"Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything. " Plato
This year, everyone thought 2023 would be completely back to normal. Everything would be fine and it would be like 2020 never happened. Well, that’s not the case. Between inflation, skyrocketing prices, and gas, people can’t tour. There are a lot of many factors, but the main one is money.
There’s been a lot of talk in the industry that people are taking it really slow this year. Are they working on music, are they taking time off, or are there just stepping back and waiting to see what’s going on in the world. I can’t go into too many logistics but basically, it’s very expensive to tour for just a couple of days.
You have to rent the equipment, rent tour buses, get gas, get groceries, pay for the trucks, get hotel rooms, and possibly flights, did I mention you have to pay the crew? The crew includes as far and wide as TM, PM, PA, lighting, video, rigging, audio, truck drivers, and bus drivers. Then on top of it, as an artist, you have to pay your agent, your manager, your record label, and your publicist… you see where I’m getting at with this.
With the cost of everything going up, it doesn’t make sense to tour. Especially for the smaller/ just getting started artists. Let’s say you are an artist and you are going to about 500/2000 person venue(s). Right, so depending on your contract, you are either getting a set rate or you are getting a portion of the ticket sales. Now depending on the venue, these ticket sales can be anywhere from 5 dollars to 75 dollars. And that’s not including taxes and fees. Chances are, the ticket sales, or your rate, are not going to cover the amount to pay everyone, pay the expenses, and then pay yourself just to go out for the weekend.
So what’s next? As an industry, we need to think about new and inventive ways to make money. Will Las Vegas residency become a thing? Where an artist just stays in one city for a certain amount of time? Will venues have to start paying more for the acts to come to their city? It’s a real toss-up with what will happen next, but we just have to keep trucking and see what happens.
This is a great article about the harsh realities of our industry. I hope you take a read!
While I could stay in Australia forever and ever, it was time to finish our tour in Auckland, New Zealand. I’m going to sound like a spoiled brat, but I’m telling you this for future reference. If you decide to go to New Zealand, make the south island a priority. I think it is prettier, greener, and most of it has all the “fun stuff” that everyone talks about. Skydiving, white water rafting, Milford Sound, you get the picture. The south island is where everything is at. I especially love Queenstown, I can’t wait to go back there. There’s a reason why they call it the “adventure capital” of the world.
Auckland is the one of New Zealand’s biggest urban cities. It’s also known for its skyline and all the other cool islands around it. Other than that, I can’t say that much about Auckland. To me it’s another big city, but all the surrounding islands and landscapes around it is pretty cool. You can drive two hours to see where they filmed Lord of the Rings, there’s also all of these cool mud hot springs, but also great wine and wildlife in the area. There are tons of boat tours and tons of scenery to see outside the city.
Luckily, I’m a chatterbox, and I was told by a handful of locals to go to Waiheke Island, basically not known for much except for sights, food, and lots of wine. It was just starting to get into the summer, so not too many people were on the beaches. But it’s better than the weather that I’m currently experiencing in Nashville. I would totally go back early in the morning because it would be a good day trip… to drink wine and eat food.
I was under the weather and due to high restrictions still in place in New Zealand, I was not allowed in the venue. I think the show went well, but I was working from my hotel room. Overall, the run down under went fairly smoothly with some bumps and hiccups in the road.
I’ll be completely honest, touring down under is hard and arduous. There are no tour buses and you are dealing with a big island that’s the size of the US. If you don’t plan accordingly, you’ll be going up and down left and right, flying all around til you get to the show. You’ll get crowds in Australia, but you won’t get the sleep on show days.
It was a great learning experience. It taught me more about traveling, traveling fast-paced in a large country, but most importantly about me. It taught me a lot about my patience, my value, and my worth. But more importantly, I like to think I’m pretty good at my job. It’s very easy in this industry to get lost in what you do, to get lost in the sea of people, but just stand up for yourself and just do your job well.
I’ll be completely honest, I really wasn’t looking forward to writing this blog post. I love Sydney and I miss it all the time. Bringing up memories of living there makes me miss it more and more each day. Writing this blog makes me very nostalgic and happy but it also makes me sad. Because the life I had in Sydney is the life that helped me create the life that I had for myself today. It’s a big part of who I am today. It’s a good thing, but remembering Sydney really makes me miss it.
It’s also a big reason why I work in the music industry today. I moved to Australia because the recession hit the midwest so bad people weren’t hiring interns. I decided to do something about it and move away. I ended up working for the Willoughby City Council as a public relations/events intern which led to the start of my career. Eleven years later, here I am, working in the music industry. Living on a tour bus, writing to you amazing people.
