Soundtracked 46: the road to Broken Arts Fest
With planning begun on our third Broken Arts Fest we started trying to acquire the funds necessary to pull off our four-year anniversary celebration. We started canvassing local businesses and a friend of Jon's named Sierra helped. Sierra had started coming to meetings with Jon a month earlier and then kept coming even on weeks he wasn't able to attend. When things started picking up with the festival she was suddenly doing more work than some of the members so it only made sense to ask her to join the team permanently.
Soundtracked 46: the road to Broken Arts Fest June 15, 2013 @ Wasted Space live: Acoustic Arrows The In-Class Waverly Blair Morgan Donors Squid Man Stan Elephant Shoes The Louder Sounds A Bit Of Floetry HeavyEarth Watershed Hour The Fires Of Hotel Royal Broken Arts lineup: Harley, John, Kathleen, Kat, Jon, Vanessa, Sierra
For our annual fundraiser we decided to make it our biggest yet and hold an open call for a ten-hour show. Old regulars like Elephant Shoes, Watershed Hour, Squid Man Stan, The Louder Sounds, and The In-Class signed up. Vanessa and her father opened the day under the name Acoustic Arrows. Waverly Blair was SASS co-president with John and dating the singer of Squid Man Stan. Morgan Donors was a pianist from Hamilton while The Fires Of were a five-piece from Toronto who contacted us. Local bands HeavyEarth and A Bit Of Floetry came out for our open mic portion of the afternoon. Set to headline were Oshawa hard rockers Hotel Royal and a Winnipeg band called Mobina Galore. The Manitobans fell ill during the show, though, and wound up having to cancel.
Despite the 10 hours of proceedings and 13 bands we only wound up with a total of 45 people out all day. That worked out to less than 4 patrons per band and was half the attendance of our previous Christmas show and lower than four of our previous fall shows. The trend of our festival fundraisers bringing out less people than our regular shows continued. More distressing was a new trend emerging. Our 2010 Soundtracked attendance averaged 21.8, 2011 rose to 30.6, and 2012 increased even higher to 44.9. Now 2013 was half over and we had fallen back to an average of 26.5. Broken Arts was turning four years old and for the first time in our history attendance was dropping. We didn't know why and, more distressingly, we didn't know what to do to fix it.