Leisure: How People Spend Their Free Time

Here's a good resource to get you thinking about American society and what we do and don't do with our free time.

Focusing on music, or even entertainment, can often be too limiting. If you are selling these concepts, you need to take into consideration all the various activities competing for a person's time, attention, and financial resources. The academic field of leisure studies gives a broad overview of time/recreation consumption.

In particular you might want to look at the PDF file, "Leisure in America: Searching for the Forest Amongst the Trees." It has culled data from a number of different research studies to give you an overview of American culture and leisure time activities.

The Compleat Leader (Getty Leadership Institute)

The economic impact of the arts

If you want some economic data on the value of arts non-profits, here's a good resource.

Arts & Economic Prosperity III: The Economic Impact of Nonprofit Arts and Culture Organizations and Their Audiences

Here's some of the summary report:

RATIO OF LOCAL VS. NONLOCAL AUDIENCES

While the ratio of local to nonlocal attendees is different in every community, the national sample revealed that 39 percent of attendees traveled from outside of the county in which the event took place (nonlocal) and 61 percent were local (resided inside the county).

VISITORS SPEND MORE

In addition to spending data, researchers asked each of the 94,478 survey respondents to provide their home zip codes. Analysis of this data enabled a comparison of event-related spending by local and nonlocal attendees. Previous economic and tourism research has shown that nonlocal attendees spend more than their local counterparts. This study reflects those findings. Local audiences, who live in the county in which the event occurred, spent an average of $19.53 per person, per event in addition to the cost of admission. Nonlocal attendees, those who live outside the county, spent twice this amount, or $40.19 per person. As would be expected, nonlocal attendees spent significantly more in the categories of lodging, meals, and transportation. These findings demonstrate that when a community attracts arts and culture tourists, it harnesses significant economic rewards.

Attendees are 61% LOCAL / 39% NONLOCAL

NONPROFIT ARTS & CULTURE ATTENDEES SPEND $27.79 PER PERSON PER EVENT

Spending Breakdowns

Residents (Residents are attendees who live within the county in which the cultural event occurred.)

Meals/Refreshments $10.77
Gifts/Souvenirs $3.32
Lodging $1.08
Child Care $0.34
Transportation $1.62
Other $2.40 $3.45
Total $19.53

Nonresident (Nonresidents live outside of the county.)

Meals/Refreshments $16.35
Gifts/Souvenirs $4.78
Lodging $10.91
Child Care $0.33
Transportation $4.37
Other $3.45
Total $40.19

All audiences

Meals/Refreshments $13.00
Gifts/Souvenirs $3.90
Lodging $5.01
Child Care $0.34
Transportation $2.72
Other $2.82
Total $27.79


ARTS & CULTURE TOURISTS SPEND MORE AND STAY LONGER

As communities compete for a tourist’s dollar, arts and culture have proven to be magnets for travelers and their money. Local businesses are able to grow because travelers extend the length of their trips to attend cultural events.

Travelers who include arts and culture events in their trips differ from other U.S. travelers in a number of ways.

Arts and culture travelers:
• Spend more ($623 vs. $457)
• Use a hotel, motel, or bed-and-breakfast (62 percent vs. 55 percent)
• Spend $1,000 or more (19 percent vs. 12 percent)
• Travel longer (5.2 nights vs. 3.4 nights)

A 2001 research study by the Travel Industry Association of America and Partners in Tourism indicates that:
• 65 percent of all adult travelers attended an arts and culture event while on a trip that was 50+ miles away from home.
• 32 percent of these cultural travelers stayed longer because of the event.
• Of those that stayed longer, 57 percent extended their trips by one or more nights.

Creating IPod Tours of Your Music Scene

Here's a site that makes available audio tours via iPods. Some people sell them, others give them away for free. I don't see a lot being done with music yet, it would be make sense. Combine a tour of local venues with music from local bands that play there frequently. Find interesting little facts about the venues that would appeal to tourists and locals who want to know more.

