Scott Andrew - lo-fi acoustic pop superhero!

Some of you have already discovered this Eventful widget at the top of my Tour page and even used it. Thanks! I have Brad and Jonathan to thank for inspiring me to give Eventful another try. I'm just gonna let it cook for awhile and see what happens.

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(If you can't see the widget, click here.)

I had to cancel a gig last week and as a result I've been thinking about touring and performing in general. For many of the thousands of musicians now reaching a global audience via the web, and for millions of listeners discovering new music via the same, I think the traditional model of touring is pretty broken.

For a lot of musicians, touring is like interstellar travel, requiring copious amounts of cheap energy and free time -- and that's when you're not being ripped off, having gear stolen, or broken down on a highway in Nevada. C'mon, this the Web 2.0 era. Where's the indie touring revolution? Things like Eventful are a step in the right direction, but it seems there's a lot more that could be done.

5 Comments

1. And Michael did speak thusly:
   

   First off, I’m pretty sure Mon Ami screwed up and canceled our gig instead of yours. But they were kind enough to let us play anyway, give us free beer, and encourage their patrons to stick around.

   Not to call it a tour, but a 2.5 hour trip to a place we’ve never been sure packed some memories that I cherish more closely than if it went as planned.

   I’ll take interstellar travel anytime - when’s the next tour, eh?

   
   
2. And Brad Sucks did speak thusly:
   

   Touring 2.0…

   Scott asks where Touring 2.0 is. Eventful’s okay but he’s right: it could be so much better. Things that suck about Eventful:

   It hassles people to sign up for Eventful accounts. People tell me it’s required, but like for Louisville, …

   
   
3. And Scott Reynen did speak thusly:
   

   Connecting touring bands with local fans is pretty much my goal with PlayingHere.com. It’s just recently launched and not nearly as complete as Eventful, but it is entirely focused on live music.

   The first thing we’re doing for bands is removing the need to enter tour schedules multiple times by pulling the information off other sites and republishing it in standard formats. Right now “other sites” is restricted to MySpace, so that doesn’t help you much, but eventually we should be able to pull it directly off your site. Once we have a lot of venue information added, the next step will be to help with planning tours, by providing contact information for venues near your intended route. If you have any other ideas about how we could help bands with touring, please let me know.

   
   
4. And What will 2.0 2.0 be? « The ListeNerd did speak thusly:
   

   [...] by Josh Kimball on June 27th, 2007 Touring 2.0 - Interesting post and fascinating [...]

   
   
5. And spinhead did speak thusly:
   

   methinks the tool needs a tune-up - I initiated a demand in Sacramento six months ago, and it seems to be invisible to everyone but me :(

   guess we’ll have to make you a guest performer at the next Grassies, eh?

   
   

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