How Foxy Are You?
Over the course of a recent Saturday, I devoured Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance, Galaxie 500 and Luna frontman Dean Wareham’s account of life in bands and on the road. I was completely engaged by his straightforward, almost sterile account of breaking up bands and marriages, of a Groundhog Day-like repeat of the same paths through the same cities and same hotels for such a low wage. (Having been exposed to the sausage making of the concert scene for a few years, the money for well-known indie acts doesn’t really start to look good until you play 1000+ seaters, which few bands ever get to. How does the Polyphonic Spree make money? Uh, they don’t.)
One parable I found particularly enthralling was The Fox and the Hedgehog: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
I’ve often been accused of being a fox, and fairly so (witness Ideanode, Dayjob, Marquee, and Gigbot). I’ve had bouts of nervousness over the last couple of years as we’ve seen lots of folks around us get big investment dollars with the ‘get big fast’ mandate resurrected from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. (Frankly, my favorite web periods are the .5s — 1.5 brought us Flickr and Basecamp, here’s hoping 2.5 does the same).
The recent downturn makes it a good time to be foxy — heterogeneous models can adapt and evolve.