Denver would be a perfect location because some of our hippest venues are in colorful parts of town and have long histories as converted bars, failed past music experiments, etc. For example, the Family Dog, which existed briefly in the 1960s and featured the Doors, Janis Joplin, and the like, is now a strip club.

And Denver, famous for "On the Road," is intrinsically colorful anyway.

AudioSnacks.com: Podcast and MP3 Audio Tours for Travel, Museums, and More!

A showcase for teen art and music

5/19/07, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER'All Ages Art Night' offers teens space to make music and fashion statement: "In one corner: teen bands covering Nirvana and The Killers.

In another: a hip-hop fashion show with local youths in their modeling debut.

In between those two areas: spoken-word performances, masters of ceremonies spitting original verse and 60 community organizations that brought together hundreds of teens from all over the city.

'Seattle is really successful at creating innovative programs to work with teens, but there are not a ton of places to show what they've done,' said Jennifer Bisson, who organized the annual 'All Ages Art Night' at the Central Library and helped transform it into a performance venue Friday afternoon and night. 'There are so many negative images about teens. This is a positive thing in a public forum, which is serendipitous, because it also builds community.'

Under thousands of diamond-shaped glass panes in the Fifth Avenue lobby, roaming bands of teens wandered to tables piled high with information and talked with helpful volunteers from groups such as Readergirlz (a local writers collective for teen girls), Youth Speaks and Emerging Voices (poetry workshops for teens), Skate Like a Girl, the Girl Scouts, the events-and-program-packed Redmond Old Firehouse and the Richard Hugo House.

Programs such as this, Bisson said, give them a sense of ownership, especially with the Teen Advisory Board the library created to help bring more teens into the system."

How a jam festival got started in NJ

Drew Wajnert started out as music fan who decided he could improve upon the festival experience. One of his complaints was the lack of portable toilets. At his own events he has gone so far as to set aside some just for women and others just for mothers and kids.

Phanphest Takes A Leap Of FAITH on UpstageMagazine.com, 5/25/07"Phanphest Entertainment started out as a backyard tradition in late 2002 as Phan Phest 1.0; an intimate group of friends from The Gathering of the Vibes message boards were encouraged to gather on one acre of property for a barbeque, some keg beer, and some great music. Attendees were invited to camp out overnight on the property. Everybody had a great time, and the feedback encouraged the group of friends to do it again six months later but this time with two days of music.

Phan Phest 1.5 was held in May of 2003. Featuring two bands on both days, as well as many other acts, the backyard party maxed out the little acre with 62 tents. A larger, extended group of friends gathered for the event and were pleased with the results. But, it was pretty clear that the event had to move.

Friends helped make Phan Phest 2.0 happen in October of 2003, and realize the dream of a three-day music festival, so the event was moved to 2 acres. Thirteen bands played over 3 days on a stage that the company constructed.

The following May, Phanphest put together a festival featuring 22 bands over a 4 acres area. This was the show that truly launched the company and solidified its future. The festival was such a success that Phanphest began searching for a larger location to work with. They began producing indoor festivals and regular weekly shows in Asbury Park, NJ. Steadily, they were assembling a roster of acts dedicated to the Phanphest mission. Acts that will now be rewarded by a spot in Phanphest 3.0 this August.

Phanphest 3.0 will be held at Indian Lookout Country Club in Mariaville, NY. This was the location for The Gathering of the Vibes for the last several years. When that festival decided to move on, Phanphest eagerly moved their festival to the location.

'It's 200 plus acres of property,' said [promoter/creator Drew] Wajnert. "We're shooting for 3000 people. Our vision for it is to be family friendly. We're going to welcome Deadheads and Phishheads with kids who want to bring them to a safe environment. There's a great security solution that's already built in and they have existing facilities. This is the total package. It allows me to be the talent buyer and just focus on the production.'"

