Corren rang me the other day after I had sent out my autumn press release. They asked me why I am cutting back on the number of shows this season. You can read it here if you are subscriber or below if not (Click on the link though as Corren needs the traffic)
This season, I am putting on much fewer shows compared to last season. Between February to May 2017 I put on 14 shows. This season it is 4 and none of those are my 'own' shows - I'm very happy to be working with Monstera for these productions, but it does mean that there is nothing that I am doing that can be said to be unique to Linköping.
The problem - venues.
I won't go into great detail about why I left The Crypt. The first season there was hard work with a lot of problems. The second season, rather than address those problems and improve the venue, making it easier to work there, those problems got worse. So, I left. As did City to City/Gaphals (The guys who put on the music there). So right now, The Crypt, which had the potential to be one of the best live venues in Sweden is empty, with no gigs booked, no technical staff and no equipment. It's a shame, but that's their prerogative.
So how does the live scene look in Linköping? There are a few small pub stages where the focus is not primarily on entertainment - i.e. they need to invest in sound and lighting, have a genuine focus on marketing. For the official, council venues, they are either way too expensive or you just hire an empty venue with no publicity, front of house staff, refreshments, or technicians making it much more hassle than it's worth. Plus you have to deal with people from the Kommun who are the personification of unenthusiastic, desk monkeyism.
City to City and my company sold over 17000 tickets in Linköping last year - That's 17000 paying customers coming to venues that are not optimal, and this year we are forced to cut back on the number of events we are putting on. Imagine if this was a TECH business that said that Linköping was hard to operate in, and they were being forced to cut back. Just some food for thought especially as Linköping has dreams of becoming Sweden's third biggest event city. Oh well...
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