About House Concerts

For the benefit of people thinking about doing this sort of thing themselves, I have a bunch of random thoughts:

I really like doing concerts at home. My living room is just about the right size for the sort of things we do. We've occasionally been SRO, but we've never had to turn anyone away. At SRO shows people will peer through the kitchen door or sit in the living room where the sound is pretty good despite the compromised sightlines.

We try to provide a great experience for performers and audiences. We have fairly good acoustics, (relatively) comfortable chairs, free snacks and drinks, an excellent piano (tuned before shows!) and an intimate ambience that's hard to achieve elsewhere. Susan calls the shows "parties for your musical friends," which is a fair characterization except that we do ask people to open their wallets, and a fair number of strangers show up. I will confess that a few of the latter used to give me nightmares about the cocktail party scene in Diary of a Mad Housewife, in which the last straw for Carrie Snodgrass's sanity is observing one of the guests surrepetitiously pocketing a pricy knickknack. (I'm over that now. Our patrons are always well-behaved. The worst behavior we see is the occasional well-hidden wine glass.)

As far as I can tell, the most important thing that brings people to shows is email from the performers. One or two people show up because of mailings I send out and one or two because of bayimproviser.com. Notices in print media are pretty much worthless, unless you get in the San Francisco Chronicle's Pink Section, in which case you'll need to hire security. The only other thing that works is getting on 510-BAD-SMUT, a phone message line with day-of-show announcements, mostly of raves. They listed one of our shows once (unbidden!), and we got a dozen kids, mostly with purple or blue hair & adventurous outfits, several of whom showed up at 11:00 PM for a 7:30 show.

And no other local concert series features jigsaw puzzles.

If you want want advice on doing this sort of thing yourself, there are good resources on the internet. Particulary, venues devoted to folk music in most of the country have pretty much disappeared over the last 20 years, and enough House Concert presenters have stepped in to fill the void that they've found each other on the web. Right now I can't find the guide that I read before I decided to start doing this, but this looks good: CIYH House Concert Guide (Googling "house concert guide" looks like it finds a good collection of links.)

It costs us about as much to do a show at home as in a rented storefront or art gallery, but we spend the money on snacks, drinks and piano tuning instead of rent.

We don't mention any fee schedule (I think the usual "$6-10, sliding scale" confuses and worries some people) but just ask people for donations which we make clear are distributed 100% to the artists. I think we get better audiences and take in more money this way than by charging a fixed fee, because the well-off middle classes give us more than we could charge without scaring away the relatively impecunious retirees and students that are an important part of our audience. Obviously it's hard to quantify that, but I think the average we take in is around $10/person. This week's show (Eugene Chadbourne and Bruce Ackley) netted about $340 (plus 50 Mexican Pesos) from roughly 26 attendees, which I think is a record. I don't believe the gate has ever been less than $100, and we routinely take in about $200. For comparison, the storefront show I went to last night, which had about 15 people attending, netted $44 for the artists on a $6 ticket. And that's with me telling them to keep the change from my $20.

We try really hard to make people comfortable about only giving us pocket change or nothing at all, but often a couple of students who we'd be glad to chat with after the show will avert their eyes and sneak out the door. I wish I knew how to better convey our attitude, which is that our primary goal is to support and promulgate Art as widely as possible, not to suck money out of their pockets. Obviously it takes money to do what we do, but like most people doing this stuff, we don't want to cater exclusively to the well-heeled.

The flip side of not setting a fee is that we won't give performers a guarantee. I understand that this is a sensitive issue. Keep in mind that you're not actually losing anything by not having a guarantee (unless you gave up another gig to play at my place, which I don't recommend.)

You can't make money programming this sort of music, so commercial venues naturally aren't interested. But you can't lose a lot either. As hobbies go, it's relatively cheap. I don't own a motor home or a closet full of vintage guitars. Instead, I get a dozen great concerts every year.