Living in Australia and then coming back for work was very surreal. It was a full circle of my career and it made me realize I accomplished more than I give myself credit for. I’ve worked very hard for my live events career, and I never take any part of my travels or any part of my job as just “another day”.
I’ve heard a lot of people over the years talk about Sydney and say “it’s not that great of a city”. I always ask “why” because I’m genuinely curious. Most people don’t think it has a lot of culture, it’s just another big city, and it’s not that wow factor. The list goes on, you get what I’m saying. I don’t think people really appreciate the beauty of Sydney. There is culture, food, wildlife, and everyone from everywhere in all sorts of walks of life.
There are famous beaches surrounding the East coast of Sydney, there’s a lot of Eastern and Western culture embedded all around Sydney, and I’m sorry, maybe you have been to the wrong places but I’ve had some of the best food there.
Sydney is also famous for the Sydney Opera House and the Blue Mountains. Sydney has everything that any big city should have. Did I mention they have pretty decent weather year round?
I could on and on about Sydney. The wonderfully nice people, open-mindedness, and beautifulness of seeing everyone for what and who they are. Don’t get me wrong, every big city has its problems. But I have never heard people complain about the dating or job shortages in that city.
The best part about working and touring in Sydney is experiencing my work in the city that started my career. It was probably one of the largest crowds we had through out the tour. The venue is extremely well laid out and it’s very easy to navigate and get from the CBD to the west side of the city. I loved working and touring there, I would do it all over again if I could.
It’s been a long, long time since I’ve been back down under. To say the least, I was excited to be back.
One of the reasons why I was excited to be back, is because Australia changed my life. I learned a lot about myself and I learned a lot about life and what it meant to me. I learned that if I wanted something, I had to get it, if I wanted something to change I had to do it, if I had a challenge ahead of me I had to work through it.
I’m sure this would be the same thing if I had an internship in Europe, but my friend group and the people I have met over there changed my life for the better. It was truly one of the most remarkable and greatest experiences of my life. I truly cherished every second of it and I’ll never for
Just a couple of things you need to know about Australia:
Yes, there are the most dangerous animals down there but don’t worry if you are hanging out in the city, you’ll be fine. If you hang out in the bush, you’re going to have some problems… maybe. Australia is America flipped upside down with a twist of Eastern influence run by the British monarchy. It’s a very unique and unexplainable in a way. Between the architecture, food, art, music, there’s a lot of mixes of each of the different cultures. People are genuinely nice, I haven’t met “mean” Aussies, crazy yes, mean not so much. I think when your background comes from criminal descent, you just want to be treated like you’re not a criminal. Overall, Australia tends to be very liberal believe in universal health care, “freeish” education, and of course clean drinking water. As of a google search of today, there are only 25.69 million Australians, to put that into perspective, there are 39 million people who live in California. Yes, Australia is expensive, but what do you expect living on a big island so close to Antartica. Australia is the size of the United States, so Perth is LA and Atlanta is to Sydney. It’s very wide and very large. The seasons are “backwards”, so for example, are fall is starting as their spring approaches. Australians love their music and they love their country music. I was astonished how many people knew my bosses songs.
This was the first time I went to Brisbane, was when I went to the Gold Coast about 11 years ago. Most people that go to Brissy go to the Gold Coast. It’s where the waterparks, night clubs, and all the tourists/family stuff is. Brissy is a cool city, but I think there’s more around the city like the wildlife sanctuaries and the beaches. Brisbane was a great place to start tour, the weather was nice, it’s in the middle of the country on the coast, and it was easy to go north or south. I think if I go back to Brisbane, I’ll spend more time by the beaches.
To say I wasn’t nervous about going over to Europe, would be a big lie. I’ve been working in events for about 11 years now. It’s always growing and changing, so you have to keep up with the times. Since I haven’t been to Europe on tour, I didn’t know what to expect. I was worried that accents would get in the way, culture/work habits would be a problem, or even just being American working over in Europe would get in the way. I’m extremely hypersensitive to what is going on in the world and how the world views the states. It’s not an appearance thing or vanity for that matter, I just don’t want people to take me as a joke. I’m here to work, I’m open-minded and I want to adapt to the situation I’m in as best as I can.
