See Moir Music — November 2024
Quick recap
- Friday, October 25 — CRi (dj set) at ~ Secret Undergound Location ~
- Fun set, but unfortunately the injury I've been battling got the best of me and I bailed after about 45 minutes of his set. I enjoyed exploring Club Six for the first time, though.
- Thursday, October 31 — SWIM at Monarch
- I took some preemptive NSAIDs and made it through most of his set, really enjoyed it. Is always nice to see how hyped the crowd at Monarch can get about an artist.
A Raccoon Social #3 event popped up since the last newsletter I sent out, but it got cancelled a day beforehand. I was disappointed but not surprised — I copped a ticket a week before and I was buying a Tier 1 early bird ticket for $20 to see about 8 artists play at the Midway. There's no way those economics were going to work out, unfortunately.
What's next for me?
- Tuesday, November 12 — Caribou at the Fox Theater
- Psyched to do it again.
- Thursday, November 14 — Ketboi69 (Kettama b2b Partiboi69) at 1015 Folsom
- Hoping I keep my energy up to make it to this!
Other shows going on
What I'm not going to, but might if I had unlimited energy...
November
- Thursday, November 7 — Dan Frandisco, Funkoscope, and other local DJs for Out of the Woods at Monarch
- Friday, November 8 — Skin on Skin at the Regency Ballroom
- Friday, November 8 — Prospa at Public Works
- Friday, November 8 — Reptant, Adam Pits, Baalti, Adware, and more (squish x Vitamin 1K) at F8
- Friday, November 8 — Sofi Tukker at Billy G
- Saturday, November 9 — Hayden James, Laurence Guy, and Kormak at the Midway
- I wish I could go to this just to see Laurence Guy.
- Monday, November 11 — Caribou DJ set at the Independent
- Free with RSVP so uh, free as in pay with your time spent in line to make it in
- Friday, November 15 — Garage Access 3 Year Anniversary ft. El-B at Public Works
- Saturday, November 16 — Orbital at the Midway
- Friday, November 22 — Nero at 1015 Folsom
- Friday, November 22 — Session Victim at Public Works
- Friday, November 22 — Max Cooper (3D/AV Live) at the Midway
- Saturday, November 23 — Will Clarke at Public Works
- Saturday, November 23 — Sully, Aquarian, Carré, CYBER1A (for Parameter and Vitamin 1K) at TBA
- Sunday, November 24 — Tinashe at The Warfield
- Friday, November 29 — TOKiMONSTA at the Fox Theater
- Friday, November 29 — Claptone at 1015 Folsom
- Saturday, November 30 — Defected World Tour (Dennis Ferrer, Eats Everything, and more) at the Midway
December
- Saturday, December 7 — Sammy Virji at Cow Palace
- Saturday, December 7 — AceMo at Monarch
- Friday, December 13 — Sébastien Léger at Madarae
- Friday, December 13 — TAAHLIAH + Maara + OK Williams (squish) at Club Six
- Thursday, December 19 — The Faint (DJ set) (for Popscene) at Rickshaw Stop
- Friday, December 20 — MK at 1015 Folsom
- Friday, December 27 & Saturday, December 28 — Flight Facilities at Regency Ballroom, with Sofia Kourtesis joining for Saturday's show.
NYE/NYD
- My NYE/NYD recommendation so far is for It's A New Day + Breakfast Of Champions Block Party 2025 at the Great Northern, with the best lineup of local talent so far.
- Fresh Start at the Midway has bigger names announced so far (like usual) but they're familiar ones too.
- You could also check out Sacha Robotti at Halcyon if you want an acid house new year.
January
- Friday, January 17 — DJ Seinfeld, Jasper Tygner, DJ Dials at the Regency Ballroom
- Saturday, January 18 — Qrion at Audio
- Saturday, January 25 — Jamie xx at Cow Palace
The distant future
Some of these shows are so far off it feels like they're sending a save the date to a wedding…
- Tuesday, February 4 — The Vaccines at the Fillmore
- Saturday, February 15 — Hessle Audio at Great Northern
- Tuesday, March 4 — Confidence Man at the Regency Ballroom
- Saturday, April 26 — Barry Can't Swim (Live) at the Warfield
- Sunday, April 27 — Barry Can't Swim (Live) at the Fox Theater
Other SF events
Some fun things going on in the city, maybe not music related:
- Sunday, November 3 at 6:15pm — Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields at the Roxie
- Thursday, November 7, 5–10 pm — Downtown First Thursdays on 2nd street, with live music and food trucks.
- Sunday, November 10, 12 noon-3 pm — Food Politics History walking tour with Shaping SF, email shaping@foundsf.org to RSVP.
- Thursday, November 14, 6:30–10 pm — Chat Room: Love hosted by the Gazetteer at Swedish American Hall
Music lately
You can always follow me on bandcamp to see what I've bought lately…
The new Caribou album is great, as is the Cameo Blush EP, 4me is maybe the second best track on the EP. I'm not a fan of Two Shell's album so far — it's a bit too glitchy, overdone, and one note for me tbh. Recently I've been listening to Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, and appreciating the impressive guitar playing on Never Going Back Again.
