Archive: Category: Yawp (yarp)

Been a long time since we posted a Yawp. But it’s good that our infrastructure is ready for the eventual collapse of social media as we know it!

We’re not particularly successful grant writers, but that doesn’t stop us from trying. Whether we get the grant we’re applying for or not, the exercise of objectively examining what we’re doing, what we’ve done, and what we want to do going forward is super valuable.

We were recently awarded a project grant from the Vermont Arts Council – our first project grant award from the Council! – to dip into waters we thought that we never really wanted to… until it became apparent that we really ought to.

Live-streams.

Lots of live-streams don’t do anybody any favors. If we couldn’t do it right, really right, we didn’t want to do it at all. Doing it right isn’t as easy as pointing a phone at the stage. Our thing is to help the performers and presenters look and sound as pro as we can… anything less is a disservice.

Excerpts from our grant proposal follow. We’re sharing it for a couple reasons: It helps ‘splain our purpose generally, and our intention for the live-streams specifically.

Stage 33 Live:

1) is a multidisciplinary incubator helping emerging local and regional musicians, language creatives, actors, and academics gain exposure and generate career capacity by documenting their original work in paid performance and presentation before a live audience;

2) disseminates the produced documentation at no cost to the participants — the aggregate online view count is [in excess of 51,000] at this writing, with plans to produce for public radio and television;

3) is a local arts-economy driver contributing to Bellows Falls’ and southeastern Vermont’s reputation as an engaging destination;

4) provides the low-income local community access to entertainment, education, and art.

The median household income in Bellows Falls is the second-from-the-bottom among Vermont’s incorporated villages — less than half the national median, with poverty exceeding 25%. The education rate is lower than average, and there are no local institutions of higher learning.

Our performances and presentations entertain, educate, and inspire an underserved and financially challenged local community; boost emerging creatives from within the community; uplift local pride; and bring outside dollars into the local economy by attracting attendees from other places. (Along with local people, four states were represented at one memorable event.)

Most of the emerging creatives we serve are too new and small for the region’s bigger performing arts centers’ consideration. Being presented professionally to an attentive, appreciative audience is a rare opportunity for them, and the documentation we produce helps them advance their careers.

To date we’ve documented more than 250 participants, including LGBTQ+, disabled people, and BIPOC, and we’re eager to serve all underrepresented groups.

In addition to the documentation’s value, featured performers and presenters receive program income that generaly meets or exceeds the recommended Fair Trade minimum wage determined by the American Federation of Musicians. We anticipate that in the endemic era of COVID-19 attendance will rise to, and eventually exceed, pre-COVID numbers.

Established performers and presenters are also welcomed, as their participation boosts the project’s visibility and perceived value.

We intend to create a permanent live-streaming infrastructure to better serve emerging creatives and the rural, low-income, often transportation-challenged regional community. If a larger audience of convenience is coincidentally reached that’s a plus but not the point.

Particular emphasis is on the word “permanent”.

Most of the larger, more well-heeled performance centers in and around our rural area used a portion of the pandemic relief funds they received to invest in web-streaming capabilities. In the absence of touring acts and individuals, they used that new power to shine more light than normal on local and regional performers and presenters.

We rejoiced.

However, now that audiences are being welcomed back into those performance centers, it appears that nearly all of them in the region, both nonprofit and for-profit, have stopped offering live-streams of their performance events — we’ve found only two exceptions. And with artists of stature from farther afield increasingly available, local and regional emerging performers and presenters are again falling by the wayside.

It’s enormously important, of course, that performance events are beginning to rebound. But it’s unfortunate that a wholesale return to business-as-usual means that people unable to travel to the venues for any of a variety of reasons, or who can’t afford in-person tickets, have lost the opportunity they briefly had to appreciate — and emerging performers to create — content on a more level playing field.

Fiscally, the decision those performance centers are making is understandable. Most live-streams don’t monetize well, if it all, especially those of limited local or regional interest. Low production values and poor marketing are a contributing factor. There’s also a pervasive supposition that web streams ding the value and ticket-sales of live performances; contrary to that belief, pre-pandemic evidence shows that a venue’s in-person attendance often increases over time if they consistently offer well-produced web streams of live events.

It should be noted that the regional performance centers that also offer educational classes are largely continuing the educational tracks online, which is terrific. That’s almost certainly an economic decision — it’s simply cheaper to do it that way than in the facility — but that’s OK. It improves participation opportunities for underserved populations.

Like other performance venues, we also pursued pandemic relief funding with an eye toward establishing a live-stream infrastructure during the shutdown. As a volunteer-run organization, most of the pandemic relief-and-pivot programs (like PPP, SOS / SVOG, and VERG) were off the table for us because institutional payroll loss was a requisite. The income we create for local and regional artists and academics that was lost wasn’t an allowable factor.

