cixelsyd

I am calling BS on this. Fact is, the front ensemble has become unequally prioritized compared to the field percussion or the brass. They are now the one section playing constantly from the first sound of the pre-show through the final note. And they are the only section that has had widespread (obligatory) concessions employed in staging, then later in use of electronic amplification. We have seen corps, including title contenders such as Ventures and Patriots, forsake field percussion entirely and use only pit percussion. Have there been any examples of similarly competitive corps in the same era forsaking the pit and using only field percussion? Or you could do what every other instrument does - vary the quantity to achieve the desired balance.

He only dove deeper into the same quicksand with that additional explanation I saw here.

I know you mean well, and I would welcome any and all new corps to DCI however they come about. But I do not agree with the assumptions you are putting forth in the development of this idea. The big one is what I have underlined below: You will not be able to rehearse more frequently during the winter months. School is in session. The kids you are describing are already involved in HS band programs. They may have other extracurricular commitments. It is also WGI season, so guard and percussion kids are just as likely to be missing from your corps as from the other DCI corps. Many high schools of the type you describe have their own winter guard or drumline, which would then obviously take precedence over rehearsal for a summer program. The philosophy of "school comes first" has become the unwritten rule for DCI drum corps. These corps require the cooperation of school band directors for recruitment, housing, or even personal participation as instructional staff. So when there is a schedule conflict between a pre-season drum corps rehearsal and a school function, the school function takes precedence. The excellence drum corps achieves is largely the product of a long term focused time period where the corps is in "all-day" mode. That can only happen when school is out for the summer. For that reason, I do not see a HS corps having the advantage you envision over other DCI corps.

Fail. Everyone knows that guard uniforms must have a patch of black-and-white stripes or checkerboard to be truly hideous. Fortunately, there is time for alterations.

No. From what I recall, it was just like this last year at this time. Because the deadline for declaring class is June 1st, there is a resulting burst of news on DCA corps in the first week of June.

My, you are quick to defend against an accusation that was not even made. My remark was only questioning whether it really is "amazing" that when we focused on a few corps, a few corps survived. Which reminds me - getting back to the topic, if I had the power, we would probably be executing the ideas in the 2009 DCI 5-year business plan regarding growing the audience, the participant base and the number of corps.

Is it? They created an organization to showcase top corps, provide shows and tours for top corps, and return money to top corps. After doing that for 40 years, top corps saw greater longevity, and the other 400 corps that once surrounded them have vanished. Your measure of "longevity" depends on how selectively it is applied.

Like the double GE judges of recent times, maybe it would only be done at selected events. Why not? Many fans will be seeing your corps for the first time at championships. Plus... ... speaking of finances, it costs money to fly judges all over the country to provide input throughout the season. Meanwhile, thanks to the huge nationwide marching band activity, there are plenty of potential judges to be found all over. Using a wider pool of GE judges could not only provide additional fresh perspectives, it could also trim travel costs.

Yes - my comment was a laugh line, but it prompted an excellent point in your reply.

And that is still an issue today. Tolerance, the subjective assessment of what is "clean" and what is not, is still a major part of the training and experience one acquires before becoming a judge - just as it was in the days of the tick system. Personally, I think the current judging system fails to capture the finer performance variations from day to day between close competitors. Judges spend 12 minutes telling their recorders how wonderful each performance is, then they spend seconds writing down numbers that are more likely to match the recent scoring pattern than the performance of the day. Neither the tick system nor the buildup system of today are perfect. If I had the power, I would overhaul the judging system. Performance judging would be a combination of qualitative ensemble judging (like today) and quantitative section judging (like the tick system). GE (at least, at major events) would be a combination of caption judges familiar with the programs, and overall effect judges seeing all the corps for the first time. Aside from that, I would also change the rules regarding equipment. Some complain about the slow pace of a drum corps event and the excess equipment that often adds to show delays. I would enact a common sense limit to equipment - corps can use only what the corps members can bring on and off the field themselves. In Japan, corps set up in one minute flat using this approach. We would need a little more time (bigger fields), but would still see much quicker entry and exit. I might elaborate on the above idea by expanding judging to cover the entire time a corps is allotted to enter, perform and exit, with the objective of incentivizing corps to minimize setup time and rewarding those who figure out how to eliminate awkward delays. I would also like to see governance changes that give open-class corps some sort of actual membership in DCI, and put the working BOD in the hands of someone other than just the most competitive corps directors. But if I had the power, why would I give it up?

Careful with that train of thought. Someone is apt to suggest that the squad drills, 128 BPM music and static rulebook of the 1950s serenaded an explosion of growth in the junior activity, with the implication that something about that era might be more conducive to growth than what we have now.

