There's an awful lot of naysayers complaining and commenting about the state of the music business, mostly lamenting about either how things are worse than the past or how labels, promoters, artists, management, venues just don't "get it" and everyone is doomed to failure, mediocrity, and irrelevance.  This summer it has been particularly acute.  Every time a show is not sold out or is cancelled guys like Bob Lefsetz (who I generally like to read) can't wait to jump on it to provide evidence that they were "right".  Times of uncertainly and upheaval are the golden moments for two classes of people - the complainers and the opportunists.

Complainers thrive when things are in flux or decline. They love to bitch and moan and talk about the old days.  Some even profit off it.  But they rarely do anything about where things are going mostly because they're too established in the status quo, too much to lose, feel a sense of entitlement, or maybe they're just too tired and cranky.

Opportunists look at things they way they are and make things happen.  But they come in two camps - parasites and hosts.   Parasites live off the changing conditions and preach fear and doom.  Hosts create things and strive to truly make things better for themselves and others.

I bring this up because we're going out to the New Music Seminar in NYC next week.  And what a great message it has for Opportunists:

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There are millions of artists with MySpace pages. How can you become one of the few hundred each year that rise from the obscurity zone to become successful?

The old record business is over. Album sales are down 60% since 2000, radio is breaking less new music than ever in history. Record companies are signing fewer and fewer new artists and artist development budgets continue to shrink.

A new music business is rising from its ashes.

We are entering the greatest era of opportunity in history.

You can take advantage of this opportunity if you know the secrets.

In three days at the New Music Seminar you will learn:

1. The secret to leaving your millions of competitors in the dust
2. How to turn your music dreams into reality
3. A whole new way to see the music business that will give you opportunities you never knew existed
4. Simple strategies to build your touring business
5. The newest technologies and techniques to market yourself and manage your business

I don't know if anyone can predict how the Great Digital Music Upheaval will play out.  But there always be a great deal of human value placed on music and music culture in all forms.  Those who understand this, look forward, and make failure pay are the folks I'll bet on.  Lots of those people will be in NYC next week, will you?

Any entertainer is working the night shift.  This can play havoc not just with your bio rhythms (whatever they are) but also can limit choices when you are ready (and able) to eat. Most of the 24hr places are really catering to a bunch of slobbering drunkards not road warriors looking for something healthy, organic, and not fried. That's fine – I understand market segmentation but that doesn't help us too much here.

Eating healthy on the road is tough. I hope this post will help you make some better decisions from the available options. Of course, you can always buy something during the day that will keep for a few hours in a small cooler, but this requires planning ahead (a luxury that doesn't always exist on tour).

Master Tour Build 1712 is available immediately.  Simply re-launch Master Tour and you'll be prompted to update.  New in this update:

• The set list print functionality allows you to change the font in order to have a set list fill up one full page.  Additionally the set list load/save function has had some minor adjustments to fix issues with set lists created in an earlier build of Master Tour.
• The Hotel "Party" name is now automatically filled in when adding a new Hotel.  The party is automatically named for quickly adding your entire tour.
• Task are now sorted correctly by date and a minor bug when deleting tasks has been fixed.
• When printing, the 10-page alert is no longer displayed when AIR 2.0 or higher is installed.
• Minor consistency improvements were made to various printed reports.

In addition to the desktop updates, we are just beginning to add some web-based features so that you can access your account data via the web.  Click the "Sign In" button at the top of our website to access your account.

Thank you to everyone for your valuable feedback!  Please don't be shy about clicking the "Send Feedback" button at the bottom-right corner of the application.

Event tickets are valuable.  That value is mostly captured by box office ticketing to the public. However, many of the tickets not for sale to the public - usually the best seats held back for distribution to friends, industry contacts, donors, and other VIPs.

These tickets are major currency.  So why do most teams, tours, and other events continually throw them into a Black Hole?  In the universe, black holes suck in everything (even light cannot escape) and nothing comes out.  This happens all the time with these discretionary tickets - they get allocated to people and then they are gone - with no trace.  And they don't come back.

The University of Kansas is embroiled in a scandal involving the illegal sale of such tickets - to the tune of $3 milllion in lost revenue. Five Kansas athletic department employees acquired nearly 20,000 tickets to sold-out events and then sold them and pocketed the money.  KU officials are making moves to improve internal auditing of procedures for ticket distribution but in defense of KU, their ticket distribution policies were probably no different than any college or venue.

One of the things that computerized ticketing has done is increase the accountability and visibility of inventory.  But conventional box office ticketing doesn't handle the nuances of permission-based ticket distribution - things like requests, request approval, different pricing (comps, service fees, etc) Our Live Access ticketing system was specfically designed to handle these scenarios and usage of such a system also provides a clear audit trail of who requested, who approved, and who received the tickets. 

End the Black Hole and shine a light on your distribution processes with Live Access.

Eventric is a sponsor for the 2010 Vans Warped Tour that kicked off last week.In addition, this year we are also sponsoring Tour:Smart's Martin Atkins to deliver Tour Smart seminars and roundtables with artists throughout many of the dates on this 42 date tour.

The Warped Tour is the longest running music tour (maybe besides Cats) and is reponsible for launching many big name acts including Blink-182 and Eminem. Like many years, this year's lineup features a boatload of new acts (including a band I like out of Chicago, AM Taxi) and a handful of bigger names like All American Rejects.

It's a circus of a tour and a cultural phenomenon - we're happy to be a part of helping young artists learn more about the industry.  Music is a business and a career and hopefully more knowledge will get out there about our software as part of a suite of skills and techniques to help make a profitable business out of art.

Martin's giving out t-shirts with his now well-known mantra "Welcome to the Music Business - You're F*cked" on the front and our logo on the back.

He's also vlogging along the way documenting the tour, fans, and the bands.  Here's the first one (look for a screen shot of our Master Tour dashboard with the map):

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