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Wednesday, September 30, 2015

The Good, The Bad, Live and Learn



Periscope!!!!

 photo Periscope_zpscxqemwz3.jpg

The new app by Twitter, Periscope, introduced last May, is a great asset to the Shanty Hounds! We’ve been broadcasting a lot of our live shows. What a great tool this is! We’ve had people from all over the country and the world watching our gigs!

For those not familiar with Periscope, it’s a brand new live video that is broadcast from your smart phone. People who are subscribed to you will be notified, but others who are not subscribed can also watch it on Periscope. Although it goes through Twitter, Periscope subscriptions are not automatically taken from your Twitter account, as it stands alone.

We first were introduced to it from our friend Janet Nathan, who arrived at one of our gigs with it and broadcast it all over the world! We’ve since used it to broadcast not only our gigs, but also a few of our famous BBQ’s in the back yard at the Conch Rock Shanty! Trust me, for our friends in cold climates, this will be key once winter hits and you can go, via your phone or computer, to a live Key West BBQ and actually participate in it as you can send messages to those broadcasting!

One note: At gigs Periscope is mounted on a tri-pod and is unmanned, so we wont see the comments you post... but everyone else who's watching will!
 
It’s really a blast! Follow us! The Twitter and Periscope account is:

@KeyWestChris

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Live and Learn

We recently were hired to play a large gig with a parrot head club, around 400 miles north of here. The amount they paid us pretty much covered our transportation there and back. We were figuring that what we made in tips and merchandise sales, would be what would make the trip worthwhile.

It was a long ass trip and when we finally got there, the place was beautiful. It’s a very large retirement community and in this particular group there were around 200 people attending. The president of the club was fantastic, with a very good nature as well. The club members also seemed like a lot of fun too.

We had a great time playing and the gig went quite well.

There was only one problem. At the end of the day, out of the 200 people attending, only six people tipped us! Two put in five dollar bills and four put in singles. Fourteen dollars total in tips. We did not sell one CD or any merchandise either. Candidly, we were in a state of absolute shock! We honestly couldn't believe people could be so inconsiderate.

In short: We lost our ass.  

It should be also stated that one kind gentleman bought us several beers, as did the president of the club. I consider that a tip. So, if we add them to the six others, we have eight people who tipped us. Eight out of two-hundred people. That’s 4%. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

Will we go back? Well, let’s just say that if they do ask us back, the flat fee will be significantly different than it was last time.



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