JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Brian Austin Whitney Blog Monday, April 9th, 2007

Hi Folks,

So this week since I am not going to Florida we'll be kicking it into high gear to figure out where we're going on the Roadtrip. It looks like several cities will sadly have to be cancelled off the tour simply due to lack of interest. I can already see that the entire tour concept isn't connecting with folks like it used to. I remember back when we'd announce a roadtrip and we'd have 40 people step up in every city within a week. That just isn't happening anymore. Historically we've averaged over 30 artists performing per show and anywhere from 1000-2000 people participating in a given Roadtrip season. With 40 initial stops (likely to shrink to 25 by the time I leave) I will be surprised if we pass 800 this time around. If that happens I will likely have to reserve Roadtrip dates for only the largest cities we visit or places like the Northeast where we always have good turn outs. We used to be able to do 3-4-5 events in a major city. Now, except for NYC, Chicago and Nashville we're going with 1. I think a lot of it is simply a shift in society and I've seen it happen in real time over the last 9 years. It's harder and harder to get people off their butts and out of their houses to do ANYTHING when they can "sort of" do it by surfing the web. We used to offer the best way to network by far. Sadly it's STILL the best way to network (face to face in the same room sharing music) but people think they can get a surrogate method by surfing MySpace or something similar. It's not the same.. by a large margin. As great as our message boards are, it's still no replacement for being in the same room.

We don't have the time, energy or resources to retrain or change a societal shift. I hope we can appeal to enough folks to at least have some type of real face to face interactions now and in the future via JPF. Outside of JPF, I think our whole society is losing. We don't know our neighbors. We don't know our local politicians. We don't know who the great talents are in our area. Globalization can be good but only if we maintain a connection to localization. What fun would it be to connect with someone in Australia if they watched the same TV shows, read the same books, listened to the same music, ate the same food and like the US and other countries, sat on their butts in front of the computer and TV without leaving their house.

Food for thought.

Brian