PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic More bad news about music sales

Regionally, no. The tourist season in South Florida dies at Easter and gets buried on Mother's Day. Like everybody else in the hospitality industry, we make more than 3/4 of our yearly income between Halloween and Easter.

When we first started, we did Cruise Ships from the beginning of April to the beginning of December, 3 years in a row. That was nice, but after 3 years it was enough, Too much time on the ship, and not enough time in the ports.

By our 4th year out we had enough local reputation to work all summer, so I declined to renew the Cruise Ship contract.

I happen to really like Summer in South Florida, so if I traveled to Georgia or Jacksonville (South Georgia to a Floridian) I'd have to pack up and leave the home and live in a motel.

I'd rather stay here and enjoy the rainy season. So I choose to stay and work perhaps 4-6 gigs a month instead of 4-6 gigs a week.

And by having slow summer gigging seasons, it gives me a chance to work on new Band-in-a-Box aftermarket products. I like making styles for BiaB because it gives me a chance to play drums, bass, and other instruments. I record parts live into a MIDI sequencer, and then take snippets of what I play and import them into the StyleMaker. I have to figure ways to work around the limitations of BiaB and when it's all done I have something I can listen to and be proud of.

Sometime late in the slow season I'll block out a few weeks to take a vacation. I like to travel, and I've been to 49 US States, much of Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico and down to Costa Rica in this hemisphere. I've also been to over a half dozen European countries and a few in Asia and Africa. I planned to go to Madagascar last summer, but they are having an epidemic of the Bubonic Plague so we drove to Idaho to see the eclipse instead and hit a few parks on the way back.

As much as I like traveling, being on the road with a lot of gear to schlep myself isn't appealing to me. Get off the gig, haul it all into the motel room, put it back in the van in the morning, set up, gig, tear down, and do it all over again.

I'm very happy with my life. I get to make a living doing music and nothing but music. Most of my money comes from gigging, and the Band-in-a-Box moonlighting gig is satisfying and makes a few bucks while I am having fun.

I wrote my first styles for myself. Being a guy who played drums, bass, guitar, keys, sax, and flute in working bands, I wanted styles that sounded more like what working bands did. I figured it would be a short-cut to making backing tracks. I had no intention of making a business out of it.

I gave away my styles to my musician friends who were into BiaB, and they all told me they liked them better than the PG Music styles (Aren't friends great!). A guitarist I know who used to teach jazz guitar at the University of Miami told me I should sell them. The idea mulled around in my head for a while, and I put a set up for sale via classified ads in EM and Keyboard magazines.

In a few months I found myself with a second business. I learned to be a mail order businessman, then when the Internet arrived here I embraced it, learned how to write web sites, and now it is decades later and the challenge is to come with new products that are both useful, and not similar to ones I've already released.

The gigging season is almost over, Easter comes early this year, and I'm actually looking forward to making new styles from the short ideas I've recorded during the busy season.

If I like what I do this summer, and feel proud enough to put my name on it, I'll release new products next winter.

Plus I'm also selling products made by other BiaB creators, David Bailey, Roy Hawkesford, Sherry Mayrent, and Jim Wedd. I send them a check 4 times a year and make them smile.

I do all of this instead of watching TV. I disconnected the cable in the late 1980s, never bothered to put up an antenna, and never got a digital converter. I'd rather live my life vicariously by doing things instead of living my life by watching actors pretend to do things. That's just me, and fortunately Leilani is the same way. Perhaps being weird together is one of the things that keeps us close.

And on every gig day I'll say to myself how lucky I am to be able to do this for a living. I could have been a printer like my dad or an insurance salesman or a 9-5 at a desk. Instead I get to pick up my sax, flute, wind synth, and guitar and play them to a live, appreciative audience over my self-created backing tracks, stick my face on the mic and sing, and tell bad jokes on the mic, and get paid for it.

What could be better than that?

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