How can we apply that to live entertainment? I’ll mostly leave that to your imagination except to say a couple of things: would it really be so bad to combine an ‘extremely traditional attitude’ toward doing the performances right with the modern tools and technology to make the audience experience and audience connection much, much better? I’d call that a good place to start.

Although I have a feeling Bob was just having a little fun by doing it this way, some commenters on the story actually felt that this was an important step forward for the concert industry.  This is what I would call ‘fundamentalism.’  In other words, the modern world is so complex and potentially unpleasant that the only way to bring order to this mad, mad situation is to go all the way back: line-up for a few hours with a fistful of bills.  Get back to the garden, man.  It sounds like a nightmare to me, but as I read the comments on the story and other responses around the web, a lot of people saw it differently.

The supportive comments sounded about like this: “I think it’s awesome that he is more concerned about fans getting tickets at fair prices than about making money for himself.” Or ”
“I *chose* to take the time as I did because it was an adventure” or “Not everything is about practicality anyway – lol! We’re talking about a rock concert.”   Fair enough.  Some people got into the idea of standing in line for several hours with their fellow Dylan fans as an essential part of the ‘experience.’  The venue even put out some street performers to keep them entertained.  What can I say that’s bad about that?  If people actually enjoyed that part of it, then, well, it worked.  It was hours and hours of free entertainment.

I sat down to write this piece with a mostly negative predisposition, and even still, if this practice were widely adopted, it would be a disaster.  It’s funny how people can say they want to save the service fees for a ticket purchase and then take a vacation day to wait for a ticket.  Let’s say the service fee is $10 on a $60 ticket.  If you’re waiting four hours and taking a vacation day, the only people breaking even on that trade are 12 year olds building iPods in China.

And the idea that this process is “democratic,” as some people suggested in the comments, can’t really be defended because this process heavily favors those with lots of time.  A democratic process would be much more straightforward:  everyone who wants tickets signs up in advance online with a credit card, and given a lottery number.  Then at some point, there’s a computerized lottery wherein seats are randomly assigned to different lottery numbers.  If the show is oversubscribed, some numbers don’t get a ticket.  If it’s under-subscribed, everybody gets in and the rest go on sale in real time.

To make the average working person line up for 4 hours is like asking them for $50 or $75.  That’s what I call a surcharge!  Someone living on a trust fund or a college student willing to blow off classes or somebody without a job but somehow with the money for a concert ticket is given a huge advantage over some poor bastard who works for PG&E climbing electrical poles for $45k a year.

But I digress.  I’m convinced that this method of selling tickets had nothing to do with, well, selling tickets and more to do with giving loyal Dylan fans the chance to make a day of their interest.  They were not just prepared to take care of people at the Warfield.  They’d obviously anticipated entertaining them.  Think of it as a carnival.

Or think of it as a church.  People gather to celebrate, worship, and have fellowship with the faithful.

So what’s the harm of a little detour into this kind of fundamentalism for Bob?  None at all.  In fact, he may be onto something here for his audience.  It’s not a strategy I would repeat much (or ever), but obviously, people didn’t hate it.  There’s something to be learned from that when even a few seconds delay in line at a bank or a fast food joint drives people bonkers.

The first thought is this:  of course, the market is in equilibrium.  That’s how markets work unless distorted by some external force.  For example, if the government forcibly took $1000 from every family in Illinois and created a fund to pay actors in small non-profit theatres in Chicago $250,000 per year, that would create a tremendous distortion of the market.  What would the outcome be?  At first, the actors, who are used to working for basically nothing, would be delighted, but about a nanosecond later, they’d realize it had become harder than ever, and perhaps impossible, to get a job acting in a small theatre in Chicago.  That’s an externality that would distort the market.

But let’s assume no major distortions are influencing the market.  What markets do is find sea level.  It turns out that a lot of people would like to make a living as an actor because it’s more fun and engaging than filling out TPS reports for Lumberg in the bowels of the Initech office.  The fact that so many people are willing to work for so little in the theatre is a testament to the fact that lots of people find this compelling as a career choice.

Note that this doesn’t bear any necessary relationship to the number of people who find theatre compelling as a way to spend their money in the marketplace.  I love to golf, but very, very few people are going to pay to watch me do it, unless they want a chuckle and don’t have a youtube account so they can watch Merton instead.

So for the sake of argument, go with me on the equilibrium thing because there’s a bigger question afoot.  Why do people feel that there’s either a supply or demand problem in theatre?  No one asks is hand soap is oversupplied or under-demanded.  What’s underneath this desire to say that something is out of whack?

