The biggest attractions and entertainers in Second Life are also the biggest losers.
Ima Flanagan: Co-owner of Toby's Blues Club
Music clubs have a special place in Second Life. They are more than their music; they provide a place for people to meet, chat, listen to their favorite music and dance. A lot of social thing goes on in the clubs. They also are places for people to show off their newest acquisition and fashion sense.
Since Second Life does not have a ‘directed’ game plan in the virtual life, it is safe to assume that clubs evolved as one of the earliest means of entertainment on the grid long before voice chat was introduced.
With music being a universal language, the clientele of the music clubs is international. If you sit in a well-run music club and have willingness to talk to anyone without hesitation, you can be assured to make friends with a resident from almost any part of the world. I have learnt a lot about many countries and cultures from my chats with residents and I continue to do so even more. For residents, clubs are wonderful places to relax from the stress of the real world free from the encumbrances of the real world.
There is no single success formula for the clubs. Usually, a club gains notoriety followed by a deep slump in its clientele and manyclose down. There are tricks that people have tried to employ to boost club popularity. But these seldom work.
But few people know that despite the glamorous world of the clubs, club-owners are constantly struggling to keep the clubs alive. Running a club is time-consuming and hard work. Ima Flanagan, a co-owner of the Second Life’s one of the most popular Blues club Toby’s Juke Joint says, ‘The work involved is multifaceted and can change at a moment’s notice.” By multifaceted work she means that a club owner has to think ahead and plan not only for the land, teleport points, building, pose balls, and other props but they also have to constantly work to find the DJs, negotiate the terms, train the DJs, buy time for the music stream pipeline, and constantly police the visitors to avoid unruly situations.
Club Millions Owner Sha Karillion
Sha Karillion, owner of Club Millions that attracts younger crowd in Second Life through hiphop music, attests to the same sentiments that the work in a club involves a lot of people skills, “Managing managers, DJs, hosts and guests… kid gloves all the time. (It) doesn’t matter if you are having a crappy day, you go into the club and you are ‘on’.”
Clearly, maintaining a civil environment is of paramount importance to the club owners because it helps popularize a club. Ima Flanagan, who is well-known for her no-nonsense zero-tolerance policies and is prompt in ejecting miscreants from her club, strongly believes in keeping the clubs free from trouble, “The worst part is babysitting seemingly adults, night after night, who don’t understand that the anonymity of a computer does not allow them a ticket to be an asshole.”
But, hard work is not a problem for most club owners; they are intelligent and hardy people who actually thrive on hard work. Ima reflects, “Toby Howton, who created the club, worked tirelessly to bring it to fruition, and to this day would do anything possible to make people happy while there. It’s a tough job that Toby makes appear a snap.” But the economics of running a club is working against them. Clubs are constantly bleeding real money to exist in Second Life. In addition to the visible assets and accoutrement of a club, they have to deal with other expenses such as the rental for the music stream, paying the managing staff, DJs and for advertising. Then, a club has to exist on some land.
Land prices set by Linden Labs have stirred the Second Life considerably. Land rentals are arguably the most expensive part of owning and running a club. In fact, it is a decisive factor in running a club. According to Ima, clubs exist because the owners pay for them. She estimates that Toby’s has a monthly layout of approximately $500.00 dollars (not Linden dollar) a month!
High land rentals are affecting other clubs as well. Sha Karillion is seriously thinking of closing the Club Millions. “50k Linden a week for a headache.”, she says with a deep sigh. Unlike Ima and Toby, Sha does not own the land where her club sits. So, she has no other source of income to compensate for the losses she incurs. It is not unusual for the club owners to rent space for advertising and direct the traffic through the ‘commercial district’ of the sim. It is a commensalism that clubs are willing to consider with the sim owners.
The economic effects of Lindens’ restructuring have been quite widespread. It is generally thought that Lindens have deliberately engaged themselves into a bait and switch methodology of operation. Once the Second Life got popularity by the hard work of the residents, Lindens have tried to unduly capitalize on their efforts. Ima resents the Linden Lab’s tactics. She believes that successful clubs bring commerce to Second Life and Linden Labs makes a great deal of money from the people who sign up and spend money. The effects of Linden restructuring of the land tiers has been reverberating through other cadres in the Second Life music world as well.
