Now at the beginning of a year, I always make my notes of all the different lecture tours in Germany. 2017 will be a year like never before. The MZvD (Magic Circle Germany), and some private lecture tour organisers, put up a schedule which is ridiculous!
This year there will be at least 9 magicians touring Germany, Austria and Switzerland. I wonder whether the clubs and their members have the time and the budget to handle all this, much less getting enough club members into the club for the events.
I wonder what the organisers think. Do they believe they are doing magic a favour with this? I don’t think that this is so. They are actively and consciously over-saturating a small market. They are overfeeding and overstraining the club members. If you consume too much of one (even good) thing, it becomes the opposite: you have enough and you don’t want it anymore. They start to be overextended.
This is the list of artists for 2017 in Germany booked and/or planned so far:
Mark Wright
Christoph Borer
Dr. Marrax
Bert Rex
Joshua Jay
Francis Tabary
JUNO
Cody Fisher
Braidon Morris
I am absolutely sure there will be more to be announced. I am guilty as well, because I will fight (yes!) and try to ring in Paul Gordon and Mark Elsdon. It will be tough. I will have to forget about my own lecture with all this, unfortunately. Maybe next year then. Or maybe in five years. Or maybe I even stop doing lectures at all.
I understand the lecture business has become a ‚huge‘ market. I understand the magicians see the possible profit doing lectures. I can understand, because I did (do) it myself. But what I don’t understand is the ruthlessness and thoughtlessness of the clubs and organisers.
Add to these live lectures the zillions of download lectures and the lectures done by club members themselves then you have the total overkill. And you are raising a new breed of ‚zombie-power-killer‘ lecturers, who know only one thing: get the lectures, make sales and kill anything which stands in the way. No matter how good, experienced they are, nor whether the stuff they show is worth it.
The downside is that the truly good lecturers with real world performing experience and worthwhile knowledge are getting rarer and rarer. The former lecture circuit mutated into a sales market, which attracts more and more people who are just interested in offering their products invented solely for selling. this, on the long range, will contribute to diminish the overall performance quality of the amateurs in magic.
Stop that insanity, it is time for a retrogression and convalescence of this fragile but very important aspect of our magic scene. If you continue, this market will die like the brick and mortar magic shops. You will cut off fees, prevent income and work for professional people, who are prepared and capable of doing this job in an appropriate way in harmony with their colleagues..
Sometimes that ‚more‘ and ‚variety‘ is everything else but good.
Pass it on!