With the large performance centers now dropping the live-streams they leaned on to get through the shutdown and gatherings restrictions, and now cutting back on featuring less established performers and presenters as bigger touring artists are available again, it turns out to be even more important for us to establish live-stream capacity.

The purpose of this request is to keep opportunities to participate alive that are rapidly falling by the wayside again in our area for the under-represented, forgotten, overlooked, struggling, and ignored as the pandemic becomes endemic.

Any increase in live digital content delivery will be more than what we’re able to offer right now. We currently have no live-streaming capability.

However, our most effective mission fulfillment is already digital, in the form of videos we produce of the performances and presentations. The online view count at this writing is [in excess of 51,000]. Viewership of the archived content has been steadily rising throughout the pandemic.

Our intention is that the live-streams won’t be archived, in order to give them FOMO value and urgency; the produced documentation provides more effective impact as the permanent record. However, the footage from the live-stream cameras will be captured and used in the edited documentation — the live-stream infrastructure will be fully integrated into the overall mission fulfillment process rather than being a single-purpose one-and-done without lasting purpose and value.

Live-streams would be at the option of the performer or presenter — not all will be comfortable with it, and the decision to decline for any reason will be honored. We anticipate that the preponderance of participants will embrace the added value.

Short-term success of adding live-streaming will be any additional ears and eyes giving attention to the performers and presenters. Long-term success will be both increased viewership and in-person ticket sales over time. Our two prongs — the live part and the documentation part — are symbiotic: The success of one supports the success of the other.

Some of the necessary hardware is already in hand, and all of the necessary basic knowledge and skills.

It needs to be noted that there are inexpensive off-the-shelf live-streaming solutions available, and their quality is commensurate with their cost. Our intention in all aspects of the work is to present the local and regional emerging performers and presenters as professionally as possible to best highlight their potential and help them advance their careers. If our presentation capability is no better than they can do in their own living room, with poor sound and marginal video, they would — in plain truth — be better off doing it themselves in their living room.

If we knew then what we do now, we’d have started looking for ways to build out a web streaming infrastructure before COVID-19 was even a thing. Since the March 2020 shutdown, the subsequent gatherings restrictions, and the brief lull before the Omicron flare-up, we were able to host just 11 events. During the same period, events that would have included 89 individual participating creatives were canceled due to COVID-19. Half or more of those could likely have been converted to web streams.

At this point that’s academic — but as performance centers are coming back to life and collectively deciding to no longer stream their performance events, we’re seeing that establishing our own infrastructure is important to pursue on behalf of those we serve, both on and in front of the stage… not as an existential stopgap, but as a permanent expansion of our mission fulfillment.

From the beginning, we’d engineered the project to be able to operate at an insanely low overhead because it was the only way we could pull it off. We knew we could get through brief stretches of having zero funds — until the next insurance bill came, which would kill us.

When everything ground to a halt due to COVID-19 and we found that we were ineligible to apply for most pandemic relief programs as a result of choosing to pay the creatives before we started paying ourselves, death by insurance bill came perilously close to becoming reality.

Our operating costs and nearly all of our upgrades (including cameras, microphones, seating, and stage lights) have been primarily funded by small donations over extended periods. Those donations dried up with the majority of our events canceled for almost two years… and the local community is currently even more tapped out than usual due to the pandemic.

COVID-19 was a rigorous test as event after event after event was canceled. Both morale and the bank account sunk farther and farther until they hit bottom, then started getting swallowed up in the silt. To our great relief and gratitude, in August 2021 we were awarded a small Cultural Recovery Grant by VAC to catch up on deferred bills and equipment maintenance, support reopening, and provide a cushion while we get our feet back.

We spent a considerable amount of time and effort during the shutdown working on behind-the-scenes things, including remixing and re-editing a lot of the documentation with the improved tools that we’ve acquired along the way, streamlining our process and establishing improved baselines. We also found cost-free ways to fine-tune our equipment and make adjustments in the performance space. As a result, what we do going forward will be even better.

During the long darkness we managed to gain steady traction on Facebook, Instagram, newsletter subscriptions, and most particularly on YouTube.

Indications are that in-room audience momentum will resume its upward trajectory if COVID-19 variants continue to wane in severity and vaccinations continue to be effective.

Performer and presenter enthusiasm has absolutely grown. Our wait-list is in excess of the number of dates that will be available on our upcoming calendar. To have demand exceed our capacity is gratifying, but alarming.

From time to time we write things down that we don’t quite understand as a way to process our thoughts. The wisdom of sharing these exercises is debatable.

