Ive been to some “sellout” 100 person venues that do a fine business (for the business, the band doesn’t get a huge payday) and I’ve never thought to myself “wow, most people would pay money for this”.
I’ve been in stadiums full of giddy teenagers, losing their minds over a collection of auto-tuned pop stars. Talent isn’t the issue. You don’t fill a venue by finding a talented performer, you fill it by advertising that venue relentlessly.
Shen Yuan sucks shit as a performance, but you’ll drown in their marketing material. Nickelback and Creed were mediocre bands on a good day but they packed venues for nearly a decade. The Korean pop bands are a dime a dozen, all with their own cult followings. They’ve got rotating casts of starlets who exist entirely to stay ahead of their leads catching a case of puberty.
Most people are just not that talented
Most people don’t make these performances their careers. Practice and training dramatically improve performance quality. And you can see younger actors who improve steadily over the course of their careers. Even the so-called greats have weak performances, where some off-broadway understudy could have filled the role better.
But once an individual becomes a celebrity, that powers their career simply by name recognition. Gerard Butler has been in a slew of crap movies doing crap performances. But he’ll forever by the “Gladiator” guy, so they’ll be using canned glitchy CGI of him long after he’s six feet under. Meanwhile, hacks like Paris Hilton and Tori Spelling can get placed in feature length films entirely thanks to their connected parents. Talent isn’t a factor in this business.
But that’s got nothing to do with being a grip or a lighting engineer or a hair-and-makeup tech or an intimacy coordinator. These are real and vital roles that take a career to perfect. They aren’t skills you have just falling off the back of the turnip truck.
A B.A. degree is like going out for the NFL
BAs don’t burn out inside five years once their knees start going. And cranking out quality audio/video/design is a very different thing than being tall enough to get a ball into a 10’ hoop. Nobody is going to be too short to develop artistic talent.
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I’ve been in stadiums full of giddy teenagers, losing their minds over a collection of auto-tuned pop stars. Talent isn’t the issue. You don’t fill a venue by finding a talented performer, you fill it by advertising that venue relentlessly.
Shen Yuan sucks shit as a performance, but you’ll drown in their marketing material. Nickelback and Creed were mediocre bands on a good day but they packed venues for nearly a decade. The Korean pop bands are a dime a dozen, all with their own cult followings. They’ve got rotating casts of starlets who exist entirely to stay ahead of their leads catching a case of puberty.
Most people don’t make these performances their careers. Practice and training dramatically improve performance quality. And you can see younger actors who improve steadily over the course of their careers. Even the so-called greats have weak performances, where some off-broadway understudy could have filled the role better.
But once an individual becomes a celebrity, that powers their career simply by name recognition. Gerard Butler has been in a slew of crap movies doing crap performances. But he’ll forever by the “Gladiator” guy, so they’ll be using canned glitchy CGI of him long after he’s six feet under. Meanwhile, hacks like Paris Hilton and Tori Spelling can get placed in feature length films entirely thanks to their connected parents. Talent isn’t a factor in this business.
But that’s got nothing to do with being a grip or a lighting engineer or a hair-and-makeup tech or an intimacy coordinator. These are real and vital roles that take a career to perfect. They aren’t skills you have just falling off the back of the turnip truck.
BAs don’t burn out inside five years once their knees start going. And cranking out quality audio/video/design is a very different thing than being tall enough to get a ball into a 10’ hoop. Nobody is going to be too short to develop artistic talent.