All this money to build venues while the local talent needed to perform on them either moves away or quits because they can’t make a living playing music.
We’re talking a venue with a capacity of 2,000 inside and 4,500 outside, all at a cost of millions.Īnd speaking of millions, how about the proposed $109 million music hall that Omaha Performing Arts wants to build downtown, designed to accommodate up to 3,000 standing patrons (because there are no fixed seats)?Īdd to that at least two more smaller stages getting ready to raise curtains, with more on the way. Shovels turned dirt for the new multimillion-dollar La Vista indoor club and amphitheater being brought to you by the fine folks at One Percent Productions, announced in 2018 but only just now getting all the paperwork in order to begin construction. Have there ever been more stages for live music?Īpparently not, and more are on the way. How we change the course, less so.įlying in the face of that mass migration is the number of music venues that dot the Omaha landscape: The Waiting Room, Reverb Lounge, Slowdown, The Jewell arenas like CHI Health Center, Baxter and Ralston arenas quality dive stages like O’Leaver’s, The Brothers, The Sydney, and just-opened boutique rooms like Bemis’ Low End. What it says about the direction of Omaha’s music scene is obvious. A few headed to other music cities, such as Nashville and Portland. Most who left last year are now Californians. Once upon a time, around the turn of the century, Omaha was a magnet for talented indie musicians who flocked here to be a part of “the next Seattle.” Well, those days are long, long gone. Lord knows how many others have high-tailed it this year. Sarah’s also in Icky Blossoms, while Graham’s the newest member of The Faint.Īnd those are just the ones I know. Sarah Bohling and Graham Patrick Ulicny of rising act Thick Paint. Singer/songwriter Jason Steady, once of the band Talking Mountain and more recently the guy behind Wolf Dealer and DJ and drummer Roger Lewis, one of the local legends this scene was built upon, whose projects include The Good Life and Oquoa
The dynamic duo of Todd and Orenda Fink, whose artistic output in addition to their own project, Closeness, includes Todd’s band The Faint and Orenda’s solo work and output as part of Azure Ray (her Azure Ray partner, Maria Taylor, left Omaha years ago) Brad Hoshaw, singer/songwriter extraordinaire and leader of Brad Hoshaw and the Seven Deadlies I can’t remember any year as devastating as the last in terms of musicians moving away from Omaha. There are four trends that deserve some reflection as we head into the roaring ‘20s: That, in a nutshell, is the music industry at the end of the teens decade. Touring for them has become a nonsensical money-losing endeavor if they don’t have merch to sell.Įven established indie artists are beginning to struggle to make money on tours. Eventually, those artists may post their recordings to Spotify or YouTube, only to earn (if they’re lucky) a few bucks in streaming revenue. I heard that story too many times last year from too many artists.
The new music business model: Record an album, upload it to Bandcamp, post a link to social media and get plenty of compliments, but no sales. All they want to hear when we’re on tour is the hits, anyway.”Īs I’ve said in past columns, never has there been a worse time to be a start-up band. As a result, for the first time in my memory, it is not uncommon to hear established artists say, “ Why should I record new music? Fans don’t buy records anymore. With streaming, paying artists has become an enormous shell game where no matter which shell they pick, nothing is found underneath, even for some established artists. At least with MP3s, artists had something to sell, sort of. Ten years later and a different shift is near completion - from MP3s as the music format of choice to streaming. Those shiny new iPods were changing everything. In 2009, we were just beginning to grasp how the move from CDs to MP3s was going to impact the music business. But I’m not going to get into a review of the last 10 years because I only have about 1,000 words to write about 2019, and what a doozy of a year it was in music, especially local music.īefore I get to that, I would be remiss not to mention the quantum shift in how people consume music over the past 10 years. It’s not only the end of the year it’s the end of a decade.