The music industry's inability to connect with aging music fans

Singer-songwriter Mike Doughty lamented the music industry's inability (refusal?) to connect with aging music fans , especially when it comes to seeing live music -- something I'm all too familiar with.

He raises a lot of good points, but I want to highlight just a few of them:

"If shows were at 7:30 pm sharp, adults might go."

This benefits anyone who has to get up early the next morning, not only us geezers who need our sleep. I know I won't go to a show with a 9 or 10 start time, knowing the artist I paid to see won't hit the stage any prompter than 40 minutes late.

"If everybody got treated with unceasing respect, and didn’t have to feel like they were uncooler than some snooty-kid hand-stamper, they might go."

This. Right here. A thousand times over. A few years ago, I went to a see a middle-aged singer-songwriter at a show in a small college town, and the twenty-something at the door very audibly and quite sarcastically said, "Well, I guess we don't have to worry about carding this crowd." Yeah. Ha Ha. Look at the "olds" trying to recapture their youth. Treat audiences like they don't belong there and they probably won't come back.

"Dear music industry: there are amazing middle-aged artists. There’s loads of genuinely NEW artists who are in their 40s, not necessarily, ahem, some dude who used to be in a different band! They would be loved by people with money to spend, and, oh, ps, you guys really, really need money right now. Doubtless, there’s a cannier strategy, to be discovered, for getting the music in front of adults, via media, but I don’t work in that department. [...] You know who still might buy physical copies of albums? People who grew up buying them."

Okay, I'll admit I rarely buy physical copies of CDs, except used ones. Record store snobbery and elitism takes the piss out of the fun of browsing brick-and-mortars pretty quickly. (Sometimes I just want to buy this Cher CD without critique, dammit!)

Another thing I want to add is that just seeing more people over the age of forty writing or talking about music with the same passion they did in their twenties is a huge deal. I never understood why music fandom is something silly and superfluous in ways that being a fan of other media isn't. Being a music fan is something one is supposed to outgrow, but no one says anything about the forty-something move buff or Homeland enthusiast. It shouldn't have to be.