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.
