Accessibility of music venues in the Greater Boston Area

Accessibility of music venues in the Greater Boston Area

There are four local venues that do a particularly good job of providing accessible seating for people in wheelchairs. These include the local House of Blues, the Sinclair, the Paradise, and the City Winery. These venues go out of their way to be helpful.

At the House of Blues there is a great balcony with seating that you can use for most concerts. When shows do not have the balcony in use, because the size of the expected crowd is smaller, they provide you with a great location on the mezzanine level that works perfectly well but doesn’t have seating for other people with you. The staff here are very helpful. They also have good wheelchair accessible restrooms.

The Sinclair seats you in their balcony, which provides a great view of the show with nobody standing in front of you. They have also been willing to bring chairs for other people with me who needed them. The seating they provide is right in the middle of the balcony and works wonderfully because you can see the stage well and you are in front of everyone. They also have great wheelchair accessible bathroom facilities.

The Paradise is a much smaller venue than the other two. The way they accommodate you is somewhat different, but they do a great job dealing with people in wheelchairs. You get seated on the floor of the venue and they set aside an area right next to the stage for you to be seated with your party. You are seated right next to the stage, stage right.

Another small venue that does a good job is the relatively new City Winery, which has table seating that works great for wheelchair users. The bathrooms are also great.

Venues that could do a better job include the Rockland Bank Pavilion. This place asks Ticketmaster to sell only two seats together to wheelchair patrons, the rest of your party is seated in a nearby row, this is true even if you purchase tickets early. This is essentially discrimination again handicap patrons. This can be unsafe for some disabled patrons. There is no reason, whatsoever, for this limit on companion seating in since seating spaces that accommodate wheelchairs could have chairs placed in the space when not used by a wheelchair patron.

Another venue that could do a much better job is the Royale.  Since it is owned and run by the same people who run the Sinclair I would expected them to do a better job than they do. This shows that protocols for helping handicap people are not even systematized within the same companies, but are likely considered within the purview of the venue managers. At the Royale I have been put in a place against the side wall where it is difficult to see the show and represents the worst seating available in the venue.

The TD Garden could also do a better job.  This place unlike the other two does have some limitations that are the result of real physical limitations. Tiered seating does provide a real reason to place some limits on companion seats for people in wheelchairs because wheelchair users can only sit on tiers that are on the same levels as the elevator entrances and there are a limited number of seats available on these tiers. This venue has some limits based on the nature of the venue, given it has tiered seating.Even so, the Garden makes the situation worse by deciding to use a significant part of this tiered for standing room. Because of this use, the Garden imposes stricter limitations than would otherwise be necessary.

I hope this information is helpful for others who are handicap and want to enjoy good music in Boston. And if you agree, it would be great if you can help advocate for improved handicap accessibility at the venues that need serious improvement.There is one final venue in Cambridge that remains totally inaccessible, that venue is Passim which is one of the seminal folk music venues in the United States. It particularly drives me crazy not to be able to get in here because many years ago before I was limited to a wheelchair I used to spent a lot of my free time while in college hanging out here. I went to college at Tufts and a few friends and I used to work with Bob Donlin, the owner of the Club at that time to put on a series of larger venue folk shows at Tufts. I also once played with two friends as an opening act here. Passim is in a building owned by Harvard and so Harvard is responsible for its lack of access.

Non-touring Bands

The way the music  industry  currently works today non-touring bands like the Beatles were in their most creative days would have a hard time making a living and would certainly not do as well as they did when people were buying  a lot of records. So I think that we have created a system  that doesn’t reward bands for taking chances and staying in the studio rather than out on the road.

Something needs to be done about this so that bands and artists can continue to spend their time in the studio being creative if they want to rather than having to spend tons of time on the road which is the way the industry seems to work today because artists don’t make their money off of recording anymore.

this is a real problem if we want to see popular music remain able to be  experimental and creative. This is a reason why people need to actually buy their music rather than rent tracks as  we all now do through systems like Spotify. Another way to deal with this problem could be is would be to have systems like Spotify spend less of their money building new features for their systems  and more on royalties to performers whose music is being listened to. it would also be useful if systems like Spotify stopped providing free access to the service so that  it could generate more revenues to provide back to the artists. . I understand that in this new Gen X world people like the idea of getting things  for free with advertising paying the bills but in situations like this with music.. I think we want me producers of the music to make decent money  in the process of making the music we need to have more and more people actually buying into the system . If we want artists to continue to be  creative.

