How Technology Changed The Band (At least my part)

When you say technology and music you get two schools of thought. First their are the purist or Old School Artist who have done everything the same way since the beginning of time and then their are the tech heads who look for new ways to reinvent themselves.  All my life I have enjoyed how technology has simplified my life. Now in my 3rd decade of performing professionally I decided to take a look back to the beginnings and reflect on how Technology has helped me saving time and energy in this fickle thing called the music business.

Now that I think of it there are way too many advances in music to write about without creating a book so lets just talk about one item that gets taken for granted.  Creating a set list.  You would think that picking out songs to perform and putting them in order was, well, not a huge task.  Hmm "Jessie's Girl"  lets play that in set two, 10th song.  That wasn't hard.  What else should we play? Whats new? hmmm (I'm listening to talk radio now so that is not a good barometer).  Hey First Lady " What else should the band play? I got "Jessie's Girl" on the list.  "Go away I'm Playing on my iPad". Hey that's an idea.  Lets check out this program on my phone called "Spotify".

Some would only see a program that allows you to listen to most any song you want to here but I see a set makers dream.  First of all I can research all the hits in a genre that I like just by pressing the radio button.  So I am listening to Paramore, and I hit radio and instantly I hear all the songs for that style.  The songs start playing and I simply move them to a list I created so I can vet them later.  The songs cover everything from 80's, 90's and today.  PERFECT!  What songs are popular? I can find that out by how many plays each one has so I know I'm in the ball park when I see a song with 50 million plays.  I then take the songs and arrange them into three set list by dragging and dropping them.  I need an hour for each list so instead of adding up times i just look at the overall time at the top of the list.  Instantly I know how long each set  list is so I don't have to guess.  I then want to share with the band, no problem, they subscribe to my lists, and they have them in order on their phones.  Need to practice? Still no problem, I just plug my phone into my guitar rig and play along.

One app on my phone takes the place of what used to be hours of work, looking at lists, recording all the songs on cassette, (OMG that took days, not hours, days) getting the songs to the band members, scribbling out a list on paper and re righting it many times to get the order correct, (Spotify just drag and drop) then coping the paper list at the drug store for 10 cents a copy, driving to the gig and distributing the list to everyone only to hear, "Really? Jessie's Girl in the 2nd set my voice is tiered by then"  Oh Brother...