There is a lot of talk of shows coming and going bypassing the Hub city.

There are many reasons that it happens. We are known as a walk up city. “What do you wanna do? I dunno, lets go to that show?”

Promoters can’t count on walk ups and thus if ticket sales are sucking they will pull the show. That’s on us. If we want to see a show we should make sure that we buy the tickets. We have incredible arts community here, but we used to be known (in late 90’s_) around as Little Austin , not because of our own version of Leslie , but because you could ALWAYS go see great music somewhere in the hub. But we didn’t support the arts, we didn’t support the bands and what happened? They moved to Austin, Oklahoma City, Nashville, ANYWHERE but here. That’s on us. Talent was here for us to see and we ignored it.

The other problem is with promoters. The avoid secondary and tertiary markets until they have bled the majors dry. They come to Lubbock when they they want to make more money between lets say Albuquerque and Austin. They make stops in Amarillo, Lubbock, San Angelo all on the way to Austin. We could be off the promoters eye for a year or two and then they come in and bring 6 shows in a year. Entertainment dollars in this economy are finite and they will bleed a market dry and when they aren’t getting the numbers that they want they will cry “OH WHY DID I COME TO THIS GOD-FORSAKEN TOWN?” But it is their OWN fault.

Don’t blame the promoters when you want to walk up and the show isn’t there because of lack of interest.

Don’t blame the public when you want to bring 4 country shows in 9 month period and wonder why the first two shows did well and the last 2 didn’t.

If someone wanted to make money they would bring in not the HUGE shows, but smaller shows, the 1000-3ooo people shows into Lubbock. They won’t because the work they do for a 1000 person show they can do for a 15,000 person show and either make a ton of money or lose a ton of money.

Also, to the citizens of Lubbock, isn’t it time for us to renovate the Civic Center? Isn’t time to renovate the Fairgrounds? I would GLADLY pay taxes for those renovations instead of paying taxes for settlements of lawsuits and paying salaries to people who don’t work for the city anymore.

But of course, what do I know?  I just may be wrong! Meet you in the comments.