The True Cost Of Gig Going (Part 7)

"No blog post today because for the first time in a long time I haven't found any new music I like enough to write about."

Those were the words tweeted from the Breaking More Waves twitter account yesterday morning. The inference was the search for astounding new music had returned with zero results. The reality was that we simply hadn't listened to any music all day.

There's a misperception that all music bloggers are sitting at their computers every waking hour waiting for the latest hot new track to drop into their inbox so that they can post it immediately. Certainly some blogs seem to operate in that way, but not here.  As we've stated before, from our perspective the reason that most 'on it' d-i-y music blogs (rather than monetised professional sites or blogs run by people who work in the music industry) are that way  is because they usually have one of the following:

1. Plenty of spare time (students, the unemployed, part-time workers and those without children usually fit in to this box - blogs often fold or become less on it when the blogger suddenly finds they have more responsibilities in life).

2. Lots of music industry related contacts supplying them recommendations and tips.

3. A team of writers so the discovery effort can be shared.

Breaking More Waves doesn't have any of these. We're pretty proud of our ability to publish nearly every week day on our own. Time management is our speciality (or at least we seem pretty good at surviving on less sleep than most people we know) but yesterday having grinded our way through  a non-music day job from 8am-7pm. with no lunch break, then having a family and social life to consume us during the evening we didn't hear 1 piece of new music all day, and with no 'reserve posts' which we usually use to plug gaps, yesterday Breaking More Waves was bare.

So today we're making amends. We have 3 posts. The first however isn't about new music (yes  - you’ve got it – it was meant to go up yesterday but for once we screwed up on our time management ) but a quick catch up on our 2014 project of recording every penny we spend on live music and associated travel, accommodation, merchandise and the like. By the end of the year we hope to be able to report on what the true cost of an average gig really is and from that draw some further conclusions. For now here's a quick breakdown of last month’s activity:

July 2014

Summer means a drop in gig going activity. Summer holidays, a very busy time doing the day job, preferring to be out in the sun rather than a dark sweaty room and less bands touring in the UK means throughout July we attended very few gigs. However our band quota was upped by two small festivals (Blissfields and Festibelly) both of which we were able to attend as a guest - therefore our outlay on tickets was exceptionally low this month.

Here’s the breakdown for July

Tickets: £42
Transport: £88
Spending* £178
Accommodation £0
Artists seen:  40
Total spent: £308
Spend / artist in July : £7.70

And for the year so far

Total spend in 2014 so far £2,295.9
Total number of artists seen** 252
Total spend / artist January – July £9.11

*Includes drinks, merchandise and other luxuries / activites but not food as we have to eat irrespective of it a gig or festival.
** Some more than once