Another way to market local music

NYTimes, 5/25/07 - Facebook Expands Into MySpace: "In its new effort, which was to be unveiled on the site Thursday night, Facebook will be relying on the work of entrepreneurs like Ali Partovi, the chief executive of iLike, a company in Seattle that gives users the opportunity to hear and buy the music their friends are listening to.

Facebook does not have a music feature, but iLike, which along with Amazon and Microsoft was one of 65 companies that appeared at Facebook’s event, is one of several that plans to make music-related tools available on the site.

If users choose to add iLike to their Facebook pages, the software will automatically see where they live and what bands and songs they say they enjoy. It will then recommend songs and local concerts.

ILike will get a commission if the user acts on either recommendation, and it will also show its own ads."

The lure of the live music experience

San Francisco Bay Guardian, 5/23/07 - Show me: "Pavlov's e-mail robot knows what gets me salivating — aside from those wolf beach towels on Amazon.com (wintry wolves and hot sand go together about as well as infants and live grenades): namely, live music. Drive blearily into the Mojave for Coachella, jump through hoops to get to Seattle for Bumbershoot, make the red-eye to Austin for South by Southwest, take the midnight train to Tennessee's Bonnaroo, hock yourself for England's All Tomorrow's Parties, hazard reindeer sashimi for Reykjavik's Iceland Airwaves — take note of the chart; I have a history of doing anything for a life-altering show."

Creating a music promotion business from the ground up

How a college student went from club booker to full-time music promoter.

Promoter helps rock scene thrive - Chico Music Guide, 5/16/07: "Devil Kat Rock Productions founder Katie Perry has always been passionate about music, but it wasn't until she moved from Redding to Chico to attend college that she found her ardor for music promotion.

'I love rock 'n' roll,' Perry said. 'I honestly think I would be entirely lost if I didn't do this.'

Perry is a music promoter who promotes, stage-manages and books various music talents, both local and national, to perform in Chico and Redding. Since starting in 2002, she has had a full calendar of shows. On top of her 40-hour-a-week day job, she pumps out another 30 to 50 hours under her alter ego Devil Kat Rock Productions....

'Having shows is like rolling the dice, I really don't know how many people are going to come,' she said. 'Some people are going to talk shit and critique - telling me how I should do things - these people are generally the ones that don't get off their asses and do something.'"

Happenings in Baltimore

This is an excerpt from a long article on an art/music collective, its performance space, and how it gave rise to much of the current indie music scene in Baltimore. It's quite a good profile of how a group of friends can have a significant impact on a community.

Feature: Wham City Doesn't Want To Take Over The World--But It Just Might Anyway | 5/16/2007 | Citypaper.com: "... Wham City was a rented industrial loft space squatting somewhere between Mount Vernon and Charles Village. (Its members have requested we don't divulge the exact location in print.) In its first incarnation, it was often filled with garbage. Smashing plates in a sink with a baseball bat was a popular activity when bored. But especially after it moved one floor upstairs in the same building, it was a crucial local space for "music shows, variety shows, TV talk shows, video productions, theatrical productions, lecture series, potluck dinners, photo shoots, fashion shows, [and] dance parties" in the words of Wham City member Adam Endres. Wham City united many young people in the Baltimore art and music scenes who maybe didn't even know they needed uniting

In fact, the Wham City collective is but one spiky tip of a massive, tangled ball of creativity currently lurking just under Baltimore's liquor-licensed layer of legit bars and venues, galleries, and theaters. Bands are multiplying like sui generis bunnies in little warrenlike warehouses all over the city, and they're being formed by folks either too young to be squatting and making a racket five years ago, or not even living in the city, or both. These bands do intersect occasionally with the city's longstanding free improvisation/noise crews, but with their vestigial connections to punk rock and their continual reification/recycling of the pop-cultural junk they grew up on, they're not really experimentalists. They're making pop music that bends at various wonky, acute angles.

And though the music is the loudest and most obvious manifestation of all this energy, you can feel it in everything from local T-shirt designers to zine makers to video artists to sculptors to performance-art shenanigans yet to be named. More often than not, they're the same kids in the bands. Wham City has been, if not quite at the center of all this attention, certainly a central node.

