The Listening Space

The Listening Space The Listening Space is a singer-songwriter collective from central Vancouver Island. Its members cooperate to build audiences and performance skills.

Join The Listening Space

Every songwriter wants to be heard. We all want to share a lovingly crafted song in a quiet venue with an audience who wants to hear it. We want a listening space. Songwriters in the central Vancouver Island region already find attentive audiences at better open mic’s but you get 10 minutes on stage. Local bars and coffee shops support live music but half the audience isn

't there to listen. You’ve written a lot of songs and paid your amateur night dues, so where do you get the stage time to become a feature act for an audience that will pay to listen? The Listening Space is a collective under which emerging central Vancouver Island songwriters can explore ways to present their work to paying audiences. It is not a venue but a group effort to find more places to play longer sets and develop as performers. One way is to organize concerts combining a group of songwriters with an experienced feature act and TLS has already booked the MAC in Parksville on March 31. TLS can organize charity events and find slow nights in pubs and bars for one-time songwriter events. The limit is the imagination of its members. It's about finding and sharing the underused spaces and resources already there in the region. The mid-term goals of The Listening Space are to:

Develop a reputation for audience-pleasing, semi-professional events
Find more spaces for songwriters to share stages and gain experience
Use existing musical venues and resources to grow the audience for songwriters
Get older and younger songwriters with different styles to stage events together
Promote intercommunity visits of regional songwriters

The Listening Space is there to help people develop but it cannot be another open mic where anyone can play. We must leave audiences and venue operators happy or we can’t afford to book space. We will need to create a range of opportunities suited to various stages of development. Audiences demand more to fill a 200-seat venue at $20 per ticket than for a charity event at a coffee shop. But this is doable. A lot of open mic veterans already fall into this ability range and bundling three or four songwriters on one stage takes the heat off any one of them. Is there really an audience for regional singer-songwriters? We aim to find out. At least two songwriter showcases in Vancouver have been drawing audiences for twenty years. Who should join The Listening Space? If you're a feature performer, you don't need us but maybe you'd like to help others. If you're pretty good but not ready to carry an hour-long set on your own, that's what we're here for. If you're a novice, come aboard to chart your own path to progress. If you write but don't sing, use TLS to find performers who will take your music public. If you're not a musician but have related skills you want to develop like audio, video, promotion, graphics etc., welcome. If you are a venue operator or promoter who wants to track emerging talent or if you just want to volunteer time to support local live music, please join us. Find our Facebook group at (//). Sign up and let us know who you are, where you live and why you are interested. Just don’t expect too much, too fast. We want to build a sustainable structure that can grow on its own solid base and that will take time.

Soundcharts is an analytics tools for music artists and labels
09/15/2017

Soundcharts is an analytics tools for music artists and labels

French startup Soundcharts is building a sort of App Annie for music artists. This service gives you a ton of data about what’s playing on the radio around..

Why Freddie Mercury's Voice Was So Great, As Explained By Science
09/10/2017

Why Freddie Mercury's Voice Was So Great, As Explained By Science

Mercury is widely regarded as one of the best singers in rock history. Now, a recent study aims to explain why the late Queen frontman's voice was so special.

07/30/2017

NANAIMO STREET ENTERTAINMENT CRISIS

From: midislandnews.com

Two speakers came to speak to council about the Nanaimo street entertainment crisis. The problem is there is only one good place to perform and make any money!

Here are some of the highlights of what they had to say:

Speaker 1:

I am not allowed to use a microphone and people can’t hear me when I am performing down on the waterfront. We need to revisit the 1998 busker bylaw. It is not working. We are being treated like panhandlers and we are not. A location was removed from outside Serious Coffee on Commercial Street. I was singled out in an email by the City not to be invited to a busker consultation meeting.

Fuller: … the original bylaw eliminated busking…it took 6 months to get buskers on the committee…agree we need to re-visit the busking bylaw…

Speaker 2:
Street entertainers are important to Nanaimo and give a good first image of our town. There is a lack of bylaw officers to enforce the rules. People are playing on the street without a license and in non-official spots and for too long in one spot. One problem is that there is no audition process.