Every marketer who’s ever worked for me (and not just the marketers who’ve worked for me) is familiar (read: sick of hearing) a three word phrase that I would like to insert in this discussion, and here it is:

Compared to What?

Under-demanded, for example, compared to what?  If there’s not enough demand, by what standard, exactly, is it not enough?  If there’s too much supply, what do you mean by that?  Too much to ensure every participant in the market a good living?  Perhaps.  Certainly not too much to be able to claim that there’s a theatre “product” out there for all consumers.  Is either of those an important measuring stick?

Well, that’s entirely up to you.

And that’s the point.  It’s all really about what we want.  I say that there’s not as much demand in the marketplace for live entertainment because it’s my desire that the industry grow.   That more people go see live entertainment, including theatre.  I don’t take the marketplace as a given.  We have to grow it, and that’s why I’ve devoted the last 8 years of my life to getting people out more (and a few million tickets later, I’m happy to say I feel we’ve been able to do that.)

So when you think about this issue, the question isn’t whether there’s too much supply or not enough demand.  By definition, the market is Goldilocks:  just right.  The real question is what do we want it to be and what are we going to do to see that come true?

My answer is simple:  I want the industry to grow in every way.  I believe people want live entertainment more than they actually manage to consume it, and that’s on us in the industry.  The good news in that is that we can change it.

Who’s with me?

Not Steven Slater.  The people who are celebrating him.  Although he pretty well fits that description too.

What about his actions are worthy of praise?  I was reading some comments in support of him that said “hey, it’s great that he spoke his mind!”  Is it really so great that he spoke his mind?  What was the outcome?  He threw a tantrum, spoke abusively to a whole plane full of people, who in buying a ticket on Jet Blue, were paying his salary, and severely inconvenienced not just the people on the plane, but everybody delayed by what followed to get the plane back in working condition and out of the way of traffic.

A passenger abused him verbally.  Well, by all means, make the situation much, much worse, Mr. Slater.  Feel free to make hundreds of unrelated people pay the price for your hurt feelings.  Because what’s important here is that you express how you feel.

But not just verbally.  Oh, no.  Do it with actions that are dangerous, dramatic and really make life hard on a bunch of people who’ve done absolutely nothing to you.

If you think this is heroism, you’re nuts.  If you run an organization and can muster even a mild affection for your customers, he’s a great object lesson in what’s wrong with customer service in places like Jet Blue (and Jet Blue is far from the worst airline in this way.)  His greatest desire is to stop treating you nicely and start treating you the way he’d really like to, which is with contempt.  The veil came off for a moment, and now you know how somebody like Steven Slater really feels about you.

And while we’re at it, this isn’t about the customer “always being right.”  That’s not a philosophy I teach because the customer can be abusive, the customer can be drunk, the customer can be a lot of very wrong things.  The philosophy I do teach is that you can’t win an argument with a customer, because if you’re in an argument with a customer, you’ve already both lost.  If Jet Blue or Steven Slater’s philosophy is that the way to deal with difficult customers is to smile and “let them win,” then this is not surprising.  One of the weaker minded people on the staff is going to crack and doing something stupid and futile like this, eventually.

Yes, customer service can be stressful, and the added dimension of close quarters in an airplane add another dimension to it, but this has nothing to do with that.  This is how Steven Slater, in his many, many years of serving customers on an airline, has always wanted to act.

How sad is that?  To think of spending your life waiting for that moment when it was acceptable to behave how you really want to behave instead of how you’re forced to behave is depressing.  But the question is then, why do it?  Why spend decades giving people phony grins and sniping at them when they’re out of earshot when you’re standing in the galley?  Just do something else.  Just live a different life that doesn’t require so much lying to get by.

Even if the passenger, as some have said,  injured Slater with her bag, this is still a destructive response.  Obviously, the injury wasn’t bad enough for him to spend a lot of energy putting on quite a show in the moments that followed.

On the plus side, the Steven Slater story does give us the opportunity to talk about what customer service is and isn’t.  It isn’t: sycophantically pretending to care about customers until you feel you’ve “earned the right” to abuse everyone around you.  It is: actually caring about people and having the grace under pressure to know that when things go wrong, the right answer is never to purposefully make them worse.

But one thing Morris said stood out that I want to challenge, or at least frame differently.  It’s this one:

“Pleasing and selling are awfully seductive, essential really; they may lead to a popular theater but not necessarily to a relevant one. And that’s the paradox.”

I just want to note that “popular” and “relevant” are not opposites.  In fact, I’d ask how the hell something can be relevant if no one cares about it.  What do you mean by relevant anyway?  To me, something’s relevant if it has a gravitational pull on the culture.  Oom-pah-pah music, not relevant.  Social media innovations, relevant.  Those are obvious because one’s obviously nearly dead in the culture, and one is almost universal.

