As far as a I can tell, the 'house concert' scene is semantically distinct from the 'house party' scene. I know of very few people putting on house concerts who allow acts with drummers at all. It's much more a way of turning pop/rock/folk/jazz into new-chamber music, playing quieter music in more intimate settings, optimised for the kind of listening that's required.
there's very little advantage in turning a house into a rock venue, for the legal reasons you've said, and because the scene is pretty well served by pubs and bars.
The house concert movement (such as it is) is about putting the emphasis back on the music, on interaction and learning from the musicians, on democratising the relationship between artist and audience (I came away with way more people I'd now class as friends from this tour than I did detatched 'fans'...)
There are, as you've said, already laws in place to deal with the noise intrusion and distruption. However, there's a huge scene for people playing smaller gigs, doing acoustic tours between band tours, and for artists that drop outside of what clubs deem to be good drinking music.
And that is not only a stellar business model, it's sustainable, very low risk, and the social return is enormous. Even if I was touring at break-even point, I'd rather play to 25 people who were engaged with what I'm doing than 150 who couldn't give a shit.
House concerts are a way to create that space, to keep it small and make it pay - no-one's getting rich from it, and that's exactly why it will work. Any attepts to 'game' it as a big business will head into the territory you outline and fall foul of various domestic laws.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will continue to make a reasonable living playing shows and selling CDs to people who want to hear it and are grateful for the chance to interact.
most of my comment got cut off somehow.. anyway, what I was saying was that in relation to the discussion of legality and scale, the tour that we did (the one linked to in the original post) broke no laws that I'm aware of, and certainly wasn't a nuisance. I know people who have their TV louder than our concerts are. None of our audiences were bigger than about 35, and we still managed to take home more money (in donations, none of the gigs were 'public' in the way that a gig in a bar would be, and most were actually by invite of the host only). Often, the audience was made up of neighbours, so cars being strewn around a neighbourhood wasn't a problem... You could easily have had three or four houses in a street holding events on the scale of the ones we played without there being any visible disruption to the normal functioning of people's lives.
"Scaled it, and it fails. So it's a nice aside but not a business model."
I'm not sure why it would need to 'scale' in the way you describe to be a business model. It's already MY business model, and a much more viable, less risky one than playing clubs/coffee houses ever was. But more than that, it's enjoyable, engaging, creatively inspiring and adaptable to the kind of event that best suits the music.
>>>Most of them end up with a knock on the door and the boys in blue complaining about the noise, or the cars parked all over, or any number of other issues that happen when you try to get 50 people into the same place at the same time.
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Harold,
As far as a I can tell, the 'house concert' scene is semantically distinct from the 'house party' scene. I know of very few people putting on house concerts who allow acts with drummers at all. It's much more a way of turning pop/rock/folk/jazz into new-chamber music, playing quieter music in more intimate settings, optimised for the kind of listening that's required.
there's very little advantage in turning a house into a rock venue, for the legal reasons you've said, and because the scene is pretty well served by pubs and bars.
The house concert movement (such as it is) is about putting the emphasis back on the music, on interaction and learning from the musicians, on democratising the relationship between artist and audience (I came away with way more people I'd now class as friends from this tour than I did detatched 'fans'...)
There are, as you've said, already laws in place to deal with the noise intrusion and distruption. However, there's a huge scene for people playing smaller gigs, doing acoustic tours between band tours, and for artists that drop outside of what clubs deem to be good drinking music.
And that is not only a stellar business model, it's sustainable, very low risk, and the social return is enormous. Even if I was touring at break-even point, I'd rather play to 25 people who were engaged with what I'm doing than 150 who couldn't give a shit.
House concerts are a way to create that space, to keep it small and make it pay - no-one's getting rich from it, and that's exactly why it will work. Any attepts to 'game' it as a big business will head into the territory you outline and fall foul of various domestic laws.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will continue to make a reasonable living playing shows and selling CDs to people who want to hear it and are grateful for the chance to interact.
cheers
Steve
...not sure what happened there...
most of my comment got cut off somehow.. anyway, what I was saying was that in relation to the discussion of legality and scale, the tour that we did (the one linked to in the original post) broke no laws that I'm aware of, and certainly wasn't a nuisance. I know people who have their TV louder than our concerts are. None of our audiences were bigger than about 35, and we still managed to take home more money (in donations, none of the gigs were 'public' in the way that a gig in a bar would be, and most were actually by invite of the host only). Often, the audience was made up of neighbours, so cars being strewn around a neighbourhood wasn't a problem... You could easily have had three or four houses in a street holding events on the scale of the ones we played without there being any visible disruption to the normal functioning of people's lives.
"Scaled it, and it fails. So it's a nice aside but not a business model."
I'm not sure why it would need to 'scale' in the way you describe to be a business model. It's already MY business model, and a much more viable, less risky one than playing clubs/coffee houses ever was. But more than that, it's enjoyable, engaging, creatively inspiring and adaptable to the kind of event that best suits the music.
win-win, from where I'm sat...
Legality...
>>>Most of them end up with a knock on the door and the boys in blue complaining about the noise, or the cars parked all over, or any number of other issues that happen when you try to get 50 people into the same place at the same time.