Live from the inter-tidal zone

I've been thinking a lot lately about the challenges (and rewards) of presenting live, original music in local settings. For lack of a better word, we'll call that "folk" and I'll note that a lot of venues and promoters - many of them deeply devoted - have simply given up trying to make folk music work.

Sometimes people look for someone to blame, and the internet is an easy target. It's everywhere, it demands a lot of attention, it competes for time, and it facilitates things like file sharing that "threaten" musicians livelihoods.

I'm sympathetic to earnest, hard-working people trying to promote the music they love, but don't believe for a second that the internet threatens live, original music.

In my experience, the burgeoning digital networks we've all come to depend on are exposing all kinds of people to all kinds of music and musical experiences, AND making it easier to learn to play an instrument, AND bringing people together in new ways.

At the Corktown Uke Jam, where our value proposition is that music is shared rather than presented, we've got tons of young, eager uke players who learned to play "reasonably well" by looking at YouTube videos and checking out the vast resources available for their edification. It's a digital dream we're seeing come true.

The other thing we observe, as 40-50 ukers jam the back room of the Dominion in Toronto on a weekly basis, is that these same people are incredibly eager to share music in a real, live space with real people, precisely because they spend so much time connecting in other ways.

We've been thoroughly networked in the digital realm since our inception, with Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, torontoukes.com, our user forum, and various members' blogs, plus a documentarian, a podcaster and CBC radio all helping us spread the word.

And what's the word?

Live music in a community setting is alive and well, as long as you've got these things:

Interest, engagement, something to share, and a low barrier to participation.

For the business types, that's "market, marketing, product and price."

I'm not suggesting this formula will work for everyone, but I do believe blaming the modern media matrix for the decline of live organic culture misses out on that marvelous inter-tidal zone that is conducive to supporting new life.