SOUND EFFECT
Free concerts are good for the music business — and we need more of them.
It is, as many have already noted, the Summer of the Music Festival in (and around) Toronto.
The announcement this month that the Pan Am/ Parapan Games would be throwing a music-heavy cultural festival of its own — and a generally free one, at that — for 35 days smack in the middle of that summer therefore triggered a bit of discussion ’round the office as to whether or not this might put undue strain on some of the ticketed (read: not free) festivals already saddled with a terrifying amount of competition this summer.
No more strain than T.U.R.F., Field Trip, North by Northeast, Bestival, Way Home, Riot Fest, Veld, OVO, Time, Boots & Hearts and the rest are already putting on each other, I’m guessing, since Panamania and the other festivals that offer free concerts this summer are really only competing for our time, not our dollars.
Beyond that, though, free music is good for business. There should, in fact, be a lot more free music piping out of Toronto’s public spaces whenever the weather allows it. Hell, even when the weather would prefer that we stayed inside. Those are the months we need music in our lives.
Seriously, if Toronto is to make hay of its recent claims that it is a world-class “music city” — and Toronto is indeed a world-class music city — then music should be a fixture on our streets. It should ooze from Toronto’s very pores. There should be no doubt when one sets foot in Toronto that one is standing in a capital-M Music City.
Maybe we don’t need to put guitars on the baggage claim carousels like they do in Austin, Texas, a “music city” with whom we signed a “music city alliance” in 2013, but our “music city”-ness should slap you right in the face. Otherwise the self-imposed title is just that: a self-imposed title.
If Toronto is to make hay of its recent claims that it is a world-class “music city” — and Toronto is indeed a world-class music city — then music should be a fixture on our streets
And again: free music is good for business. From July 10 to Aug. 15, for instance, Panamania will deliver such reasonably forward-thinking artists as the Flaming Lips, Death From Above 1979, Tanya Tagaq, the Roots, Janelle Monae, Chromeo, A Tribe Called Red and Lights for free to people who, for the most part, will probably be plugged more into sports than into current musical trends.
In family-friendly spaces such as Nathan Phillips Square and the Pan Am Park at Exhibition Place, too. That’s huge. You can fit something like 20,000 pairs of ears into Nathan Phillips Square, and you can bet that in that crowd somewhere there’s gonna be a kid or two or three who has his or her mind fully blown by the Lips (who even my mom would get into if she saw a performance) or DFA1979 or Tagaq, and goes home to download the records and then buys concert tickets the next time they come to town. Maybe for life.
That’s how it works. You can’t get into live music without seeing music live. The more people you put in front of live music, the more people are likely to catch the live-music bug.
Whoever programs the music at Panamania deserves kudos not just for programming around all the radius clauses in effect from all the other festivals, but for picking a collection of artists who, while not totally obscure, walk just enough outside the mainstream that they’re still ripe for discovery by many Pan Am Games patrons.
Consider it an investment. That’s good for everyone because you know damn well every one of those artists is coming back through town in the next 12 months to play another festival. brayner@thestar.ca