[Dixielandjazz] Eliminate the Middleman? Nah!

[Steve barbone]

Austin Texas is often called the music capital of the USA. Below is one
reason why. A 1400 band weekend.

Dan A., any OKOM there?

And for those of us that think there is no music middleman, check out the
last paragraph. 

Cheers,
Steve


A Texas Festival Recalls Ye Olde Club-Hopping Days

NY TIMES - By KELEFA SANNEH - March 17, 2006

AUSTIN, Tex., March 16 ‹ What moves faster: a song or an airplane?
 
On Tuesday night, a fully lovable and partly Swedish band called Envelopes
made its American debut for a small crowd at Mercury Lounge, in New York's
Lower East Side: less than an hour of cute, obnoxious indie-pop. The music
was loud and catchy and willfully ramshackle; the instruments sounded out of
tune even when they weren't.

If you had dragged yourself to the airport the next morning, you could have
made it to Austin just in time to see Envelopes play their second American
concert, less than 24 hours later. The show, in the upstairs part of a club
called the Parish, was part of the 20th annual South by Southwest Music and
Media Conference, known as SXSW. Every year, it invades Austin while the
locals ‹ which is to say, the college students ‹ are away on their spring
break.

The biggest names (this year's schedule includes Morrissey and the Beastie
Boys) are doing their listeners a favor. And the smaller names (about 1,400
bands are scheduled to play) are hoping listeners can do them a favor. So
fans and professionals traipse from club to club, sometimes discussing the
merits of venturing to an off-site show. (Sometime after 2 on Thursday
morning, a message arrived from the Back Room, where the Houston rapper
Chamillionaire was performing: the show was over and cabs were scarce. Was
anybody driving?)

There is something slightly old-fashioned about all this traipsing. Although
South by Southwest has evolved over the years to include podcasts, video
broadcasts and even text-message updates, the event is built on the idea
that the best way to discover new music is face to face. For many of the
savvy listeners (even, perhaps especially, the amateur ones) in town, this
week might be the only time all year they're likely to see a band live
without first having visited the site and downloaded an MP3. For a few days,
an ancient tradition ‹ checking out a band simply because a friend says it's
good ‹ comes back to life.

Of course for most of us, it's not that simple. For every person who
stumbles into an Envelopes showcase and wonders why the band is playing
something loud and fizzy while the singer delivers absurd lyrics like a
little kid, "If I were you, I would watch out for that guy over there/He is,
he is, he is, he is not that fair!" ‹ for every person like that, there is
surely one who has already fallen in love with "Demon" (Brille), the band's
irresistible debut CD.

Or with one of the MP3's from it. In that sense, airplanes seem slow: no
flight could ever move faster than a digital file. (Especially not a flight
with a three-hour layover in Atlanta. But that's another story.) And
sometimes, the logic gets reversed: a good SXSW showcase might prompt
listeners to check out a band's Web site, instead of the other way around.

But in another sense, SXSW provides a useful corrective to the world of MP3
blogs. When those songs get beamed around the Internet, it's seductive to
think that bands and listeners have eliminated the middlemen: music goes
straight from the recording studio to your laptop. This conference is a
reminder of how many professionals it takes to turn an amateur band into a
popular MP3. Here, "behind the scenes" is the scene: the place is packed
with publicists (right now, Envelopes should be thanking theirs) and
managers and booking agents and marketing teams and even a few old-fashioned
radio D.J.'s. This is a big part of what makes SXSW tick: middlemen as far
as the eye can see.