The Sound of Displacement

The podcast explores whether the Denver music scene is biased towards local and independent musicians. The host interviews musicians who believe that independent venues are selling out to national promoters, making it difficult for local and national artists to play in Denver. They discuss issues such as low payment for musicians, corporate takeovers of venues, and the challenges faced by musicians in making a living. However, there is hope as there are still opportunities for musicians and recent lawsuits against Live Nation and AEG may bring about fairness in the industry. Hi, this is Chris Sanford and this is my podcast titled, Is the Denver Music Scene Biased Toward Local and Independent Musicians. So in this podcast, I'll be exploring the question that many independent venues are selling out to national promoters. So does this indeed make it difficult for local and national tourniquets to play in Denver? And so we're going to listen to a couple of interviews and get some background knowledge of my experience in the Denver music scene and see if that has had any effect in the past five years, especially of the corporate behemoths taking over the independent venues and basically pushing many musicians out. And is it an obstacle to playing in Denver? Do many bands simply skip Denver because they cannot play the Bluebird, they cannot play the Ogden, they cannot play the Gothic because they have to be part of Live Nation? Hi, this is Chris Sanford and I'm here for my podcast about the Denver music scene. I'm here at the American Music School in Lakewood, Colorado with nationally renowned mandolin player, Emily Wilson, who's played thousands of shows and been on multiple national tours. And we're going to ask her some questions about what she feels is the Denver music scene. Let me thank you for that, Emily. So Emily, we've known each other for a while. You play so many shows outside of Colorado. What is the reason for that? Do you think it's just that as a bluegrass musician you're pushed out or what would you say the reason is on that? No, there's a ton of bluegrass in Colorado. There's several groups that get together almost daily. There's the Colorado Bluegrass Music Society and they keep a list of the local jams and stuff, which is where you just get together and play usually at a bar or a park and just play music together. And there's one every night of the week that I know of except for Friday. So it's almost non-stop. I think the main thing I run into with playing in Colorado, and especially in the Denver area, is that most of the venues don't want to pay musicians because it's oversaturated. I feel the same way about the city of Nashville itself. My bands that I play with fairly regularly, one of them is called Roadside Distraction and that's a trio. And really, we rarely play on the home front in either location. And if we do, it's a house concert or something like that. I know someone called me earlier today telling me about a local venue that recently switched ownership and asked them to renegotiate the contract, which was originally paying the band $250 for a three-hour show. And the issue with that is this is a six-piece band, so we're already cutting it pretty tight. If you're splitting $250 six ways, that's not a good deal. And they wanted to renegotiate where the venue charges for the sound guy, so the guy running the board, and then only gives a small, like, 30 percentage of the door. And that's not going to work for anyone. You're not going to feed a six-piece band on that. You're going to be limited to your local players that aren't really doing it for the money. Yeah, so you feel that a lot of musicians are kind of pushed out because of the way that venues change over and because they're taken over by corporate entities and they're uniting and it's just not as independent as it used to be, right? Yeah, there's a lot of that, and it's just, and even the small venues that aren't corporate-owned don't want to pay more than $300 for a band for the night, and that's not going to work because, like, most of us, I think, need to aim for at least $30 an hour to pay our bills, and you're only playing for two hours a day and they don't want to pay for your rehearsal time, so it just doesn't work. Yes, it's that old joke of $5,000 in equipment, $250 for gas to go play a $30 gig. Yeah, and I wish it was $5,000 in equipment. Okay, well, great. That helps me to summarize just how corporate the scene has gotten and how it can be harder for independent musicians to get into places like Goosetown and all these other venues that, unless you're part of Live Nation or AEG, it's just really hard. Yeah. So I thank you so much for your time, and if you could just play a little lick as we end this, that would be fantastic. And we thank you so much. So as we can see that it's getting harder and harder for local musicians. I was able to go down to Record Store Day and speak briefly with Jim Nash and Danny Flesher, who founded Wax Tracks Records, where I've been shopping for many years, and they usually have live bands playing for the fans who are coming in for Record Store Day. And they were telling me that Tammy, who is from Dressy Bessy and completes the