“Life’s not about sitting at home in front of the TV waiting for your life to begin.
Get out there and take some chances.”
– Queen Latifah
The Listening Room at 443 is a lot of things – a coffee house, a bar, a cafe, and a live music venue. But our primary goal in creating this space has always been to provide an intimate room to showcase talented singer-songwriters, particularly national artists who don’t have a chance to perform in CNY very often.
We knew it would be a tricky business model and we would be taking a big chance that Syracuse would support it.
Our capacity is just under 100, and while some of our visiting artists are better known than others, we aren’t booking performers who are household names – we are a very small club, and it just doesn’t work that way. We knew we would have to introduce our audience to the acts we’re booking, expose them to their music, and then convince them to buy a ticket to the show.
Not an easy task, but we thought by producing a consistent, thoughtfully curated calendar of high-quality music along with a big focus on marketing, we could make it happen.
We are about 4.5 months in, and it’s turning out to be a more challenging proposition than we anticipated.
We have had a lot of hugely successful shows, where the capacity audience enjoyed a very special night of excellent music and we’ve had shows that were just as amazing but they were only experienced by a handful of fans. We have struggled to even give away tickets to some of these shows, which is completely insane. The shows that sold 8 tickets were just as good as the ones that sold 80 – it’s not about quality.
Sometimes I feel like a gypsy fortune teller reading tea leaves trying to predict what might sell in Syracuse…do they have decent social media numbers and engagement? Good quality videos? Have they won a national award or toured with a major artist? Do they have any ties in Syracuse? Have they played here before? Is there a chance for media support? Is there a quirky piece of their story that will resonate with music fans? Is there some other X factor that will make this show work?
Will we take the risk and break even? Or take the risk and lose our shirts?
Blues acts have been a particularly tough sell, and as a result, we’re mostly steering clear of that genre moving forward. Syracuse may have been a “blues town” years ago, but fans are making themselves pretty scarce these days, unfortunately. My personal taste leans heavily in that direction, but we simply can’t afford those kinds of losses if we want to keep our doors open
We’ve had some promising moments too…like when a regular customer stopped in recently to buy tickets for an upcoming show. I asked if he had seen the artist perform before and he said, “No – but he looks interesting and we’ve had a great time at every show we’ve come to here. I’ll take 3”.
Another time we were chatting with a national artist after his show and he was incredulous that we managed to get people who had never seen him perform into the room for his show. “That NEVER happens…kudos to you guys!”
YES – that’s how this is supposed to work.
So here’s the million dollar question:
Is it realistic to expect our audience to trust us and show up regularly for acts they haven’t heard of? Will music fans take a chance and buy that ticket?
Some of the acts we book are artists we have personally followed for years. Others have reached out to us directly or through their booking agent and we think they are REALLY good – and we want Syracuse music fans to have the chance to see them live, in an intimate setting with a stellar sound system.
There are so many incredibly talented independent performers out there…some are Grammy nominated, some have written successful songs for bigger artists, others had a Top 40 hit themselves 30 years ago…and some have just been plugging along building a solid career and a compelling body of work that is worth listening to. If we are booking them at 443, they aren’t going to suck, and you just might get turned on to your next musical obsession.
“He who takes no chances wins nothing”
Danish Proverb
We get that this is all part of the game…you win some, you lose some, and every show isn’t going to be a home run. But at a certain point, we have to question whether we are trying to sell something our market simply does not want, right? As we navigate through our first year, we are having a lot of conversations about what 443 might look like if we end up cutting back on touring artists and limiting our shows to the “sure thing”. Will we be forced to become just another bar with cover bands playing background music on the weekends in order to survive?
