to be un-hackable. There may also have to be a minimal percentage devoted to the upkeep of such a system which would be taken out prior to the commission and venue pay outs.
2. To prevent venues from double-dipping on their traffic, the displays would have to be coded to deactivate if they are placed within X distance of each other.
3. Since it would be traffic-based, there will be the customary methods to game the system (bots/drones/camping chairs) by people that have nothing to do with live music. As such, the community would need access to the list of most successful venues so that locations could be self-checked by the community itself. A process would need to be established for deactivating a location based on enough user complaints. The requirement would need to be high enough to discourage people from trying to deactivate legitimate locations as a means of retribution or griefing. Displays would need to indicate whether they were active, deactivated, or in gathering mode so that venue owners could troubleshoot effectively.
4. Transparency would be of paramount importance and a boon, providing population statics that could benefit both the live music and general SL business communities. As such, they should be made available to the public on a regular basis. This will also provide incentive for competition within the community and give potential advertisers something to reinforce their investment.
5. There would have to be protocols set forth for instances where fraud/mistakes occur or where prices need to be changed for whatever reason. These should also be handed with the utmost transparency to the community.
Example:
Let’s say:
A. 100 advertisers pay L$5000 a month for a place in the display rotations;
B. 50 venues host displays and of those 30 meet the minimum traffic requirements for a paid ranking;
Total monthly income from advertising: L$500,000
Total monthly commissions paid: L$50,000
Remainder split between 30 competing venues: L$450,000 (an average of L$15,000 per venue)
Presumably, the commissions would also be earned by venue owners, giving them incentive to do more than just sit around and play queen for the day to support their establishments.
Anticipated Positive Results
Venue owners become active participants in the business of SL live music.
Venues have more income to hire more artists and/or pay crowd-friendly performers higher fees.
Venues have a reason to compete and create more crowd-friendly atmospheres; competition almost always benefits a community.
SL businesses work within the community to establish a new multi-location advertising outlet that occurs in world where people play and shop instead of on websites only a fraction of the community visits.
SL live music gets out of the ghetto, stops begging, and grows up.
Unintended Consequences
Always a concern. If I could foresee them, they’d be considerations and not unintended consequences.
For what it’s worth, I can only think of one person I’d trust to handle this project who has the integrity and the coding stones. Okay, actually, I can think of two, but I like them too much. I wouldn’t wish this undertaking on anyone I cared about, largely because I don’t think the majority of the live music community has it within itself to appreciate anything done for it.
