Does live electronic music make good business sense? (part 2)

In a recent post I talked about the cost/benefit ratio of live electronic music for composers and performers and concluded that whilst traditional live electronics delivers relatively low economic value, it provides high research value. In this post I will describe ways in which electronics can deliver both economic value and research value.

Repeat, repeat!

It’s true of all forms of music that repeat performances increase the benefit, cost ratio. For example, if a composer is paid £5,000 to compose a work for an ensemble of 8 musicians and the piece is rehearsed for 8 hours plus one sixth of a 2 hour concert at a rate per musician of £30/hour with production costs at £1500 and 30 people attend the concert at an average of £10 per ticket that’s a loss of 5000 + 1500 + (30 * 8.3) - 30 * 10 = £6450.

However if the piece is played on a tour with 6 concerts, with 2 hours rehearsal per concert to ‘sound check’ this introduces a per-concert profit of (30 * 10) - (30 * 2.3) = £231. So clearly, the more times an ensemble can successively perform a work, the more the economic gain from each performance balances out the initial cost of commission and rehearsal.

This can be generalised to the following equation:

Where L is the total loss, c is the commissioning cost, p is the initial production cost, r_n , a_n and t_n are the rehearsal cost, audience size and ticket price for the nth of N successive productions. With such a small profit margin as that shown above it would take 27 successive performances for the ‘piece’ to break even! This clearly illustrates that when commissioning new works, the cost of the comission and the likely production costs need to be balanced against the significance of the work in terms of the audience size it is likely to generate. This business model is epitomised in musical theatre with productions like Les Misérables seemingly on a constant loop at venues like the Queens Theatre in London.

The graph below shows a representation of total loss on a commissioned work as a function of the number of successive performances. However so far we have only been talking about ‘normal’ concerts that don’t involve live electronics. If we add electronics into the equation, we still get economic benefit from repeat performances, but this is offset by the additional production cost entailed by the electronics, especially if the setup is complex. In the following sections I will suggest possibilities for dealing with this scenario.

Standardisation

The currently exists no standard setup for live electronics performance. In fact, to my knowledge there isn’t even a standard recommendation for basic equipment like loudspeakers, mixing desks, laptops and software. Equipment is often sourced on a work-by-work basis entailing hire cost and hidden costs in terms of producers’ time researching and sourcing equipment. Few small ensembles have in-house systems. In addition composers and live electronics performers tend to use a variety ad-hoc and personalised software. This can be a good thing from a creative perspective, but can make it impractical to program multiple pieces with different live electronics requirements in the same concert.

One possibility for addressing these issues is to standardise. If we had a centralised equipment recommendation for live electronics performance it would enable new music ensembles and producers to start to build up a collection of equipment in-house, safe in the knowledge that they would be able to accommodate a wide range of works. Although this entails a high initial capital expenditure, it is soon outweighed by reduced production costs. Likewise, if composers and performers converge on certain standard protocols or setups they can be assured that their equipment will work ‘out of the box’ with other compliant systems.

The better the standardisation process and the more widely standards are adopted, the easier and more cost-effective repeat performances become. This reciprocal relationship is shown in the diagram below.

Innovation

So far live electronics has been discussed in relation to music for ‘acoustic instruments and live electronics’ where the electronic treatment is something conceptually separate ‘added to’ the instrumental sound. However, as pointed out by Alexander Jensenius in this post, there are a number of other live electronic idioms that allow for a far better benefit/cost ratio than traditional models.

With the growing prevalence and wide, relatively cheap availability of laptops and low cost or free software, technical virtuosi are emerging who can compose, develop live electronics systems and perform their own works without the need for external assistance or hired-in equipment.

This reduces costs during the composition process by removing the need for musical assistants and expensive studio time and reduces performance costs by removing the need for extra technicians etc. It also brings with it added artistic/research value in the form of new artistic idioms associated with laptop performance and the development of new interfaces/systems for musical expression.

Conclusions

In this post I have argued that whilst live electronics composition and performance carries with it a high economic cost, this cost can be greatly reduced by balancing commissioning/production costs against repeat successive performances, developing and adopting standardised equipment and software and through composers and performers adopting new more integrated approaches to electronics.

In the next and final post in this series I will examine some of the software barriers to the wider adoption of live electronics and suggest ways in which these problems might be resolved.