Back in 2006, the MIA (Music Industries Association) were reporting that there were over 18 million "lapsed musicians" in the UK alone. These were people who'd tried their hand at playing an instrument, maybe joined a band or whatever. The bulk of these 18 million had given up by the time they were 21. I don't know what the figure is or was for the US, but with a population of around 5 times the size it could equate to about 90 million there.
At the time of writing Gig-Getter it struck me as incredibly sad and I was reminded of it by an email I received recently.
Mike, a middle-aged IT manager wrote to me to tell me how as a teenager he'd played guitar in a band in the 1980's. They had tried to stay ahead of the trends in pop music and peddle their own material to the record labels in the UK. In amongst the seemingly endless rejection slips for each of their series of demo tapes (and back then it was "tapes"), Fiction (who had The Cure and were run by the guy who supposedly discovered the Jam) and A&M called to say they might be interested.
The problem was that both labels wanted to know dates they could come and see Mike's band gig in London. This was a problem because their only experience of playing live was the odd gig or two for friends in their Northern hometown. They had no manager and as far as getting gigs in any other city went - they "didn't know where to start".
So the chances with the record labels, and the band itself, came and went. Mike got himself a "real job" and today gets his kicks playing in a thriving tribute band for which he gets all the gigs.
He says that he does sometimes allow himself to wonder about what might have happened had he known back in the 1980's what he's since learnt now about getting gigs. But on the other hand, as he says, "Self control wasn't a big quality of mine back then so God knows how I'd have ended up!"
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