Somehow  we must find a way to  deal with this problem so that popular music can continue to be creative and so that bands who spend most of their time recording can actually get paid well for doing so.

 

 

Americana a category of music on online music services

I think it’s weird that most of the online music services when they list categories of music and have radio stations associated with them do not include Americana as one of those categories or at least include it in the top level name of the category in which they include it.

If these services include categories like hip-hop, dance, rock, folk and country they should include Americana as a category as well or at least include Americana as part of the top-level name of the category in which it is included. Currently some services categorize this music under folk and and others categorize it under country. This makes Americana particularly hard to find using subcategories if it is not actually included in the top-level name of the category it is being associated with. Americana also includes bluegrass, R&B, and some blues. Thus, if Americana’s included only as a subcategory of another category it needs to be included in the top-level name of the category it is included in in order to be easily found by people who want to listen to this kind of music.

Given that musicians use this category to label their music themselves you would think that the online music services would use it too and either make it its own category or included in the top level name of the category in which it is being included. But if you look at Rdio, Pandora, and Itunes  you won’t find Americana as one of the basic musical categories and you also won’t find it included the top level in the name of the category the service actually categorizes it under like folk or country. That means that if you’re trying to find playlists radio stations by genre this is not one that you will see in the categories either as a separate category or as part of the name of the category it is included in as a subcategory.

Lots of people now consider this their favorite category of music. Therefore it deserves better treatment by the online music services. Including this kind of music as its own category or listing it as part of the top level name of the category that is included in.

Spotify is the one service that does include Americana is included as part of the top-level name of the category in which it is included which on Spotify is folk.

A new kind of music competition show

A new kind of music competition show

I think it would be more interesting to have a contest for singer songwriters that that rated the performers on both their singing abilities and their songwriting than it is to have contests like American Idol and The Voice that is focus entirely on singing. I think it would be great to have a situation where people were judged by what they wrote as well as how they sing. In a show of this sort the performers would have to do their own material most of the time so that they could be judged on that as well as their voices. Most of the best music being developed these days is singer-songwriter music where the artists does both.

Singer-songwriter’s cut across many musical genres so the show could still involve lots of different kinds of popular music. Even so it would be unlikely to have an audience as large as the current shows because it would not appeal to the teenybopper audience that is now a big part of the audience for American Idol and The Voice. Thus a show like this would probably not be a big network show with an audience like those two. As a result it would likely need to be put on a cable network. I could be completely wrong about that audience expectation however.

I would think that the people coming out of this sort of contest would be way more likely to end up having long-term careers. Probably more so than the current group coming out of the purely singing contests. That is because if their singing careers ended they would still be able to continue their careers as songwriters.

Judging people on their ability to write songs would be much more difficult for the audience but also much more interesting. I think that hearing people doing their own stuff would be a lot more fun than watching people singing old hit songs by other people. That type of contest would demonstrate much more about the person’s real artistry than the current shows do.

The format for this kind of show would have the performers do their own material most of the time but also have a few weeks when they did other people’s material and got judged just on their vocal abilities for that week. That would make sure that both their singing ability and their songwriting got carefully examined. If these performers had their own bands they should be allowed to use them as part of the show if they want to but they should not be required to do this if there is a house band and they want to use it. They should also have the option perform without any band at all if that was their preference. Each performer could make a different decision about this in each separate week during the show.

Seems to me that in a show like this the performers would be able to do songs entirely within the genre or genres in which they hoped to build their career rather than a lot of different genres, some of which had nothing to do with the way they wanted to build themselves as artists.

On the current shows many of the performers are actually singer-songwriter’s but they never get any feedback with respect to their ability as songwriters. I would think that these kinds of performers would be happy to be a part of something where there songwriting abilities were also part of what was judged both by the judges and by the audience. If your intention is to follow this sort of career path you actually really need feedback on both kinds of ability.