New York Says NO to Ticket Sales
New York is in the center of attention again in the music industry, and not for a good reason.
Alright, alright. So in case you didn't know, at the beginning of all this, covid nonsense, New York instituted a ticketing ban, and that band basically said that if you are a music venue or a comedy venue or anything that requires selling tickets, you are no longer allowed to do that for the safety of the people that may come... And in the beginning, I think everybody was down with that, we didn't know where this Covid thing was going, and here we are pretty much six months in now, and we still don't know where it's going, but the difference is the opinions and the overall feeling of this particular virus is slowly evolving in a lot of people's minds and musicians are not really being taken care of by the government so much to speak right now, so in line of all this, they started having ticketed events again, of course, safely distanced like a restaurant or something. In response to this a couple of days ago, New York reminded everyone, the ticket band is still in play, and they threaten to take away anybody's liquor license who didn't follow the law, so the New York state government officials are really holding strong on this and they're strongly advising against all these concerts and comedy events and whatever, not happening with this friendly reminder from the New York government about how things are to be limited during this time, now musicians are starting to really feel the hurt, especially since PUA is currently not being distributed.
The artist community obviously took action and immediately owners started speaking out of club saying, This is totally not fair because you're letting restaurants come in and open and spacing people six feet apart, and they're able to come in and buy a dinner and they're being served by people with the plate and everything, and you're just letting people move like that, whereas music club or a comedy club could be operating under the same sort of restrictions and people can still sell tickets and people can still make money and as artists and... So the artist community is left with... Where are we going with this and what are we doing? It's just yet another example of government not really understanding how the function of art works in our society from an execution standpoint, and quite frankly, it's a broken record and it's been happening for decades and decades now, people on Capitol Hill and people in our local governments don't understand the complexities of an artist career, I don't necessarily know how fast we're able to turn their minds around.
But I will say this, that the musician community in New York is always resilient and they took action.
In just two days, they had massed just under 8000 e-signatures calling for a stop to this particular piece of legislation, and again, simply saying it's unfair that you're letting some restaurants open and not these clubs who are not serving food, but simply showing up and entertaining people, the united entertainment industry professionals, which is a new sort of union that started up in New York, they are taking this on head on and considering legal action and actually kind of threatening it, saying that you can't continue to operate under these conditions where one side is taken care of while the other is not in the side that we're talking about here, not being taken care of is in fact musicians and artists, so while I understand, it's important that we all stay safe and it's really important that we do what's in our best interest to stay safe, if you're going to open up things for a restaurant, you have to open things up for a music club. It's just the way it should happen. One should not be treated really much different than the other, they both serve food, they both serve alcohol. The only difference is one plays music or one gives comedy and one doesn't, and you sit right across from your friends less than six feet apart and have a conversation with them, so I don't understand why a music club couldn't just space chair a six feet apart and have people show up and enjoy in a time where they so desperately need it.