Dave Ostrowski, the Buffalo NY musician known as Davey O who graced our stage back in 2019, shared a Guardian article with the headline “This should not be normalised: Why musicians are cancelling tours to protect their mental health” on his Facebook page.

The article is about way bigger fish than will ever darken our doorstep, but it glances off a couple experiences we’ve been having here lately. This particular passage jumped out:

“… an industry desperate to spring back to life after a devastating pandemic, with turbo-charged touring and promotional schedules to make up for perceived lost time.”

We could be wrong, but there seems to be at least twice as many shows going on a short drive in any direction from here as there was before the pandemic. Is it euphoria? Desperation? Probably neither… probably, like us, it’s just actual people trying to make their thing be the best thing it can be. There are also new small rooms jumping into the fray, mostly coffeehouse and microbrewery type places trying out live music as an add-on.

We celebrate anything that helps raise the reputation of southeastern Vermont and southwestern New Hampshire as a destination for music and performance and art. Not to mention it being a boon for local and regional musicians and performers.

On the other hand, wearing our venue hat, there’s only so much audience to go around, and by all accounts it’s a smaller audience than it used to be.

Stage 33 Live’s shows are still getting column inches in local press and getting the same social media outreach, still landing on good calendars near and far, all the things… but on-the-ground traction is more scarce than ever.

Our plodding once-every-three-weeks schedule (which may do us no favors) is unchanged, though we did run summer shows this year, something we don’t normally do, to try to accommodate a few of our 36 (three dozen!) dates that were postponed by the pandemic. So we were guilty of helping create an event-overload situation for a little while by doing shows during a stretch when we normally wouldn’t.

We anticipated poor attendance at those summer shows, honestly, based on past experience. But it was worse than expected. Even under normal circumstances there’s just so much going on in the summer. And people want to be outside. Plus COVID hesitancy was still pretty strong, and still lingers. For us, the recovery has been a lot more famine than feast.

Another new wrinkle is that we keep getting whomped by bigger shows. We’re not crying foul, it’s not the responsibility of other places to accommodate us. It doesn’t matter if almost all of our shows are booked and on our website more than a year in advance, it just doesn’t. Touring acts are available when they’re available; tour routing is a tricky business, and venues that want to book touring performers need to book them when the performers have an open date.

And that’s how the marketplace works anyway — it’s up to the little dogs to get out of the way of the big dogs. That’s why we designed our calendar to revolve almost entirely around Sundays (with a brief foray into Third Thursdays). Time was that other area venues — both bigger than us, and smaller than us — rarely ran Sunday (or Thursday) shows. It was a nicely balanced situation, but it’s different lately. We’re not harboring ill will or bad feelings, just saying what is.

It’s terribly important for local and regional establishments to flourish, and for the industry at large to recover. That kinda goes without saying. The world doesn’t revolve around us even though we think it oughtta.

An acquaintance who works for a pretty big national booking agency with some pretty big-name clients told us that ticket sales are fluctuating insanely for touring acts — one night sells out, the next has five people. To us that seems to indicate that some markets are oversaturated.

We don’t know if things are panning out for other venues and hosts like they are for us, but from our vantage it seems like there’s going to be a market correction at some point. Most likely a drawn-out transition. Since we’re not a normal venue with a dollars-are-the-bottom-line endgame, we expect to still be here after the dust settles. Probably.

The part that’s super-hard for us to swallow is that at Stage 33 Live the performers are paid by door receipts. Prior to the pandemic, that program income generally met or exceeded the recommended Fair Trade Minimum Wage suggested by the American Federation of Musicians (for solo players, anyway). But since the shutdown ended and the gatherings restrictions were lifted, that’s only been achieved once. Ouch. Since most of the artist participants are local and regional, most of the money they make stays local and regional, and that benefits everybody.

Paying the performers and presenters before we pay ourselves violates good business practice and is contrary to the counsel of every nonprofit advisor we’ve come across; nevertheless, we pay the artists first. Artists, especially emerging artists, take it in the shorts entirely too often.

Institutionally, we don’t take a cut of the door, or of merch sales, or of tips, and we don’t have income from bar sales. We do have stickers available at performances for a buck each though. Not sure that we’ve actually sold any.

A saving grace for our performers and presenters is that the documentation part of our mission fulfillment has legs — though it sadly doesn’t generate income for anybody but Google, which owns YouTube. (Why don’t we pay for a decent hosting service? That takes money that we don’t have. Why don’t we stick it behind a paywall? We’re not convinced that wouldn’t work against what we’re trying to accomplish.)

