Everyone was friendly when we played follow the loss leader.

Take a sec­ond and think about record stores and live music and counter that with the per­cep­tion that the world is abuzz with new music all the time. There’s more prod­uct than ever! But the record stores piece is old hat; what hap­pens when they’re gone is a dif­fer­ent mat­ter. But as the Times points out, does that mean that some unprof­itable gen­res will die off with them?

Sec­ond­ly, the live music busi­ness blows my mind. Sure “every band times two is going on tour right now,” as R5 Pro­duc­tions head Sean Agnew points out. Now they’re ask­ing for guar­an­tees too. But if this is a busi­ness, and a lot of busi­ness is about risk man­age­ment, why not ignore those bands? The easy answer is that because the busi­ness is so volatile, not book­ing a show could mean a tremen­dous missed oppor­tu­ni­ty. Yet it seems that a demand-ori­ent­ed prob­lem is being treat­ed as though it were a sup­ply-side prob­lem, which is trou­ble­some enough, but the greater ques­tion here is how are busi­ness­es like Live Nation using small­er oper­a­tions like R5?

Philadel­phia used to have near seam­less ver­ti­cal inte­gra­tion from the Khy­ber up to the Elec­tric Fac­to­ry, thanks in large part to ques­tion­able busi­ness rela­tion­ships that Clear Chan­nel cul­ti­vat­ed upon arriv­ing. Now that that’s fal­tered, or frac­tured, at least for the time being, are Agnew’s results the de fac­to A&R barom­e­ter for who jumps into the larg­er venues? Is Live Nation even inter­est­ed in these shows? Or has Philadel­phia reached a sat­u­ra­tion point since Jeff Sharlet’s now infa­mous Harper’s Week­ly arti­cle hit bookshelves?

If we back up a bit, these bands seemed ripe for the pick­ing, with low costs and high mar­gins, so that when packed into small­er spaces there was still ample return on invest­ment. Let blogs do the pro­mo­tion­al work in lieu of radio, which was more expen­sive any­way. It seemed the dawn of a new age for the music indus­try, seem­ing­ly still hun­gover from the last call of the dot com era.

But then the “new econ­o­my” went. No prob­lem. The focus nat­u­ral­ly shifts to the hous­ing, which is the crux of the cre­ative class net­work any­way, and the part that in the absence of mean­ing­ful work, made it afford­able to invoke the entre­pre­neur­ial spir­it. Now that hous­ing is in flux, does­n’t it fol­low that all the entre­pre­neur­ial trap­pings would be due for the cull? So is this then how Richard Flori­da’s beloved cre­ative bub­ble pops, like a H.C. Ander­sen punchline?

[See also: Baf­fler #16, as well as Urban For­tunes]