But relevant doesn’t have to be a mass phenomenon. In fact, who cares if it’s a mass phenomenon?  Morris says this:

“How are theaters supposed to go out and do work that they know will alienate 95% of the general population? What’s their incentive to be brave?”

Well, that’s an easy one: the love and support of the 5%.  If it’s truly being done for the 5% in the sense that they are the niche that can and will support such work, that should be plenty to make any organization thrive.  The goal over time is to grow the 5% to 6 and then 7 and then, well, as large as you want.

Trying to please the so-called “general population” is a fool’s errand that’s irrelevant to today’s market for anything.  Everything is a niche market.   Mass market is dead.  Super dead. Cirque Du Soleil and the NFL are both huge, but they’re still niches.  Why?  Because their product isn’t for everyone; it started with a small, emerging portion of the culture which clashed meaningfully with the “general population” and then over time, their vision won out, or at very least, earned the right to survive and thrive.  Football used to have to live on the leftovers from baseball, horse racing and boxing.  Cirque Du Soleil was a freaky footnote to the head-in-a-lion’s-mouth school of circuses that cost $5 to see.  Only in hindsight does it seem obvious that these are tastes shared by many people.

Although I understand it, I hate the mindset that says we can either do “good” work or we can do “popular” work.  No organization has to please everybody and shouldn’t try.  That’s a guarantee of failure.  And imagining that there’s a “general population” is naive and out of touch.  I vaguely feel like this is just snobbery dressed up in something that sounds like thought.  There’s no general population.  There are just people, and their tastes are really varied.

What’s hard, though, is figuring out who your work is for and then honing it to make it work for them.  It’s easier just to hand wave the problem away and say that there’s a “paradox” where theatre gets stuck between what’s popular and what’s good.

On the other hand, if what is meant by “relevant” is really self-indulgent work that values mere self-expression without any regard to the audience and designed mostly to flatter the ego of the artist, there’s a different word for that.

Irrelevant.

And hey, free money is free money. How can you argue with that?

Ok, I’ll tell you how: TANSTAAFL. There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Here’s a piece from the WaPo that describes the price of free money, and here’s a key tidbit:

“These two traits are now clashing head-on. The company is in talks with the Kennedy Center about renegotiating its contract; one option is that WNO and the Kennedy Center may merge. But there’s a hitch.

Most of WNO’s endowment derives from the sale of a building donated by Betty Brown Casey, the widow of Eugene B. Casey, one of the company’s major donors. And she has stipulated, several sources confirm, that if WNO ceases to be independent or if it merges with the Kennedy Center, those funds will automatically go to the Metropolitan Opera in New York.”

Bummer, eh? You want the money you need to survive or you want the freedom to do the right thing? There’s only one way to have both and that’s to earn your own way.

To be precise, I believe that all organizations should make funding their operations from sales and small donations their first business priority. People talk about the business model for the arts, but here’s what I think. Every organization should do whatever it takes to balance the books without major donors.

Don’t tell me it’s impossible. It may be difficult. It is difficult, but it’s only impossible if you’re committed to staying the same. Radical changes may be just enough to keep some businesses and organizations alive, but what’s the alternative? Oblivion or servitude.

I get this from personal experience. In the Internet business, lots of people take big money from venture capitalists, and that makes some things easier. But it also means you’ve got a business partner, and this partner has some weird proclivities. He (or she, but probably he) wants to make 10 dollars for every one he gives you, and to do that, you’re going to have to take some crazy chances. You’re also going to feel some pressure to help his other investments, whether it really makes sense or not. He doesn’t have bad intentions; he just doesn’t know.

We nee took any of that money, not that we had that option, starting a ticket selling business in the shadow of 9/11and in the middle of a pretty serious recession. It also meant no one got paid (and by no one, I really mean the founders, who were pretty much the only people working in the business for a long time.). It was nerve-wracking, and it was tough, but in a couple years, we built a business that worked, and grew it gradually. We learned what it took to deliver a formula that delivered something special to customers and paid its own bills, including giving us enough to pay some salaries and keep us focused full time.

And that’s really the magic point for an organization. When you can pay your own way, you can grow. You can take smart chances. And you can also breathe a little more easily, because that’s how people do their best work. When they’re proud of what they’re doing, but not just struggling to survive.

A constellation of small donors? Great. That’s akin to sales for a non-profit.

Big donors, though, aren’t donors. They’re co-owners, and unless you’re sure you’ll always see eye to eye, be prepared to do what it takes to please your business partner.

Or patiently fix your business model and always have the ability to do the right thing.