There are a lack of spots to play on the harbour front. There used to be 6 spots to play and now there are only 3. There once was a spot out side the ice cream shop on the waterfront and in front of the Lighthouse Bistro and the Pacfica Condos.

I am asking Council to bring back at least two of those spots.

The only real viable spot to make any money in all of Nanaimo is down in front of Trolls Fish and Chips but the competition is fierce so I would like to propose a $50 fee for that one spot only and the other spots at the regular fee of $25.

Yoachim: …would buskers be open to rotation?

Speaker: ….used to be the case but it had too many problems…every spot was open to play at and then a rotation …but people argued about time…they allowed people to preform two hours a day and they couldn’t come back for the rest of the day…any spot this applies…four or five years ….now there are performers who keep performing where they are not supposed to such as in front of the Lighthouse [Bistro]…I shouldn’t have to approach them – it’s the bylaw officers’ job…

Yoachim: …two hour window…enough time?…

Speaker: …used to be four hours…because of the lack of spots…two hours is enough…hard to busk for four hours…

Yoachim: …is it two hours all at once?

Speaker: Yes, all you get is two hours…

Hong: …would you like a schedule system?

Speaker: ….no…first come first serve gives more people more opportunity to busk…I won’t busk downtown or at Maffeo Park because there’s no traffic there…There is one spot that is safe…there is no safety downtown…there are no bylaw officers out there…

Hong: …if buskers are interested in time slotting…we have the ability to do it …we can promote buskers…a calendar…

Speaker: …need more spots to play…

Fuller: …I went to a meeting 5 years ago…and one person from the Pacifica Condo complained…and they pulled the spot…

Speaker: It was a great spot…

Fuller: …Maffeo Sutton could use some more busking spots…no people there…food trucks not working out there…

Mckay: ...Pacifica leases the land for $40,000 a year from the Nanaimo Port Authority [NPA]…time to revive the busker bylaw…some restaurants are hiring buskers to attract people…

Yoachim: …review and modernize busker bylaw..do they [NPA] pay for bylaw enforcement?

Mckay: …City agreed to pay for bylaw services and NPA agreed to allow busking

Yoachim: …no cost to the port…they should bring something to the table…

What will happen to the Nanaimo Street entertainers? Has anyone suggested that they can play inside some of the empty malls around Nanaimo?

07/08/2017

SoundCloud is kinda imploding

- As originally posted by Owen at Charged

It's one of my very favorite music sources — and where I happen to host the podcast — but for the last year it's become evident that something is very wrong at SoundCloud. The company has shipped few features, launched bizzaro paid services and failed to raise capital repeatedly.

This week, the company cut more than 40 percent of its workforce in a move that it described as a "path to long-term independent success." That's a big departure from looking for big venture capital last year, considering a sale, then raising $70m in debt.

The thing is, even though SoundCloud is the platform of choice for 175 million listeners (!) and it hosts millions of indie music tracks, DJs and other artists... the business model simply hasn't panned out at all. At first, SoundCloud hoped to charge artists for hosting their music, but it's not particularly profitable. In 2016, it launched a subscription music service too, but it's not competitive on price.

Spotify and Apple Music have essentially steam-rolled the music space, and the price of royalties is incredibly high for these companies. I suspect we're going to start seeing the music streaming business bottom out, as they realize the margins are slim on almost all options.

Even Spotify is at risk, though , given that the company has a huge disadvantage on iOS where Apple requires a 30 percent cut, and can be undercut on price by Apple Music since Apple doesn't need to pay that fee... and that's pre-installed on all iPhones.

The problem, for me, is that SoundCloud has all the music I want to listen to, while Spotify/Apple do not... but I'm also not willing to pay for a second music service. NYPost reports that Apple is actually considering buying SoundCloud, which would be an incredible coup de grâce to Spotify's discoverability, and would be a move that would make me consider an immediate switch.

I'll be watching the space closely in the coming year. There are a few ways to profitability for Spotify, SoundCloud and Apple... but almost all of them require muscling a few extra dollars off royalty payments which is no easy feat (unless you happen to be Apple).

05/25/2017

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