Thundergas Menges: JunkYard Blues DJ
Thundergas Menges is a veteran Second Life DJ at the Junkyard Blues Club. Thundergas is an articulate IT personnel in the RL who has very strong and candid opinions about the music scene in Second Life. He also has a keen sense of classic blues music. You can check him out on MySpace.com.
Thundergas also thinks that Linden Lab’s restructuring of the land tier has adversely affected the clubs, “the tier is a little high, especially since Linden Lab went thorough that whole restructuring thing”. Thundergas is almost an activist who sincerely believes that music has an important role to play in Second Life economy. Thundergas came to Second Life to do something very different. He wanted to make machanima in the virtual world.
Although he was successful in creating mechanima that can be viewed through this link, he decided to gain additional experience by following his passion for the Blues music. He boasts of a collection of almost a hundred Blues CDs that he likes to share with people simply because of his passion to propagate the ‘true blues’.
DJing in Second Life is fun but it may be technically demanding. He is cognizant of the real economic forces working in the first and Second Life. He admits that RIAA will eventually attack the DJs in Second Life for copyright infringements. Indeed this is a prickly issue.
A music event organizer, who also happens to be a close friend of mine, refused to grant me an interview from the fear of attracting attention of the music industry to Second Life tribute bands. But, in the broader context of the Linden Lab’s policies, Thundergas believes that Second Life is not the final frontier in the virtual world and other platforms will eventually emerge that will be better than this, “…it’s a free market. The strongest will survive.”
The perplexing question is why the club owners even bother to put forward a project that is going to tax them both in terms of time and money? The answer was simpler than I thought. Ima says, “Simply because they (clubs) are fun to run. Not everything in life can be about the dollar value, and clubs rise to the top of that list.” Sha has similar feelings, “Its for fun, lol.” She adds, “Can fun ever be a loss?” We guess not.
Whether Linden Labs put together their acts and get rid of their greed or not, we know that one of our favorite club will be there to entertain us, to bring the Second Life community together and we can be assured that hard working dedicated people like Sha Karllion, Ima Flanagan, Toby Howton, and Thundergas Menges will be always there to entertain Second Lifers. As Ima aptly said, “They don’t tax churches in RL, and Toby’s can be a spiritual experience.” So do all other music clubs in Second Life. Amen!
Great post. I want to add some thoughts. but I hate being the first commenter with it :OP I’ll come back soon with some of my ideas
Thank you for writing this article. It’s good to see someone else making many of the same points, and giving the same consideration to club ownership that many of us have lived by for years. Running a club in SL truly is a labour of love, and something you should only consider doing if creating an entertaining experience for other people at your own expense (in time, effort and money) is of the utmost importance to you.
But I think it’s important to distinguish that this is only true if you truly want to create a nightclub or music venue experience to share with others. I could, quite easily, create a plywood platform in the sky, pipe in a radio station, and within a day or two have the “club” banging against the sim’s avatar limits by installing a ’sploder and giving away masses of prizes. Attach a mall to sell stuff to these same visitors and I could start to turn a profit.
Personally I would consider this sort of venue an abject failure.
I will always consider it a success to attract even 10 people who have come to an event because they love the ambience, the crowd and the music over having 40 people who are there simply because I’m paying them to be. I personally see very little point in those types of “traffic factories” that are often no more than cynical attempts to sell or advertise to the people that have been attracted by the chance of something free.
When we first opened Club Republik over four years ago, we took the decision to intentionally avoid attaching any sort of mall or (as was allowed then) casino to the club. We were the first live DJ club, and also the first to take a step away from the mall attachment seen everywhere else at the time because we chose to focus on what we held as most important: Creating an entertaining and enjoyable experience for people from across the globe to enjoy that one thing we all love – the music!
If you approach club ownership with this same altruistic attitude it will be costly, and it will never return a profit… but take it from me – in pure friendship, memories, and experience it really is worth it!
Sable x.
Thank you Sable for a very thoughtful comment.
[...] the wonderful voice to keep the rest of us happy- these are our favorite DJs. I have told about Thundergas Menges in one of my previous blogs but there are other excellent DJs including Fiery Otaared, Ben Shutt [...]