The sine wave that is country music's fortunes periodically intersects with the boundaries of the larger mainstream pop music paradigm, and this summer, Nashville-based music finds itself all over that map. Artists like Lady Antebellum, Rascal Flatts and the ubiquitous Taylor Swift have kept country on the cover of People magazine and on the broader cultural radars. One other thing they have in common is major video projection systems out on tour with them. "If you've got video projection out with you, especially if you've got LED out with your tour, it's a way of saying to the industry and the world, ‘We've made it,'" says Steve Daniels, president of locally based I-Mag Video AV Inc., which has provided video systems and services for country touring artists including Rascal Flatts, Brooks & Dunn and LeAnn Rimes, as well as pop artists such as Billy Joel and Alicia Keys.
More Competition
As country moves further into the mainstream, more of its artists reach the level that warrants the cost of projection video and LED systems. However, success attracts competition, and like other home-grown Music City tour technology support companies, Daniels says he's never seen more of it in his 20 years operating I-Mag. Nashville's growth as a touring hub has brought more competition to town, most recently outposts for XL Video and Chaos Visual, both anchored in the L.A. area.
Scott Scovill, owner of video provider MooTV, headquartered in Nashville's Soundcheck facility, has done video for artists including Alan Jackson and Brad Paisley since it launched in 1993. Scovill says the local market has jumped from three video providers to seven in a little over two years – driven, he thinks, both by Nashville's attractiveness as a tour launch location and by a fall-off in corporate work during that time. "It's frustrating," he says. "The number of companies here has more than doubled, but the amount of work certainly hasn't." But, he adds, "some of the ‘offices' here are little more than a cell phone. I have to wonder how many of them will be here when the [corporate] market picks up again."
A main point of contention for Daniels and other Nashville-based companies is that the owner/operated business model he's used all along – working directly with tour production managers, and, more recently, the lighting designers who are increasingly integrating video as part of lighting designs – is coming up against "box houses" – rental companies that also deal with middlemen such as equipment brokers and do dry hires (rental of the video equipment without operators.) "There's a paradigm shift going on in the way we do business," he says. "There's a lot more competition now than there has been, and it's lowered pricing. People are scrambling to get and take market share."
VER, Nashville's dominant dry-hire company, didn't return calls, but Chris Lisle, a veteran LD in Nashville, says pricing pressures are increasingly counterbalancing the traditional relationship-based Nashville way of doing business. "As a designer, I do see [more use of dry-hire] happening," he says. "I would love to always send out a tour with a killer video package and crew from a vendor, but most of the acts that I work with just don't have the budget. If I can get a decent LED video product from VER or another supplier like that and have my touring LD/lighting crew deal with it on a daily basis to save my client money, then that is what I am going to do. My job is to give my client – the artist – the most bang for the buck, and if they have a $5,000-a-week budget for video that gets eaten up by a $2,500-a-week video tech, then I have to look at other options. For my clients that do [have the budget], I would be the first one to put a tech [from the supplier] out there with the system."
Pricing Pressures
The market expansion is putting further downward pressure on pricing, but it also presents alternative packaging opportunities, such as the PixLED system that XL Video general manager Ken Gay calls a hybrid: artists can take the system on the road for as little as $3,500 a week, provided one of their crewmembers takes XL-provided training on it, and an XL technician is also onsite during rehearsals and the first show of the run. "Country music has a number of arena acts, like Brad Paisley and Kenny Chesney, but for each one [of those], there are 20 acts that go out with a bus and a trailer," Gay says. "That's a market this [package] can work for." Gay stresses that XL Video is not a dry-hire company, nor does the company apply that type of package to its Los Angeles office clients. "But country artists have realized how to use video as a way to extend the stage," he says. "This is a creative way to get video to them cost-effectively."
Mike Cruce, owner and president of Birmingham, Ala.-based Media Visions, which opened its Nashville location in 2003 and includes Brooks & Dunn, Montgomery Gentry and Dolly Parton among its clients, says the faster-changing product lifecycle of LED, plus the ability to offer amortized video projection equipment at lower costs, the increased demand from smaller touring artists who can now afford some video or LED for their show as a result, and the greater amount of competition that Nashville has been attracting as a touring hub, creates its own dynamic. "As more companies move in with more equipment, prices go down, then that stimulates demand, which is great, but we realize less profit per client," he says, describing a scenario made ubiquitous by digital technology. The outcome, Cruce predicts, will be some degree of consolidation, especially when viewed against the backdrop of continuing decline in music industry revenues, including from concert touring this year. "The question becomes, where is the saturation point in gear ownership for full-service providers?" he asks, adding that his company has an AV integration division that helps offset touring's seasonality.
As the most cutting-edge of touring technologies, it's not surprising that video/LED would become a highly competitive battleground in Nashville. It may make it a hot seat for the growing number of providers there, but it's certainly giving artists touring out of Nashville plenty of choices.