There's a new music journalism outlet, Hearing Things, which seems promising.
Mostly laying in wait for Spotify Wrapped to land next month, preparing for my annual blog post and a December of ranking my favorite tracks and albums of the year.
Other notes
Ever since shows restarted during the pandemic, I've been grappling with why I go to shows, what my motivation is, and what I'm hoping to get out of the experience. I've intensified this self-reflection out of necessity lately as I try to rehab a painful nagging hip injury and just get older, but I haven't come to any strong conclusions yet. My debate is more spiritual than economical, but the industry and fans have a lot going on.
Often I'll go out to a show and it seems like most of the audience isn't there for the music, and is just there to vibe and talk, or even just be seen and be out. I'd love a world where everyone was there for the music alone, and that's all, but my partner reminded me that a functioning music scene can't really exist without the people that are there just to be out.
If an artist is big enough to sell out a huge venue, maybe everyone there will be there for the music — but there's still folks that will buy tickets purely out of FOMO and not to listen to the music necessarily, but enjoy the spectacle of a show. If it were only about the music, after all, staying home and listening to a DJ set on SoundCloud or an album on speakers would be the same.
A thriving music scene might depend on all sorts of motivations that lead folks to go out at night, and that's just the demand side. On the supply side, it seems lik musicians and promoters are still finding the new shape of the industry since the pandemic started.
During the lockdowns in the early months of the pandemic, many artists wrote and produced a lot of new music. Most of those same artists have been on the road, touring that music ever since venues and clubs reopened. Some venues have closed, others have changed hands, and Ticketmaster/LiveNation continues consolidating its vertical market share.
With global inflation, an unpredictable economy, and continued shrinking of income from songs themselves (e.g., Spotify has made access to the pool of royalty payouts even harder to access), it still seems like the best way to make money is to get on the road and tour like your career depends on it. But there's a careful equillibrium to touring.
You can't tour too often otherwise you might saturate your fanbase — why bother going to this Tuesday night show if the artist will be back for another show in a few months? Repetition can fuel support, but it can also fuel complacence and lack of interest (otherwise developers of recommendation algorithms wouldn't spend so much time trying to define the right blend of "newness" and "familiarity" to introduce).
How do you build and sustain hype, while also keeping the business side afloat? Local promoters like DJ Dials have been experimenting with more novelty venues, building out events at Hibernia Bank, activating other clubs as "secret underground" spots, and building out legendary spectacles at Cow Palace. Festival promoters, meanwhile, are succumbing to what First Floor is calling "festival creep":
Last Thursday, October 24, Barcelona’s Primavera Sound—which has become one of Europe’s biggest and most important festivals—announced the line-up for its 2025 event, which is happening in June, more than seven months from now. This was nearly a month earlier than the announcement for its 2024 edition, which was issued on November 21, 2023.
Why is this happening?
the timing of all these festival announcements comes down to something very simple: putting tickets on sale before the competition does.
There's a lot of competition for those pockets and dollars of festivalgoers, and the reason is, as Shawn Reynaldo continues, economic uncertainty:
Costs are up, ticket sales are erratic, credit is hard to come by and the cost-of-living-crisis—which disproportionally impacts young people (i.e. the bulk of potential festival attendees)—has taken a huge bite out of consumers’ disposable income. (That crisis has also prompted many consumers to wait until the last minute to purchase tickets, which makes promoters’ efforts to move up their on-sale dates seem pretty ironic.)
This uncertainty and changes to ticketbuying isn't just limited to music festivals. Tech conference organizers have been talking about the phenomenon of last minute ticket sales too:
Something that I confirmed that other conference organisers are also experiencing is last-minute ticket sales. This is something that happened with UX London this year. For most of the year, ticket sales were trickling along. Then in the last few weeks before the event we sold more tickets than we had sold in the six months previously.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m very happy we sold those tickets. But it was a very stressful few months before that. It felt like playing poker, holding on in the belief that those ticket sales would materialise.
The hard reset of the pandemic lockdowns might have led people to reconsider how and where they spend their time, but combined with the erratic economy since then, purchasing patterns have changed. With so much added uncertainty pushed onto organizers of large events, the whole enterprise is more fragile. We've seen what that uncertainty has done for the big movie studios, releasing more and more franchise-based films and even holding back some films from theatrical releases if they're uncertain about the economic prospects (or to game the system for tax breaks).
We might be seeing what it looks like when live music and festival promoters try to stick to the reliable heavy hitters that can carry a festival's lineup. Reynaldo again:
In a volatile live music market, one of the most effective ways for promoters to mitigate risk is to lean heavily on familiarity, and if they’re hoping to sell tickets right now, it does make sense to book artists that people are talking about right now.
What happens when the biggest music festivals in the world start to feel like they're booking artists like a summer county fair? I guess we'll see.