Since you can hum along to some of it, the indie-music world outside Charm City is taking note of Baltimore's young underground. National media outlets have started to glom onto Wham City and its satellites as another installment of the Baltimania that's given us a hundred half-assed articles on club music and The Wire in the last 18 months. Just a week ago, Deacon was featured in the The New York Times, where he was hilariously described as a 'sensitive electro-party rocker.' Baltimore bands recently swarmed the annual South by Southwest music industry clusterfuck in Austin, Texas; Deacon played no less than five shows that weekend.

Locally, evidence of this explosion is increasingly easy to find on the records released by labels such as Wildfire Wildfire, Creative Capitalism, and recent Washington transplant Carpark (which is sucking up Baltimore bands at a quick clip); at exhibitions and performances at Current Gallery; at the biweekly Are We Not Men? dance party at the Depot; at the Talking Head club until its closure; at shows in the artist-riddled H&H Building; at house parties and one-off loft gatherings; at Baltimore institutions of 'high' culture like the Walters Art Museum; and at Wham City itself, until recently. See, all this celebration comes at a strange time, because Wham City, as it was, is no more.

All illegal venues live on borrowed time; last September--after a string of shows plagued by assholes pulling fire alarms, smashing windows, and setting fires--Wham City was forced to stop holding shows following alleged complaints by the fire marshal to the building's management and threats of eviction from the building's owner. The collective rallied and is hunting for a new, potentially legit, space, but at the moment there's a feeling that the local arts community has lost something important just as its intensity is peaking.'...

The collective initially formed around six friends, but its ranks have swelled to include anywhere from 16 to 24 people in Baltimore, and 11 of them are here today. It's two days before everyone has to be out of the building for good....

Stranded in a city where they knew almost no one, the Purchase kids developed a drunken bunker mentality, holed up in the space that would become Wham City with no phones, blowing what little money they had at the local liquor store, and destroying personal property when boredom threatened.... [But, as the article explains, things got better.]

The past six months alone have already seen a Wham City theater night, a cross-country tour, sundry live shows around town (and their attendant poster art), two episodes of in-house talk show The Ed Schrader Show, several records released by various WC-related bands, a gallery exhibition, a museum showcase, various videos, two issues of Catatac (a traditionally folded-and-stapled zine published by Kate Levitt, Mark Brown, and Kevin Sherry that's full of contributions from Wham members), and a bunch of stuff not yet ready for prime-time consumption. "I know of at least two board games that are being developed," Connor Kizer says. Sure, not all of it needs to be documented, but the irrepressible, overwhelming mass of stuff that Wham City churns out is always impressive."

Putting jazz clubs into perspective

An interview with Branford Marsalis.

MetroTimes Detroit, 5/16/07 -‘Jazz has never been popular’: "Marsalis: Jazz music has never been popular. I think that we need to get away from that lie. Jazz clubs back in the day, were considered places of counterculture. If you listen to records like John Coltrane Live at the Village Vanguard and Bill Evans Live at the Village Vanguard, what you will hear is a lot of people talking and treating the music with relative indifference. In the '50s, if you wanted to go to a cool place to hang out and have some drinks and talk, you went to a jazz club. Where were you going to go? Lawrence Welk didn't have a club where you could go to. Now they have all kinds of clubs that didn't exist back then. Whoever heard of a cigar bar or a wine bar?"

MT: In those venues the music is secondary to the ambience and the socializing.

Marsalis: The music has always been secondary; that is why you hear people talking. Jazz has never been popular. I think that is just a common thing to say, and I don't know why. Just for research purposes, you should get the Time magazine with Thelonious Monk on the cover [from 1964] and read the entire article. What you'll notice is there's very little in that article about jazz music. It's more focused on the personality and jazz as a lifestyle. The American aesthetic has always viewed all music as a form of entertainment. Any idea of music as an art has always been something that America has rejected since we have had a country.