There are always problems in the events world, and our job is always to have a solution to those problems. Of course, the first thing that happens when we get over there, KLM lost 14 bags including my own. 14, that’s a pretty big number, and I knew we weren’t alone in that! Of course, there was/is a shortage of workers, and I’m sure there was a strike going on, but what I tell everyone, if you can’t handle the workload, just don’t take it on, and that includes airlines. So it wasn’t a good start but the very next day, our luggage finally made it to the UK.
We are very lucky and found an awesome work crew to travel with us, SoundForce Crew, if you ever need extra hands on your tour, these are your guys. Urban was the leader and a true leader at that. It’s great working with people that have the same type of work ethic as you do. The last thing he said to me was, “you are truly good at your job.” What he doesn’t know is I feel the same exact way, and I think he’s amazing at his job. Hiring those guys if you can while you are working in Europe. They made our first day go by very smoothly and let me handle other things like finding luggage.
Glasgow was the first start to the tour, and man what a day it was. From trying to understand accents to try to get everyone’s luggage, it was a very interesting start. I learned very early on, Europeans are a little bit more relaxed (I should have known that from my travels over there before), maybe it’s just the midwestern in me that’s always “Go Go GO” but it made me take a step back with my runners, and think “OK this is how they work over here.” It’s not a bad thing, just a different pace of work.
The biggest issue I had in Glasgow was the accents. Man, did I have a hard time understanding all the venue workers. Literally, my biggest fear on my first day on tour was not being able to communicate with them. They speak English for crying out loud, and I still had to ask them to repeat themselves 100x over. However, they all made me laugh so hard, that I cried. I needed that on my first day on the road in Europe. I even made a dog friend over there! I can’t wait to go back… but this time with my luggage.
With all the hiccups and such we made it through the day. However, we had to take a ferry overnight. I stupidly slept through the ferry which you are not supposed to do, but needless to say, the rest of my guys got up and they were very tired going over to Ireland.
Dublin is everything you imagined and dreamed of. It’s the place of music, art, and culture. It was fantastic and I can’t wait to go back. We had great burgers for after-show food and gathered lots of great information about Dublin and the history behind it. And of course, people were thrilled to see the boss man on stage. I couldn’t have asked for a better second show in Europe.
The thing that stuck out the most to me in Dublin, was the number of tourists. Where I’m from in Milwaukee, we have a huge Irish community, a lot of people migrated over to that area from Ireland. When I was able to sneak away, my runner was great and answered all my questions. I’m always curious and will always take the opportunity to escape when I can. With all the different things you can do in Dublin, I was able to go to Stephen’s Green. It was packed and full of people. People were everywhere drinking coffee on the grass, sitting in rounds playing music, and just enjoying the little sun that Ireland normally gets. With much history involved in the park, it’s no wonder why it’s one of the main places to go in Dublin.
Stephen’s Green
My runner was great and showed me all the buildings, the bridges, and all the neighborhoods in between. I had to ask him, “people are so proud of the Irish heritage, even in the states. Why is that?” He just said, “We are proud people, with a lot of history, but we are about a culture of who you know as well. That’s why we spread far and wide, we just know people!” Which in the end, totally makes sense, if you know anyone who is Irish in the states, they proudly say, “I’m Irish”.
Overall, I hope to make it back to the UK sooner rather than later.
Means “we will see you later”View from the airplaneShow in GlasgowAll the luggage shoved in the back of the car I make friends with dogs!Entrance to Stephen’s GreenOne of the many statues in the parkShopping District Double Decker Bus in Europe
It’s after the holidays, we are currently seeing music venues and Broadway getting canceled, put on hold, or postponed. Which is not a good sign since most of us in entertainment have PTSD from losing our jobs. What is scarier is I know many of my friends and colleagues can’t afford to go through 2020 all over again.
While the world is getting back to normal, it’s also taken its’ setbacks. For example, we have a show coming up, and you need a negative PCR test in order to get back into the United States. However, we are scheduled to go out of the country, so I guess you can say catch 22.
I’m trying to be hopeful about the future when it comes to my job, the entertainment industry, and the world in general. I know people just want to go to a show and not have to worry about getting sick. I know this can’t just “go away”, but I want people to understand, if we don’t take this seriously, we will be in this for a long time.
As most of you are aware, the world is opening back up. Which is great, as long as people get their vaccinations. If you truly don’t believe in it, you do you, but just remember the world will be harder to open back up if people don’t. There’s a reason why “The Plague” hasn’t truly come back to life. Science and vaccinations have come a long way.