Good point. Of all the things various corps directors suggest, I never hear them saying "if only we could get back on PBS". And of all the ideas corps actually pursue on their own, I never see them splurging on public outreach as cost-intensive as a television broadcast. A same-day, local TV commercial for a drum corps show might have a more reasonable cost/benefit, and I think there may still be a show sponsor out there somewhere that does that - but we have no TV programs in the works. For that matter, the other marching arts do not seem to be pursuing TV broadcast time either. WGI had TV exposure in the 1980s, but not now. BOA is not on TV. What these two circuits are doing is a Fan Network platform, powered by DCI. Meantime, the YEA! marching band circuit does neither TV nor Fan Network, promoting through more of a constant-contact style.

While that may have been a valid rationale back in the 1970s, we have the Internet now (and theater broadcasts). That same video-based introduction to the activity is available in a wider variety of formats, and at greater convenience. But to be more precise, was it TV that introduced you and all those other people to drum corps? Were you all habitually watching PBS as teenagers? Did you see "Drum Corps International" in the TV listings and switch away from the football game? Or did a person you know insist that you check it out? In most cases that I have heard of (including myself), people have learned of drum corps from either a friend or a teacher. In the late 1970s, that friend or teacher might have directed people to the DCI telecast to get their first taste of the activity free of cost. Ever since videotape became available, though, people have had other options with which to make that introduction. As long as those video sources are widely available, I see no need for DCI to spend an additional six or seven figures to get airtime on one of a thousand cable channels. It made more sense when there were only four channels to choose from.

Well, then, if you think DCI is bad, WGI must have their heads even deeper in the sand. When was the last time they were on TV? And competitive marching band is doomed. They have never had a TV presence. Must be totally irrelevant.

That is partly what I meant.

Regarding your "leverage" post - thank you for saying this: Personally, in this day and age, I would be squeamish about allowing any body of short-term elected representatives to run up a debt in this manner. In my opinion, such behavior has a track record of frequent failures in industry, government, and even households (okay, spouses are not elected, but they are becoming increasingly short-term!). I guess in essence, I am not a fan of injecting the kind of "risk/return" into DCI that would make it attractive to investors, if we must "risk" DCI to accomplish that. That said, if we accomplish all you say in the above quote, ask me again.

That is a lovely scenario. However, it is at the very least an oversimplification, if not a distortion of the nature of the Indy deal. The DCI deal with Indy is a package deal which, in addition to the stadium use, also includes the DCI office facilities and all kinds of other provisions. The dollar value of the cost savings to DCI goes way beyond just the stadium rental. I also quibble with your attendance projections. I could see a one-shot move probably selling 5,000 more finals tickets (8,000 if in a suitable California venue), but not 10,000 in my estimation. And keep in mind that those are one-year pops in attendance; the law of decreasing returns applies whether DCI stays at a site for a second year, or even if DCI constantly rotates sites. So maybe we are looking at DCI paying $200,000 more in stadium rental and $100,000 more in other costs post-Indy, and getting (at first) 5,000 more finals fans at $50 each, for a net LOSS of $50,000 the first year, and bigger losses in subsequent years. Admittedly, this is still oversimplified, but it illustrates how the numbers incentivize DCI to make a deal like this. Just to be clear, I agree wholeheartedly with this aspect of your POV (again, not the exact numbers, but philosophically). My gut reaction to the deal back when it was announced was similar to yours. What you are missing, though, is that part of the whole idea was for DCI to shift emphasis from finals and spread it throughout the season. The strategy behind making this deal was to grow focus events all over the country and market them as destinations that the Indy-haters (among others) would choose to attend in greater numbers. All your bellyaching about lost customers, corps sales and DCI revenue at finals are compensated for by additional customers, corps sales and DCI revenue at other events. And the added benefit is that sales are now better distributed across an array of events, such that a problem with one event no longer threatens a 1993 Jackson style disaster. If you want to see finals move around again, you will need to consider their whole balance sheet, and make a better case. By the way, where is DCI supposed to get the money for this change? I recall you insisting that DCI should raise money to pay the corps more, raise money to hire some super-salesman-CEO, and raise money to get drum corps back on TV. This makes 4 major capital ventures you want now. Which should we do first? Could you give an order of priority for those? Thanks.

