CEO Roundtable: Local Music Scene

Springfield Business Journal Executive Editor Christine Temple discusses economics, opportunities and challenges for the local music scene in southwest Missouri with Jimmy Rea, a longtime musician and music festival coordinator who also serves as arts reporter on KSMU Ozarks Public Radio; Gary Thomas, owner of The Regency Live (850 seats), Midwest Live and Gary L Thomas Presents; and Geoff Steele, executive director of the Gillioz Center for Arts and Entertainment (1,015 seats).

What follows are highlights from the conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Christine Temple: If you guys were to assign a temperature, curious to take a temperature of the local music scene: hot, cold, where would we be right now? We’re in this five-years-post-COVID moment, right?
Jimmy Rea: I think it’s always been a great scene, and folks who travel outside of the region know that they get to certain communities, and they don’t have the same musical, traditional legacy as they do here. But coming out of COVID, it was weird. It was different. Everybody kind of adjusted, and there’s been some things that’s changed, but for the most part, I think Springfield continues to be a great music town locally, and folks that Geoff and Gary are bringing in, and other venues. I mean, you can see great local music, regional acts coming through, as well as national, on all different levels of venues. So I think it’s pretty hot, to be honest.
Geoff Steele: We’re all old-timers here, right? So when you rate that, how would you rate it in comparison over the last 15 years? So the pre-COVID numbers versus the post-COVID numbers?
Jimmy Rea: I think COVID – I think it started with the birth of the internet, taking away a lot of music experiences. So when I first got on the scene, slipping into venues, maybe before the regulatory age was there because I was so intrigued by live music. So we’re talking mid-’90s, when the jam band scenes were a little hot. Looking back at the Barefoot Revolution days, the Speakeasy days, the Big Smith hoopla, to me, that was the height of it. I got in just after that with Arkamo Rangers and begun and was in tandem with the birth of the internet, kind of, OK, people aren’t quite as interested, aren’t quite as interested, aren’t quite as – so, I mean, fighting that is tough, but [the internet is] not going anywhere ... I travel to a lot of venues around the country. I do a lot of shows and stuff around here. I think this year has been pretty tough: 20%, 30%, 40% decrease when it comes to ticket sales. … I don’t have to lean on a lot of ticket sales like these gentlemen might need, to get that temperature. So you guys might have a different flavor on it. How’s this year looking for you guys? Are you feeling that decrease?
Geoff Steele: Yeah, so I can tell you, national elections always impact discretionary spending. They have for the 42 years I’ve been involved in the business …. Midterms for the last 12 years have impacted it as well, and they impacted for a couple of reasons. One, you know, discretionary spending: Nobody dies tomorrow because they don’t see a show tonight, right? I mean, this is, this is discretionary spending. And so it’s not even so much a conscious decision as a subconscious decision, that if there’s uncertainty, that they may kind of hold on to their money, even subconsciously.
Jimmy Rea: Survival mode.
Geoff Steele: Yeah. And then you also have noise, right? The noise – being able to punch through promotionally, right? To be able to, if you’re going through a political ad section, a lot of times, you just traditionally struggle to get placements because they’re, because they’re filling up. Now, the fragmentation of traditional media, right, radio, TV, the death of print locally: You know, when we were young guys, you could put an ad in the Thursday Weekend edition of the Springfield News-Leader, and you’d start selling tickets. You know, it was just, if you could get in the Weekend section, that’s where everybody went. And now that doesn’t exist.
Jimmy Rea: Right.
Geoff Steele: And there’s not an equivalent to that that has taken its place. So that fragmentation has happened. So, yeah, … I’ll go on record, last year was the worst year of my career, ever.
Jimmy Rea: Wow.
Geoff Steele: And what’s weird with national elections, you usually see, like the day after the election, the numbers will, they’ll just, it’s like, “Oh, the sky didn’t fall. You know, we’re going to go on.” This election … we saw national tours continue to hit pause through January. And so we had artists saying, we’re not going to go, we’re not going to go on the road until we see what happens. Then you get to the middle of February and they’re like, oh, we need to eat. [Laughter from Jimmy Rea.] It’s an ecosystem, right? So, it changed. So have we rebounded? Yeah, we’ve rebounded. There’s good traffic, and for the most part, tickets are back. The frequency of the shows is still not back up to where it needs to be. I think it will be by the end of the year, I think. Gary may differ with that, but I think, you’ll see it continue to spin up, because the reality is that this serves such a purpose. It serves such a role in the community that’s beyond – it’s not about, it’s not about a show. It’s about so much more than a show, and in the role that it plays. So I think we are insulated compared to other trends. ... Gary really can speak to this, because of his California influence, but I think comparatively, there’s a level of insulation in Springfield that doesn’t move with the wind and the wheat quite as much as the coasts do…. Gary?
Gary Thomas: Yes … I tend to go back to more of how did this look when I first opened up, and I see nothing but continual improvement. … And I continue to say that it’s on an upward trajectory.… How does it look pre-COVID and after COVID? I think it’s doing very well, but if we want to break it down a little bit more in a six-month block, or one-year block, I agree with Geoff that there’s been a little bit of a slump. That slump may happen a little bit more with the way the economy is floating right now, whether it’s going to go into a recession or inflation. But I remind myself, in 1984 when we opened, it was a recession of Reagan, and whether I was just immune to the concept of recession at that period of point in time, or forced myself to be, it had no impact on that. And I think … we should ask ourselves, what’s the driving force? And we go back to the driving force of the community itself, and the different microcosms of the community, whether it’s age-based or genre-based, whatever. That can have an impact in making the music scene happen. Again, I think back in 1984 when there was nothing downtown, nothing, right? Dark rooms, I literally had to call CU twice to try to get them to replace light bulbs, because their comment was, well, there’s nobody down there after 5 o’clock, and there’s very few people there before 5 o’clock. And we were packing out the location on an ongoing basis because the community wanted to see it. That age bracket wanted us to come see the show. And it was also an impact at that point in time when everyone was saying national shows coming to Springfield, Missouri, international shows, it wouldn’t even, they wouldn’t even pronounce the word. And we were bringing international shows on a weekly basis and doing very well.

Excerpts of the conversation by Deputy Editor Gregory Holman, gholman@sbj.net.