I’m listening to this new Tom Petty album.\u00c2\u00a0 I haven’t reached a final verdict.\u00c2\u00a0 But I already know it’s about listening.\u00c2\u00a0 About dropping the needle and letting the entire opus play again and again as it sinks into your brain. It’s not about the hit single, but the experience.<\/p>\n
And it used to be this experience was translated live.\u00c2\u00a0 You bought the new album to hear it live on the subsequent tour, maybe not start to finish, but the lion’s share of the album would be played.\u00c2\u00a0 You see careers were going forward, they weren’t calcified.\u00c2\u00a0 But now new music is anathema.\u00c2\u00a0 The audience doesn’t want to hear it, it signals the bathroom break.<\/p>\n
But is it the audience’s fault?\u00c2\u00a0 Now that tickets cost in excess of $100, you expect the hits.\u00c2\u00a0 You’re no longer on an adventure, you want insurance.\u00c2\u00a0 But if the buy-in is less, if you’re on an equal footing, you want the act to take you on an exploratory journey.<\/p>\n
What if acts toured in venues where only their hard core could fit, and they played the new album, like in the old days…\u00c2\u00a0 Less revenue would be generated, albums might never break big, but you’d have a healthy scene, satiated fans and musicians.\u00c2\u00a0 I mean how can the artists stand to play the same damn songs night after night?<\/p>\n
You had to buy the new album before the show.\u00c2\u00a0 You didn’t want to be in the dark.\u00c2\u00a0 You had your favorites, you wanted to hear what they sounded like live.\u00c2\u00a0 And you knew you had to go to the show to hear them, because next time around they’d be replaced by the subsequent new album, with only a couple of cuts surviving.<\/p>\n
Now acts play entire albums.\u00c2\u00a0 Old albums.\u00c2\u00a0 To try and get you to pay a fortune to relive your high school days. Interesting, but if looking back were so damn good our reflections would get younger every time we looked in the mirror.<\/p>\n
Now in many cases the musicians are no longer young.\u00c2\u00a0 They don’t want to go on the road in buses, never mind vans, they don’t want to work that hard for so little money.\u00c2\u00a0 Or else their heads have been turned by past success, they’ve got lifestyles befitting the rock stardom of yore, which exists for almost no one today.\u00c2\u00a0 Therefore, some acts wouldn’t want to play theatres, never mind clubs.\u00c2\u00a0 They wouldn’t want to come home with six figures in their pockets instead of seven.<\/p>\n
But imagine if Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers did a theatre tour, and tickets were twenty bucks.\u00c2\u00a0 Hell, that might be unrealistic, let’s say forty bucks.\u00c2\u00a0 Can you imagine the demand, the excitement?<\/p>\n
And you can imagine fans boogieing to "Mojo", because that’s what it would be, the "Mojo" tour.<\/p>\n
Blame "Behind The Music".\u00c2\u00a0 It set in stone everybody’s career, acts have been touring Live Nation sheds ever since on this nostalgia.\u00c2\u00a0 But now that rarely works.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s time to dig down deep and reinvigorate.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s the acts that must demand audiences listen to new material.\u00c2\u00a0 And the way they’ve got to do it is through enticement, small cheap tours playing to fans.\u00c2\u00a0 If you don’t want to hear the new album, you don’t go.\u00c2\u00a0 And there’s no Amex pre-sale.\u00c2\u00a0 As a matter of fact, it would be best if tickets were sold in lineups outside the box office.\u00c2\u00a0 How dedicated a fan are you?\u00c2\u00a0 Are you willing to miss a day of work or a Saturday morning round of golf?<\/p>\n
This would be a bigger story, in both the mainstream press and word of mouth, than another overpriced greatest hits tour.<\/p>\n
The acts have to save the music.\u00c2\u00a0 Believe me, the labels and Live Nation won’t.<\/p>\n
P.S. Best track I’ve found so far on "Mojo" is "Lover’s Touch".\u00c2\u00a0 It’s dark and quiet like those tunes on Petty’s first album, it’s an amplified "Luna".\u00c2\u00a0 "Mojo" works first and foremost because Tom Petty and his band are fans, they love the music, they’re driven to create.\u00c2\u00a0 Now that’s very different from the acts du jour.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s about looking inward, not outward, it’s about digging down deep in the darkness of the studio, not going out to clubs so you can be featured on TMZ.\u00c2\u00a0 But that’s what music is, something you hear, not something you see.\u00c2\u00a0 Something that touches your inner soul.\u00c2\u00a0 You know it when you hear it.\u00c2\u00a0 But it requires dedication on the creative end.\u00c2\u00a0 TP has it.\u00c2\u00a0 It comes through in the grooves of "Mojo".<\/p>\n
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