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Case For Gov’t Support Of House Concerts

November 24, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

FastCompany recently had a post by Matt Mandrella, the music officer for Huntsville, AL advocating for cities to support house concerts as a method for stimulating economic and creative vitality. According Mandrella, Huntsville has a handful of people who have set up their basements and garages to host concerts.

This raised a lot of questions in my mind about how the neighbors were impacted by traffic, parking, and possibly noise.

Mandrella said cities shouldn’t just be building amphitheaters (Huntsville has one), they should be supporting neighborhood level cultural infrastructure which are more fan and creator focused.

House shows fill a different and equally vital gap. They empower artists to control ticket prices and profit margins, bypassing bar-sales-driven venue models. They create peer networking opportunities and act as incubators for emerging talent, offering artists the chance to book, promote and manage shows on a small scale, thereby building skills that can scale to larger venues.

Most importantly, house shows democratize music, embedding it in communities instead of keeping it behind ticketing paywalls. In short, they rebalance the live music economy.

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He says among the things Huntsville is doing to support these small concert venues is helping people form LLCs in order to separate owners’ liability from their personal assets; advising on sound, lighting, and ticketing; having conversations about artist pay and sustainability.

And perhaps most importantly from the neighbors’ point of view – “Guiding artists through compliance with sound ordinances and neighborhood approvals.”

Mandrella also pitches vibrant house concert networks as a possible response to AI generated music in the sense that it creates local, accessible opportunities for people to connect with their neighbors and perhaps generate a sense of ownership and pride.

To some extent, this isn’t an entirely new idea. About 10 years ago I wrote about the PorchRokr Festival near Akron, OH where people hosted concerts on their porches. I subsequently became aware of other porch based concert series around the country. This is the first time I have read about a city intentionally working to create an infrastructure to support and encourage house concerts as a going concern.

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Business Models, Government Relations, New Initiatives

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New UK Rules Prohibit Reselling Tickets Above Face Value

November 18, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

Rainer Glaap recently linked to a story about new legislation in the UK which will prohibit selling tickets for any amount above face value. (Apparently there was discussion about capping it at 130% of face value at one point.) Service fees on resales will be permitted, but there will be a cap on them to prevent them from becoming inflated.

There will also be rules against speculative sales where the reseller doesn’t actually have all the tickets they claim to possess.

Resellers will be prevented from listing more tickets than they could have legitimately purchased from the original point of sale under event-imposed limits. However, it’s unknown if promoters will be required to disclose the number of tickets held back from initial sale to promote a sense of scarcity.

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According to a corresponding article on The Guardian news site, resellers who make speculative sales are often banking on being able to buy tickets elsewhere for less than they are charging.

My venue has encountered a variation of this recently. Typically we might have a call about purchasing tickets on a reseller site once every six-eight weeks from people who are concerned their tickets aren’t valid.

But that number always escalates as the Christmas holidays approach. Last week we had three calls in a single day. One person wanted to change her seats to sit next to friends. However, the information she received was that her seats were in the back row of the balcony. We asked her to find out what her specific seats numbers were.

When she called back the next day with the seat numbers, we discovered those seats were purchased at 1:30 am that morning. In other words, the reseller didn’t purchase the tickets until after the buyer asked for the seat numbers.

We have also noticed that resellers are promising people seats in the back row of the balcony betting on the fact those seats will sell last. In some cases, purchasers end up being the only one in that row of 25 seats with four empty rows between them and the next group of audience members.

We take a lot of steps to make people aware of the correct website to visit. There is a mention in our monthly email newsletter. There is a poster in the ticketing lobby and rack cards people can take with them. We also have slides on our lobby monitors and the pre-show slide show in the theater. Plus I mention the issue in my curtain speeches.

Still there are many people who end up purchasing from the wrong websites while insisting they were on ours. We are in the process of assembling a list of warning signs to make new posters and slides in the hopes of doing a better job of making people aware of the websites masquerading as ours.

Arts in an Age of Technology, Audience Relations, Marketing/PR, Pricing

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Need A Little More Recklessness

November 17, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

Seth Godin recently made a post about recklessness which intersected somewhat with the concept of giving permission for failure, something that is a key element to the creative process.

In fact, that is the essence of the first example he gives after evoking a homophonic word play with wrecklessness

Worth noting that there’s no ‘w’ in reckless. We imagine there might be, since a wreck is entirely possible.

There’s the recklessness of creative generosity. This happens when we show up with our best work, regardless of how it might feel if it doesn’t land with the desired audience.

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He makes similar statements about recklessness of connection, love, joy, solitude, radical honesty, and financial abandon.

I confess to not being entirely enamored of the idea of financial abandon. I am not sure if he is casting in a positive light or not.

He also raises the example of recklessness of unlearning which has been a recurring topic in the arts and culture world for most of my life. There has been conversation about not becoming dependent on existing audiences, donors, marketing methods, audience relations, and programming in the face of ever changing socio-economic conditions and expectations.

The recklessness of unlearning. When we deliberately dismantle our carefully constructed expertise and certainties to make space for new ways of seeing and being.

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I will say there are a lot of people in the arts and culture learning, adapting, and executing new and interesting ideas and approaches. I am often delighted when I come across these promising practices. But it also seems like this stuff isn’t happening as broadly as it probably needs to which I attribute to lack of time and resources.

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Leadership, Management Philosophy, Working In The Arts

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Making It Easy To Find Your Org From The Couch

November 12, 2025

by:

Joe Patti

Colleen Dilenschneider and the folks at IMPACTS Experience share some of the latest data regarding how people are becoming increasingly invested in spending their free time at home.

She starts by reminding readers that it wasn’t so long ago that even when you planned to stay in, you often had to leave your house to grab videos from the video store. Even in the early days of Netflix you often had to invest some time in picking what DVDs you wanted delivered to you.

Compared to those times, there is even less effort or commitment required. She notes that many people will be flipping through things on their phones while having a show or movie running on an in-home big screen.

She presents data showing that Americans in general have expressing an interest in staying home during the weekend has increased 56.8% since 2011.

The statistic of bigger concern is that among those with a high-propensity to visit cultural organizations, (both visual and performance based), the increase since 2011 is 79%.

In short, high-propensity visitors are the people who actually do visit, want to visit, or are likely to visit cultural organizations – and their preference to stay home over the weekend has risen a whopping 79% since 201

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An approach Dilenschneider et. al. suggest is the same one that was advocated when people were involuntarily required to stay at home–activities, opportunities, marketing, etc., that keep your organization at the top of people’s minds. She writes that when people make decisions to engage in out of home activities, they gravitate toward those activities that are most familiar.

In a chart comparing how people were spending their time in 2021 with the first three quarters of 2025, the percentages are roughly the same for at-home activities so the trend has been relatively consistent. (Though fewer people are doing home repairs and gardening.)

While people are spending more time online, they are interacting with cultural organizations a lot more online as well. In a chart comparing end of year 2019 with third quarter 2025, visits to websites and social media pages has increased quite a bit in that time. Word of mouth and recommendations from friends are fairly high up in responses, though tend to be higher for performance based entities vs. exhibit based entities.

Having online resources which are easy to navigate and discover desired information is increasingly important.

…..the trend of increasingly high expectations for digital competence wasn’t created entirely by the pandemic but was accelerated by it. Audiences were already seeking out information about cultural organization experiences primarily via the web, mobile web, and social media before the pandemic and continue to do so today, particularly as AI enters the conversation. The hard work that cultural organizations have put in to engage their audiences online and show their relevance beyond their walls in the past five years has elevated those expectations even further.

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Arts in an Age of Technology, Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Marketing/PR

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