tegs07

There are a couple of reasons for this though such as demographics and changing tastes. I don’t know many young people who listen to the radio, buy records or go to gigs by unsigned artists. They do seem to use social media and festivals with big names are a big thing though. Add in unaffordable housing, expensive transportation and food and all the rest and being a YouTube musician is probably more appealing than the traditional route to making a living in music. The overheads are low and the audience is online.

The Limiñanas, Bristol. Great live band and The Fleece is probably my favourite Bristol venue.

Not really my thing but he seems like a decent sort. What little I have watched he has a marmite kind of humour that I find amusing. Not sure about the claims that he’s not much of a bass player. He’s exactly the kind of bass player I like.

Agree on both counts. Both bands clearly have something but whatever it is it’s lost on me

Back in the day he was just an intellectual snob. He then moved up to being a bitter man about how the record label never did enough for him, then screwed over his band mates involving court battles, then released some truly dire records that didn’t sell for which he blamed the UK public, then got all BNP and a bit racist, then moved to the USA where he made an astronomical amount of money. I gave up on him when he was still bitter and twisted despite being wealthy beyond most peoples expectations and living in Clark Gables old house! Most of this information was gathered from his nicely written, but thoroughly irritating autobiography which should have been called: ’the world gave me the moon on a stick but it wasn’t bright enough’

Anyone that gets up, gives something a try and puts themselves out there deserves respect, no matter what field they are in. That said Coldplay are still rubbish.

I have heard really positive things about this: https://buskersbern.ch/en

Personally I really like Birchwood-Casey Tru-Oil. Old pictures of bass before final buff and set up:

It’s not necessarily an age thing. Some middle aged, middle class professionals will go regularly to gigs at random. I would not rely on them randomly stumbling across my band though if I was trying to make a living from music.

Or weekends. Most of the time I have commitments and strangely enough getting in at gone midnight doesn’t gel well with getting in to work and doing a decent job. Your rant is not for me. If you don’t want to prostitute your self on the socials or want people to use streaming platforms that is up to you but as you said “no effer want to get off their fat one” So I guess it’s everyone else who is at fault for not knowing about you? I will continue going to see relatively unknown artists who I discovered in the digital space. I hope that I contribute in some small way to them making a living. As I have already said most of these bands have an audience no larger than The Fall in their early days and from what I gather previous members hardly made a fortune from record sales even in the good old days.

I am in my mid 50s. The days of frequenting random gigs mid week are 30 years behind me. The generation that you need for that are teenagers to mid twenties and like it or not they get their information from the digital space.

I do. I just tend not to blindly pay £25+ for tickets, £7+ plus a pint and £15 plus on transport on a whim. Like most people.

This is getting very circular. How do I find these musicians? Talk to my middle aged IT mates? Ask my kids? How do they find the bands? Streaming and social media, they don’t read the NME or listen avidly to John Peel (largely because he is dead), they don’t join bands by taking the little serated number from the add in the local corner shop. Like it or not the world has changed and it’s digital. I don’t do social media as I genuinely have concerns about the political and social ambitions of the big tech companies so streaming is the least worst option.

Do you think that you are missing the point? No is the answer. Do I think people are going to start buying records and CDs again and restricting their social lives to pubs and working man’s clubs? No So we can’t re write history. We can utilise technology. Even in the glory days I have read enough autobiography from people in smaller bands like The Fall, Spacemen 3 etc to know that they earned very very little from sales of recorded music.