What does that mean for live music. Well, things are still up in the air. In a lot of ways, people are booking tours and concerts for this summer and fall, but every state, city, and county are doing it differently. So be prepared for some of the following:
Covid Passports: Whether you agree with it or not, Covid Passports might actually become a thing. Meaning, like you carry around your license, same way you carry around your wallet.
Less lights, sound and action: A lot of vendors took a big hit, and it cost A LOT of money to put on these concert. Expect possibly smaller “action” shows… or maybe not I could totally be wrong. I guess we shall see what the vendors do and how much they will charge for equipment.
Venue capacity: This will be tricky, I’m not exactly sure what venues are going to do. I’ve heard several rumors we are supposed to be up in running at full capacity by July. Does that mean it will happen… I don’t know. Everything is so up in the air, I’m not exactly sure, I just know that people want to get back to work and people are doing whatever they can to go back to work.
Different protocol: I do not expect things to go back to normal. It would be very strange if they just went straight back to normal. Just be prepared when you go to a show, that some things may be different.
It is almost March 2021 and it will be a year since this whole thing went down. While most of us are over this and exhausted (I know I am), take the time to be proud of yourself.
Be proud of the fact you made it a year, changing your whole life around to help the community around you.
Be proud of the fact that you probably accomplished more than you think! I know I did!
Be proud of the fact that you didn’t give up. You kept fighting through this whole thing. Mentally and spiritually.
Be proud of the fact that you developed new hobbies and found new ways to entertain yourself!
Be proud of the fact that you took the time to think about what really matters to you in this life.
Be proud of the fact that you did your best to make it through it!
Be proud of the fact that you are awesome, you are doing great, and there is hopefully light at the end of the tunnel.
If you follow this blog, you know this blog was mostly about music. Well guess what COVID-19 happened and it’s STILL happening. It’s 12 days in 2021 and I’m already mentally exhausted. I’m exhausted about what’s going on in the world. I’m exhausted about my career and after 10 years of working towards it, my career just disappeared.
I’m tired of the news and all the negativity. I’m tired of the peoples’ flakiness because let’s be honest, we are all struggling. We are all drowning in the same water, some of us just have boats and yachts others have canoes and life vests. Just remember that when you decide to play the “woe is me” card.
I know I sound so mean, rereading what I typed, it can sound really harsh. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, I’m not trying to be mean, I’m trying to be honest. I have friends in music who are struggling and I have people who work in medical that are struggling. Everyone is struggling in their own way and the scary part is the ones that don’t show pain are the ones that are struggling the most.
I wish I could write about what’s going on in music and the next show/artist you should go see next. I wish I could write about a the next artist I’m going on tour with. I wish I could write about the newest production that is happening on stage. I just wish I could happen about what’s going on in the world of music and entertainment in general.
Life sucks right now. Most of our worlds have flipped upside down and inside out. It’s an adjustment for everyone. So I leave you with this. Remember the scene in Bridesmaids, where Annie’s mom says, “Honey, I think this is your rock bottom. But you know what’s good about hitting rock bottom, you can only go up.”
Annie kind of rolls her eyes because she’s heard that line before and then later in the movie Annie says, “Hey mom, remember when you said I hit rock bottom… that wasn’t it.” And like most movies it has a sappy, happy ending. I can’t guarantee your life will have a bow at the end of your ending. But I will tell you, I’ve hit rock bottom, it’s not as bad as it seems. Believe me, I got through it, and if this is your rock bottom. Just know, you will get through this.
It’s the year 2021… and nothing has changed. I’m not surprised and neither should you. I’m not exactly sure why, but I’m still hesitant about this year. Is this year really going to be better than 2020? Typing 2020 just gave me chills…
Everyone had this whole idea about the pandemic being over and life would be back to normal. Hard reality check, my job still doesn’t exist and neither do concerts at this moment.
Rumor has it, most entertainment won’t start until May 2021, but it’s just a rumor.
If I were you, I would walk into this year slowly and guarded. You did your good deeds and you have walked the fine line of not getting Covid-19. How about we count our blessings, shut up, listen to science, and actually start caring about people.
You want concerts back, care about my job and the thousands of other jobs behind the scenes. Wear a mask and don’t discredit people who are still wearing masks because this pandemic “is not over.”
This is me not trying to be mean, I am your reality check. I am one of 12 million people out of work in live entertainment. From the bottom of my heart, start caring about people. That’s all I’m asking for in 2021.
The Thein Way to Live 