From Chuck Hughes on Facebook: I’m in Texas hill country March 11-18 , playing Andalusia Whiskey Company Sat. March 14 at noon. I didn’t realize until today that’s the week of SXSW in Austin. So I checked out the SXSW schedule to see who is playing. Zero Rockabilly bands and two Surf Bands. Tons of DJs. One Blues band. The tickets are expensive. Local musician show are pre-empted at a lot of places to accommodate the festival-selected bands. So unless I hear something that changes my mind, I’ll check out other hill country towns.
Just like the NAMM show, there will be more video of SXSW happenings online you can watch and will exceed the time it would take to buy a ticket, and stand in line for shows you wanted to get into. SXSW started in 1987, and in those days the bands hoped to get a recording contract, to build an audience outside their own town. Despite all the independent artists who are amassing millions of monthly streams with no label I still meet and read of lots of acts who hope to be signed by a record company. You can upload your tracks to streaming in an afternoon and collect just about all the revenue or pay a record company 50% of revenue even in the friendliest indie signings to upload your songs.
My favorite book about the new music business is “How to make it in the New Music Business” by Ari Herstand. Although a couple years old, it’s already obsolete since it’s pre-dating Ai. The most recent projections that I hear are that all the streaming platforms are teaching their Ai to create music that they will own, pay a fine in the millions for training the Ai using real artists’ music, then dropping all the real artists from their platforms, and making billions of of dollars having their artist-trained Ai fill their platforms with music.
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When the Hillbilly Hellcats started domestic van touring in 1996, the average nightly motel room cost us $55! Drummer got a bed ,bassist got a bed, and I slept on a sleeping bag and air mattress. We played two very nice gigs in Vero Beach this weekend, and the cheapest motel rooms cost $130. I stayed in my van at a T/A truck stop for free, and bought a $17 shower when I woke up. I remember when truck stop showers were $6.