Jazz Audience Part II: Jazz and Youth Soccer?
Then one of the hosts brought up the disconnect between of the number of kids playing soccer, versus the size of the adult soccer audience. It's hugely popular, right up there with basketball, and baseball, and has been for some time. Millions of kids are in soccer leagues. I drive past a major soccer complex often on the freeway, and it's always PACKED at night with various teams playing, hundreds if not thousands of people. But despite the HUGE numbers of kids playing soccer, most don't go on to be soccer fans. This CNN Money article (a bit old, from 2002) talks about this issue. This of course is of concern to many in soccer, and presumably to the MLS, which is hoping its product will catch on and be as mainstream as baseball or football someday (with the revenues that follow).
How does this relate to jazz? Well, we always talk about building the next generation of jazz listeners and focusing on getting kids in jazz bands (good thing for a lot of reasons, I'm not questioning that). But the problem is those kids aren't becoming LISTENERS! They may be in the program out of coercion. They may like playing an instrument, or the social aspect of being in the band, but as they mature they aren't seeking out jazz events, or recordings. Now, of course, the kids in the band are more likely than those the average student population to become jazz fans (a guess, but I think it's a safe one). But still, the numbers aren't very good. How else can you explain the explosion of jazz education of the last 30 years, compared with the simultaneous decline in the jazz audience, jazz venues, jazz record sales.
Jazz faces the same issue as soccer. If we only rely on youth participatory programs to generate next generation audiences, we're not going to grow the audience as we think we would. We need to take a serious look at audience development, how we can make jazz relevant to new generations of listeners, and find out what interests them. I'm not talking about watering down music. I'm talking about taking a moment and saying "what's going on here?" To be continued.