No. They know that attendance would be higher - but costs would be more dramatically higher. Why is finals attendance such a big deal to you... especially you? You went on for weeks about how DCI needs to return more money to the corps. Now you argue against one of the methods of doing just that. Staging DCI in Indy cuts costs more than revenues, allowing DCI to return more money to corps. Finals is not the only show on the schedule, or the balance sheet. Emphasis has shifted from finals to making major events lucrative throughout the season. This is one idea that top corps, other corps and the DCI office actually AGREE on. If you are so determined to avoid a renewal of Indy as the DCI championship site, then do like Jeff Ream says and submit a bid. Otherwise, it would take a sea change to get DCI to sacrifice profitability just to boost in-person attendance at one specific show.

Then I am baffled. You say there are 10 times as many marching units today as in 1971. You say we have 4,000 bands today - add in 40 DCI and 20 DCA corps, and we have 4,060. 10% of that is 406. But we had 440 corps in 1971, plus whatever number of bands we had back then. You have not yet mentioned how many bands there were in 1971. Regardless, I do not see what number of bands would bring the total down to a tenth of today.

Where do you get that number? Where do you get this other number?

1981: 98 corps, 35,000 at finals. 1983: 51 corps, 16,000 at finals. Wish I had the numbers to plot a graph of finals attendance against number of corps, and see just how strong a correlation there is between them.

That is quite an overreach. By the time DCI first got on TV in 1975, the finals audience was up in the mid-20s. In 1983, it was 16,000. We could just as easily say that after eight years of live TV coverage, finals attendance decreased 33%. Well, you had the underlined part right. So the Blue Devils are wasting their time running those feeder corps? How do you conclude that the niche is "filled"? I understand how marching band provides a similar experience to certain people with the built-in "sponsorship" of the schools. But only 1 in 5 high schools have a competing marching band, and there is no comparable activity for college kids. Maybe the niche is nowhere near "full". Oh, I get it now. You would prefer that any time, effort or money be directed toward the top corps. How does live TV change that? Maybe back in your formative years, getting on live TV was that big of a deal. With no smart phones or Facebook/Twitter, and only four TV channels to choose from, getting time on one of those channels made it very likely that you would be seen by a large number of people. But today, we have so many channels that they need four-digit channel numbers. As a society, we no longer sit down to the same few TV shows. The media universe has expanded. Viewership was far more passive when there were few choices. Today, it is not just the Internet, but also those thousand TV channels that make our media expereience much more active. Our youth demonstrate the shift in behavior that these changes bring. Choosing our entertainment has become a more social process. A viral video on YouTube can attain the same level of viewership and chatter as a popular TV show. Broadcast time, in and of itself, is no longer the holy grail of public exposure. Voices from your side of these debates often speak of the need for this activity to remain "relevant". I think there is no better measure of relevance than the number of people who participate in the activity.

I guess you must be listening to their World Open recording. If it was the DCI preliminary performance you heard, your question would have been answered by the end of the OTL.

I hear no objections concerning the summer band circuit still operating (MACBDA).

You just descrbed Sam Mitchell. That type of change already came to DCI back in 1995. It was a harsh lesson that I hope the activity has learned from. As the retirement of Don Pesceone approached in 1994, the DCI community was in a panic. DCI was low on reserves (legitimately low in this case, due to a poor financial result from the 1993 championship in Jackson, MS). Some wanted to address the situation by dividing the pie into fewer slices (i.e. reducing the number of member corps from 25 to 21), and that change was implemented starting in the 1994 season, but it did not fix things. There was also an outcry for new leadership to come from outside the activity to "save" it. The primary attribute sought in this savior was "business contacts", with the conventional wisdom being that the financial and marketing expertise assumed to come with that would fix all ills. Is this deja vu or what? So the result of this episode was the hiring of Sam Mitchell as DCI executive director. Mitchell had a long and successful career and lots of business contacts, and no prior exposure to or understanding of the drum corps activity. His one year at the helm was more damaging than the events that led to his hiring. Fortunately, there was still a DCI left when he was fired. More fortunately, the subsequent choice for DCI executive director, Dan Acheson, had a balance of business skill and activity knowledge, tempered with the sanity of a responsible leader. Under his guidance, DCI stabilized, recovered and grew. So what have we learned from this episode? Hopefully, we have learned what garfield already pointed out a few posts back - that the choice of a leader, partner or other power player needs to be made very carefully. Defining the personality (and better yet, the role and power) of that partner is vital. Unfortunately, I think one of the learnings from that episode was that if you want to change direction and cannot do it democratically, creating a panic and an outcry for an outside savior is the next best tactic. I think we all agree that DCI marketing and strategy for growth need change from the status quo. But that change needs to come from strategy developed and agreed to by the adults in the room. There are a number of proper roles that outside experts can play anywhere from beginning to end of this process, but those roles need to be defined by the adults in the room. If the DCI boardroom is not currently populated by "adults", then that is the first change that needs to take place.