Our aggregate online video view count at this writing exceeds 55,000 and viewership has been steadily rising. For a dinky listening room in a dinky village in a dinky state hosting mostly emerging artists, that’s amazing. It’s the equivalent of hosting 1,375 sold-out shows — which by our calendar would take almost 70 years.

Live-streaming is also on the way. It had a couple setbacks but is inches close to launch. For us, the short-term success of that will be any additional attention on the performers and presenters, and long-term success will be both increasing viewership and in-person ticket sales over time. The two prongs — the live part and the documentation part — are intended to be symbiotic: The success of one creating the success of the other.

Anyhoo, we persist. We think what we’re doing is important.

The bloggy Yawp Yarp section of the website has been hidden for a good while, and nobody seems to have missed it. That’s OK. The infrastructure is here for when social media finally gasps its last.

This is something we’re going to send to the media outlets where we send press releases. We’re posting it here just so it’s somewhere handy. And maybe to share on social media. 😉

– – –

Hi editors and others,

There’s been personnel churn at several outlets since we started Stage 33 Live about six years ago, and because we’re such an abnormal thing — not actually a venue, not actually a business — we want to re-introduce ourselves in bullet points and short chunks. Even if you’re already familiar with us, there might be tidbits that you didn’t know.

So this isn’t actually meant for publication, it’s meant for you. In the spirit of helpfulness, so you know what you’re dealing with.

Thanks to each of you for the important work you do. It’s appreciated, even if it may not seem like it some days. We know that feeling too.

– – –

• Stage 33 Live in Bellows Falls, Vermont, is a 501(c)3 nonprofit 40-seat listening room in a former factory, entirely run and done by volunteers from the community, from administration to sweeping up.

• Listening rooms turn the bar / restaurant / coffeeshop / brewpub dynamic on its head — the performers aren’t an add-on, they’re the whole point. It’s about immersing in the performance. Like the million-dollar performance centers, but without the million-dollar part. And way more intimate, without glitz and flash.

• We’re not a full-time business. We do this one thing about 18-ish times a year, give or take.

• The featured performers receive 100% of the ticket sales.

◦ We have operational expenses even though payroll isn’t one of them — random donations and occasional small institutional grants, for which we’re endlessly grateful, keep us afloat. (We would like to get paid someday if we can figure out how to make that happen.)

• Our nonprofit mission is multi-pronged. The main prongs are:

◦ To help emerging musicians and language creatives find ears and eyes by documenting their original work in paid performance and presentation in front of a live audience, and then disseminating that documentation;

• and also welcome artists who are more established — their participation gives the project more visibility and perceived value.

◦ To provide the community affordable yet high quality live entertainment.

◦ To contribute to Bellows Falls’ and southeastern Vermont’s reputation as a desirable destination.

We record and film all the performances and post the clips online. Getting the videos out in the world gives the performers extra visibility to a much wider audience, and raises awareness that Bellows Falls (and southeastern Vermont / southwestern New Hampshire) is a pretty cool place.

The documentation prong of the mission is the most successfully fulfilled prong by a wide margin. Our online view count is in excess of 81,500 (as of October 2023), averaging more than 2,500 a month and growing. To have 80,000 people churn through the room as live audience members, we’d have to do 2,000 sold-out shows. At the actual rate we do shows, that would take 100 years.

We also plan to produce programming for regional radio and TV from the archived material. That may seem like an audacious conceit, but everything we’ve ever done has been plucky.

New audience members tend to be surprised to find performers who are as good as, and sometimes better than, bigger fish in bigger rooms with bigger tickets. Not every time, but more than would reasonably be expected. Most people who play here are still in the ascendancy of their arc, but there are also touring performers who deliberately prefer to play small listening rooms over larger venues.

We book first-come first-served from a wait list because the biggest obstacle emerging performers face are the gatekeepers. We kept a Grammy nominee dangling for over a year while people with no name recognition — but who were in line first — got their turns.

We’re already booked full for more than a year, through the end of 2024, and already have more performers on the wait list than we’ll have dates available in 2025.

All booked shows are on our website, www.stage33live.com — as are all the past ones, and all the videos.

• The building we’re in, 33 Bridge Street, is part of the old Moore and Thompson mill complex and is on the National Register of Historic Places.

◦ The building is now a creative economy incubator, with tenants including fine artist Charlie Hunter, hot-glassworks Sherwin Art Glass and Kekic Glass, photographer Gail Hynes, artisan soapmakers Grace and Miss Mouse Soaps, and community radio station WOOL-FM.

• We’re renewably powered with electricity generated by the hydropower dam facility just steps away from the front door.

• Our intention is not to be in competition with other venues and events, but to complement them. Most of our shows are on Sundays for that reason.

Our website has an unwieldy amount of information if you want more, www.stage33live.com

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