2009 In review: Concerts, analysed more

This post involves some further breaking down the gigs I went to in 2009. For thoughts of an introductory nature, you can read the previous post here.

By popular demand, I decided to do a bit more number-crunching with my list of 2009 shows.¹ Obviously all of this only reflects my own pattern of show-going, so it's probably ill-advised to try too hard to draw too much out of this. That said, it's fun to extrapolate. Let's start with a thought as to how broad my concert-going is. (For all of these, you can click through to the full-sized versions):

This of course, is a halfway jape. "Indie rock" is all-encompassing and means nothing. But, like many insidious things, I know what ain't indie rock when I see it. Usually.

Packed in Like Sardines

It seems self-evident to me that all things being equal, a show in a smaller venue is better than a show in a bigger one.² So it should follow that there would be a mathematical relationship between venue size and how enjoyable a show is. To test this, I did some checking around to match the venues I'd been to with their capacities (and some educated guesswork here and there), and also did a very quick ranking of the gigs:

Interestingly, there's a far lower correlation there than I was expecting, which begs some explanation. The first thing that came to mind for me is that because I'm wary of larger shows, I'm more careful to "pick my spots". In other words, I'm generally only going to go to the Phoenix for someone I really like anyway.

Boys on stage

Just to test against my hunches, I also wanted to get a more empirical breakdown of how the girl/boy thing is working out on stage:

This involves some subjective rankings, of course. For the most part, solo performers fall easily into the binary columns at the left and right; bands are trickier.² Regardless of how you assign things, though, it's striking: shows by solo male performers or all-male groups outnumber all other columns combined. It's still a man's man's man's world. Does this matter? Setting aside how idiosyncratic this breakdown is to the gigs I attended (and we don't have anyone else to act as a control there), I'm curious — is this a big deal? Does this mean that women are being shut out — or, given the numbers on post-secondary education, say, does it mean the women are doing something useful while the unemployable mopes are forming bands to whine to other boys? I honestly don't know, and I'm open to persuasion if I'm blowing this out of proportion, but my inner second waver gets grumpy when something this systemic and persistent is pointed out. Sometimes, the sausage factor up on stage just kinda makes itself apparent, and I wonder what we're missing out on — I look around at who's not up on stage and I think to myself, to appropriate a line from Virginia Woolf, "she should have had a microphone put in her hand!".

Geography

Meanwhile, where are the acts that I'm seeing coming from?

This probably ties together a lot of overlapping things: local bands are plentiful and cheap to see, so if you're going to see a lot of bands, you almost have to take an interest in what's cheap and close at hand unless you've got the resources to pay a premium.

Thinking about proximity in another way, one wonders what the environmental impact is of seeing local bands. What if there were one of those online footprint calculators — "seeing xx local bands instead of touring bands is the equivalent of taking yy cars off the road and saves zz tonnes of CO₂." (Of course, I wouldn't want to push that too far — having people come from far away and share their music with us is one of the highest achievements of a civilization, and does good in all kinds of ways.)

Where we go when we see gigs, and where we do not go

Geographic distribution of where I saw shows in 2009. Reddish pins are locations of intense concert-going, blue indicates multiple trips, and yellow single trips:

This map would be no surprise to anyone who goes to a lot of shows: gigs and venues are clustered downtown. That one outlier way out east is kind of handy, as it keeps me from being able to zoom in more, and just demonstrate how much city there is, and how little of it exists for this part of my life. But looking at that brought another famous map to mind:

This map, from J.D. Hulchanski's widely-discussed "The Three Cities Within Toronto: Income polarization, 1970–2000", illustrates how the city is becoming increasingly split between areas getting richer (mostly downtown and up the Yonge subway) and places getting poorer (most notably the northwest and northeast quadrants of the city).

If you happen to believe that gig-attendance is, amongst other things, an effort at active citizenship, what does it mean that where we practice our citizenship is so narrowly proscribed? What does it mean when the maps we draw for ourselves of our city have vast swaths of terra incognita? What does it mean for the care in our hearts that we carry for others?

I probably have no persuasive answers to any question raised here, and I know it's possibly overwrought to push any metaphor too far. But, shouldn't people who spend a serious amount of time going to shows think about the broader consequences, even a little?

If not, at least putting the graphs together was fun.

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¹ One piece of information that I now wish I'd recorded was the ticket price for each of these shows — it would have been enlightening to graph the costs against some of these other factors. And just to do some reckoning as to how much it costs for a "typical" show, and map my average cost against, say, the average of a stadium show, etc. etc. On the whole, for ticket cost v. number of gigs, I think I spent less per show as I went to more and more of them, a relationship described by what we might dub the Polk Axiom of Gig Costs: The amount a person spends per concert is inversely proportional to the number of shows they attend.

² Although, to finesse this some, I'm also of the opinion that any venue is better with the right sized crowd. Too empty, of course, is often kinda awkward. But a tightly-packed full house can pull down a sublime moment down by fettering it with physical awkwardness — who wants their toes trod upon, or someone's big head blocking your view? Most places feel right at about seventy-fice per cent capacity, when you are amongst people, but still have some elbow room.

³ How would you evaluate, say, a male singer-songwriter with an three-piece female backing band? Is that "predominantly female"? probably not. By and large, I'd weight things by the "controlling mind" of the group, something that is, admittedly, really perilous for an external observer to guess at sometimes.