{"id":1526,"date":"2011-10-31T09:04:25","date_gmt":"2011-10-31T16:04:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp\/2011\/10\/artists_in_search_of_a_liquidi\/"},"modified":"2011-10-31T09:04:25","modified_gmt":"2011-10-31T16:04:25","slug":"artists_in_search_of_a_liquidi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/main\/artists_in_search_of_a_liquidi.php","title":{"rendered":"Artists in search of a &#8216;liquidity event&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last night I attended the Madison performance of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.littlebigtown.com\/\">Little Big Town<\/a>, an alt-country group whose current national tour is sponsored by Country Financial (which is where I got the backstage invite&#8230;thanks Sean). And in the pre-show chat for the sponsor&#8217;s guests, they were asked about how they managed to endure as a band before they got their break. The answer, of course, was with hope, with scrappiness, and with day jobs. They would rent a cheap van to get to gigs. They would scrape and save and barter and borrow for their equipment. They would follow the same trail as almost any other wanna-be professional ensemble.<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>It just so happened that their trail led to a record deal, a national tour, a series of featured performances on broadcast television, and a series of hit singles.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Such rags-to-riches stories in entertainment always leave me wondering (because it&#8217;s my job to wonder): What&#8217;s the difference between this profitable band and the many nonprofits that tell a portion of the same story (the scrappy, resourceful, hopeful story)?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>The answer, of course, is profit.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Little Big Town, and the thousand other bands and ensembles that make music together any way they can, are essentially nonprofits, until they&#8217;re not. Just as Yo Yo Ma was a nonprofit enterprise until he wasn&#8217;t. Or Kathleen Battle. Or Cirque du Soleil. They may not be formed as tax-exempt corporations, but they operate with essentially the same principals &#8212; driven by passion and purpose, sustained by the act of making things from nothing.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>In venture capital and equity investment, there is a magical moment when promise turns into profit, when founders or owners or early investors harvest the cash resulting from their early passion and productivity. It&#8217;s called a &#8216;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.investopedia.com\/terms\/l\/liquidity_event.asp\">liquidity event<\/a>,&#8217; and usually takes the form of an Initial Public Offering or a buy-out by another company.&nbsp;<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>While its easy and convenient to label genres of music and types of performers as either nonprofit or for-profit, as commercially focused or community focused, neither is a particularly productive definition for what&#8217;s really going on. Artists create work because they are compelled to create. Whether those creations find their way to a &#8216;liquidity event&#8217; or not is a matter of the market, the moment, and the media that find what they make.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last night I attended the Madison performance of Little Big Town, an alt-country group whose current national tour is sponsored by Country Financial (which is where I got the backstage invite&#8230;thanks Sean). And in the pre-show chat for the sponsor&#8217;s guests, they were asked about how they managed to endure as a band before they [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1526","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1526\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}