opening riff of this podcast, the first three times she tried to play Record Store Day, the neighbors had basically petitioned because it was live music and they didn't want to hear it. And they had to fight that in court, and they won because they were able to keep it at a lower decibel range. So when a musician from Denver, nationally known, can't play literally on a street corner in Denver without a problem from everybody, you know that you really do have an issue. And this is Chris Sanford on interview number two for my podcast about the Denver music scene. And right now I am interviewing a predominant bluegrass musician, probably one of the best banjo players in all of Colorado, from Parker, Colorado, a very dear friend, and his name is Mike Roshwell. How are you doing today, Mike? Good, good. Great. So, Mike, you play a ton of gigs. You've been playing gigs for years. You're a multi-instrumentalist. What issues have you encountered, either playing solo or playing with the groups and all the different bluegrass jam sessions of just trying to play gigs and do everything that you guys do in Denver and the surrounding areas? Well, I would say, for me, there's a lot of places that want music that don't want to pay a lot. So doing music, especially for musicians that are in it as their sole career, it's a huge challenge to actually make money doing this. And so, you know, I really feel like it's a struggle. There are certain avenues, there are certain pockets that I think you can get involved with, like the churches, for example, the worship music stuff. You know, you just have to be, I guess, sourceful to actually make it go a bit. But I do think there are a lot of opportunities out there. It's just a challenge to kind of hunt those down. When I interviewed Emily, she said kind of the same thing, and what she'd encountered was that some of the places are requiring a pay-for-play, where you have to pay up front just to play and then kind of like a reimbursement. I don't know if you've experienced that. Is that something you guys are familiar with? I haven't had that happen to me. I have heard about it, but it's not something that I've personally come across yet. But I do know that it's a tough thing as far as, it's really the networking and just finding a lot of, there's actually quite a bit of work that goes into, for example, some of the bands that I've been in. There's somebody in that band that usually takes on that role to try to get work and book gigs. It's not impossible, but it is quite a bit of elbow grease, quite a bit of time that you have to invest in trying to get decent paying jobs. I think if you can break into the wedding scene and the corporate scene, there's definitely money to be made. But it takes a lot of work to get into those circles and build those relationships. So it's definitely not easy. It's not an easy thing to do. Somebody has to spend a lot of time doing it. Yeah, because I remember years ago when I was gigging, we kind of just called the venue and they had an open booking, unless it was a national act. And you could just kind of go in there and set it up and you cut the profits. But now with Live Nation and AEG gobbling up all these independent venues, you're kind of shut out of it. So yeah, that really helps me to get a better understanding of it, because a lot of what you said mirrored what Emily had said. So I do appreciate your frank candor on that. And I know you don't have a banjo available to play because you just got home from work. So I will add some banjo tracks behind this to give you the credibility to use. So again, Mike, I thank you for that. And I will go ahead and as soon as we're done, we'll send you a copy. So what do we draw in conclusion for this? Well, we see that a lot of musicians are being pushed out by the economy, by greedy bar owners, club owners, and so forth. We also see that the corporate takeover of AEG and Live Nation has pushed a lot of bands to the fringes. But there is still hope for everything. And that's something we really want to keep in mind as we support local musicians. Something to keep in mind would be the Underground Music Festival, which is at the end of July. That is all local musicians. And it's a great place to see over 300 bands. But as we look at this in retrospect, as I was conducting all of my information for the podcast, an anonymous bartender from the Bluebird called me and said, I need you to read an article in the Wall Street Journal. And as I read that article, I couldn't believe what I saw. As we were composing this, Live Nation and AEG are being sued by the Department of Justice for the exact same thing that we were doing on this podcast. Price gouging, ticket gouging, pay for play, all of that kind of stuff. And this could essentially break open the entire industry and make it more fair and suitable for everyone. So is there hope for everyone? There absolutely is. And that's just something we need to keep in mind and look forward to what happens with the litigation and the lawsuits and helping local and national musicians. And that will conclude this podcast. And I did promise one of my fellow students that I would end with some kind of metal. So here we go. Transcribed by https://otter.ai