Denim and cotton are beloved favorites of stitchers. It’s so fun to sew you often see it at Sewing Bees and charity events. Thanks everyone for sending us great cowboy music links on YouTube. It feels 100% wholesome.
Maybe it started with Tucker and Kid Rock’s summer tour, Anthony Oliver, or Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter, but now the Sourcing Journal is talking about summer festival denim trends too. We love hearing about the sold out shows and people having a blast. Obviously, Hollywood has cut its shows by 50% from 600 to 300 so the music industry is riding the below the line talent wave, but it’s a good wave. Hollywood has imploded, multiple times, since it was created in the early 1900s. Artists survived then and we will now too. But Hollywood management eating the fruit of hubris after ignoring reality during the past decade is NOT a ship anyone else needs to go down on with them. Move on people.
Which brings us to YouTube music, our second potential platform we’re looking into. YouTube generally pays ~$100/cover song for smaller indy musicians and scale starts at $125-200/day so there’s a clear potential low risk cross-over. Scale insurance for performers is ~$20/month and busking goes back thousands of years so it’s already easy for location managers to book musicans without jumping through a lot of hoops or huge risks. Some smart talent managers in Nashville, etc. are probably going to hit the jackpot this summer organizing tours. Or a MusicDash app? Just to be clear, there’s multiple revenue splits. A smaller artist might simply want a flat daily or weekly rate as a performer, but a larger band generally splits profits at the door. YouTube's downside is copyright strikes. However, you see many musicians already use YouTube via busking locations. They play live and then forward listeners to YouTube to buy their individual songs or albums. So there is an answer for YouTube AND musicians like it. That counts a lot. Keep expecting someone to revamp those $3,000-5,000 summer artist-in-residence grants for musicans to draw in a weekly tourism crowd. Probably Tuesday or Wedsday nights? Weekends?
We’re still looking into giants, just all the good hooks for tourism so far are location driven. A friend recommended Fritz Zimmmerman’s travel guide series. A number are free on Kindle Unlimited if you're looking for something to pick-up. For anyone who is not familiar with his books, especially on fairies, Western North Carolina is full of tall tales about little Cherokee people living around burial mounds. Similar to the Irish folk legends or Tolkien, fairies are a mixed bag of adorable kindness and mischief. My grandmother used to leave out milk for brownies in Greensboro. There’s also an art of making little people out of acorns, leaves, and moss. Jewish legends in Enoch seem to put the fairies in a separate category of fallen angels who were punished to live underground, but not actively bound in the Tigris for being evil. Cue Tolkien's Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Well, whatever you think about U.S. earthwork mounds, we have a lot. Ohio alone has 700+? Add the rest of the Americas. More reading required.