cixelsyd

As predicted... I would love to let the corps decide. But that would mean ALL the corps. Instead, for 50 years, a small subset of the very richest corps have been making those decisions.

That is not accurate either... but I share your frustration that they did not do more back when the opportunities were there. But here we are now. Watch how even the small suggestion of temporarily suspending prop usage while we address existential crises of health/safety, budgets, venues, etc., gets shouted down. That is just a little taste of what they were up against.

By the time that vote took place, all other options had been removed and DCI was a junior-corps monopoly. The "choice" was between running as a net-zero-cost appendix of DCI, or being cut completely loose to compete against DCI. You know, like Drum Corps Midwest did. How did that work out for them? As for the rest of your description... ... it is like the frog in the pot of water gradually brought to a boil.

You contradict yourself. DCI world class is a level of membership. Non-members (i.e. open class, SoundSport, etc.) do not share in that pay. In fact, the effort to prevent open-class from sharing that pay is so extreme that DCI has segregated those corps into a whole separate tour, and mandated that this separate-but-unequal tour balance its own budget.

That would be fine with me. I might even volunteer to start the other thread... except I do not see exactly where the split should be. As soon as you put the words "props" and "unneccesary" together (as you did three words into your title), there will inevitably be responses defending that and all sorts of other escalating expenses in the drum corps activity. If we cannot discuss the vicious circle of fewer corps = higher costs per corps, we cannot understand the damage caused by additional self-inflicted expenses such as props.

That only proves that we are talking past each other. Everyone who went to VFW/AL Nationals back in the day was in the same boat. There were no special pay rates for member corps only.

I cannot answer that question, since it is based on something I never said in the first place. What were we just discussing? In fact, it was you who described the vicious circle of increasing challenge that comes with a smaller population of corps. And it was you (with credit to MikeD) who identified the declining birth rate of new corps, rather than the death rate, as what changed five decades ago. When those two observations are put together, it is only logical to ask what the plan was (or should have been) when these entities decided to move away from organizations who had establ

I underlined one word of your post above, so as to point out that I do not see anyone saying or implying that this is the only unresolved problem DCA faces. It is a big one, though. Are they down to 13 corps again now?

Sorry, but that is not accurate. Nobody in the history of drum corps had an operating model using both member corps and non-member corps to create systemic haves/have-nots until DCA and DCI came along.

That may have happened twice. RCA fits your description perfectly as the 1970s drew to a close. Then ICA sprang up a couple of years later, and performed a similar role to RCA in the 1980s, winding down in the early 1990s. Then nothing sprang up to replace it. DCA found themselves with only 13 corps at championships in 1993, and no convenient underclass to replenish from.

You understand the vicious circle of how less corps = more cost per corps. Thank you so much for explaining that.

Then who were they delegating that role to? (And if the answer is "no one", maybe the "bad management" was in that oversight.)

(continued from previous post) Jim, I think your experiences marching with Westshoremen illustrated this practice, as the corps transitioned from non-member to member with DCA and gained access to shows and pay.

(continued from previous post) Evidently, the costlier forms of activity the top groups wanted were not sustainable. They could only afford to provide membership benefits to a small number of corps. Their member corps were not enough to fill their own show lineups, and they could not stage championship events comparable in scale to AL/VFW Nationals or World Open using only the member corps of a closed club. Both DCA and DCI have therefore relied on other corps to fill the gaps, making their shows and/or tours viable. And they have opened the clubs to allow the possibility of a select

Maybe... if I can find a way around the "500 internal server error" that prevents me from posting the whole thought. Both DCI and DCA run based on the model of haves and have-nots. Some of their corps are "members". They get access to all the shows they want/need, with enhanced pay (membership has its benefits). Meanwhile, there are other corps who are not members (that includes "associate members" and other such euphemisms) who get less access to shows and less pay. These circuits were created for the purpose of establishing/maintaining a sustainable operating model for competing