Baron

Let's do the maths on bad singers: Let's take 3 hypothetically rotten singers who arrive early & get in the queue. Early in the eve it doesn't matter -ie- they take up 3 min X 3 songs = 9 excrutiating minutes. Go buy a drink or go to the loo, no problem. Of course, this is a gross simplification as it ignores that this might be the first thing prospective passersby hear, let alone the staff. Where things become strained is later in the eve. Rotation takes them to the next round, by which time the after dinner crowd arrives. Now you have them doing another nine minutes. No big deal. However, the rotation slots in 1-2 new, one old. So if the issue is you waiting your turn this nine minutes becomes 18 minutes (plus say 2 of the first round = 6 min). When you have a high ratio of singers to listeners as at Chats, this blows out even more and ends up as high as 1.5 hours between your songs. At such a point, it becomes a question of whether you enjoy listening that long or would rather go somewhere else. So the issue does affect you.

It also affects overall attraction to singers as they may not want to travel to where they wait 1.5 hrs/song. This is proven by the huge number of blow-ins we see at comp's. Again, no big deal, but some may merely be deterred by the wait.

Where it affects all of us more is in the overall image. Nowhere was this more clearly shown than SBS. We are clearly seen as people who wear funny hats to make fools of ourselves. It's not a personal issue for me. It is a survival issue for the hobby. We've lost at least 5 venues I can remember in Chats locale. We have one left, which is so poorly respected (even with its #1-2 rank) that its own venue reception didn't bother to find out whether it was on and told me on the phone it wasn't. You can't sink much lower than that.
Submitted by Tom on 26-07-2007

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