“The way bands are getting popular quickly is pushing them into the spotlight sometimes, I reckon, before they’re ready.”
It’s easy to get down about the current state of the music industry. Young fans largely seem like they don’t give a toss about albums; older fans are reticent to put faith in bands off the back of one catchy song, and somewhere in between, the sheer ocean of accessible art opened up by the advent of the socially-driven parts of the internet can seem so overwhelming you never want to leave your room or listen to anything new again.
But, says Ben Thompson of booking agency Corner Presents, it’s so much more rewarding to focus on the positives. And he should know, as the chief architect of one of Melbourne’s Face The Music panels on the changing nature of how bands break.
“If you’re looking at it from a live music point of view, there is a lot more bands around, and a lot more acts are accessible these days than there used to be,” he concedes, though refusing to see that as a bad thing. “As far as the volume of shows that we see coming through the venues that we work with, that volume is much higher, and you’ll have acts now breaking so quickly that you’ll book them in for one show having really no idea over the next two months how things will pan out.
“I’ve seen it time and time again in the last five years, definitely, where we book an act in for one show thinking that they will hopefully sell out the show, and they’ll go on to do two or three or four or even five headline shows at a place the size of the Corner, and that momentum can all happen within a period of two to three months, which I find astounding.”
Thompson works with five separate venues – the Northcote and Sydney’s Newtown Social Clubs, Shebeen, 170 Russell and Corner Hotel – in his duties for Corner Presents, which is currently in talks to expand into Brisbane and Perth. For all his ebullience about the prospects for the industry and its newly flexible, fluid state, he remains nonetheless aware of a core truth of our times – that “being able to maintain a career is probably harder than it ever has been”.
“I just think it’s a sign of the times. Younger people today, I believe, have much shorter attention spans than the older generations would, and I think this is really reflected in their music tastes. I think it’s no longer necessarily about artists or about albums – it’s all about songs. And one song… people will love, and that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll love the next song, or they’ll buy that act’s album. Potentially, after they’ve got bored of that song, they’ll be looking for the next song they love.
“The way bands are getting popular quickly is pushing them into the spotlight sometimes, I reckon, before they’re ready. Before they have follow-up singles, or an EP or an album or something like that. So I think that’s probably the biggest challenge with the way things are going these days.”