Re: German audiences (WAS site specific looping)

[Per Boysen <perboysen@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 10:48 AM, Rainer Straschill
<moinsound@googlemail.com> wrote:
> [note: behaviour in classical music events hasn't always been like
> that.... ////

Very interesting note from Rainer there! I didn't know that social
part of the classical music history. Thanks for telling!

I did some touring in Germany by the mid nineties and had a similar
experience as Mark of the German audiences. In my case though, the
musical setting was rather commercial pop/rock/techno at major record
label level and many concerts were promotion gigs for music business
VIPs. But we did some gigs at German dance clubs as well and it was
quite amazing how "civilized" people acted - I mean, even when the
intensity was high and they were totally into the performance everyone
seemed to keep the analytical approach. Just before the German tours
we had done a long and intensive tour through five countries in South
East Asia and with the exception from Tokyo the Asian audiences
behaved wild compared to the Germans.

Bear in mind though that these experiences come from the commercial
party-rock-indie-dance-techno scene. I remember the record label's
marketing guys used to say that "Germany is the best market, "loyal"
because people tend to buy as many records as you put advertising
money into the marketing budget. UK is totally unpredictable, an
island of half crazy people that might love you or not-care-at-all no
matter what marketing resources you throw at them. And US record
stores has way too low record prices to make it worthwhile.... if you
don't get a hit over there 'cause it is such a huge market (even
though with less margins)." Funny memories form "the old world". Today
those markets are almost dead.

Another funny memory, associated with "Germany", is when Apple bought
Emagic in 2002 (?), took over the music software Logic and put out
adds like "German Precision meets American Design". Funny to me back
then, because during the "corporate-rock-thing" touring I had
experienced so much German non-precision and some ultimately ugly US
stuff too. I guess those popular sayings were already decades old by
then ;-)  Germany actually had the best engineers and scientists in
the world at the beginning of the previous century but many of those
genius guys had to run from the Nazis and ended up in USA where they
kept on their great work. We talk a lot here (me and my gaming sons)
about possible alternative real-life history, which is another
interesting topic...

But hey - what about Norwegian audiences! Mark...? Germans and
Norwegians seem both very interesting people to me. Special in many
ways. It's an interesting topic how all this comes through in how an
audience is experienced from the performers sides.

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.boysen.se
www.perboysen.com
www.looproom.com internet music hub