Hey everyone,
I’m Ben Slade, and I’m a graduating senior majoring in Electronic Media with a Digital Media Concentration and a Business minor.
I feel very connected to the Austin Music Scene. It has been a part of my life as long as I can remember. Even when living and attending college in Vancouver, BC I was collaborating on music with people back in austin and helping to promote Austin shows to my Facebook friends.
Being so connected to the scene I find it hard to come up with a data driven story that I feel is worth telling. I’m still brainstorming more Ideas but I have come up with a few.
My first thought was to tell the story of how many venues have closed recently or will be closing by the end of the year. Especially in the Red River District, known for having an abundance of great music venues not just bars that have live music like you see up and down 6th street. I was thinking maybe this could be a story about the life span of a venue in Austin. Austin is the self proclaimed live music capitol of the world, but with the growth of the city and the rising price of everything here it no longer provides an environment where venues can last longer than a few years to a decade. Unless your one of the staple venues in town (mostly booked exclusively by C3) like Stubbs or The Moody Theater chances are it will be difficult for you to last longer than a decade. The problem with this story though is that i don’t know how I’d collect the data for it, other than doing A LOT of research and even then, it could be really hard to find all the information I would need.
So my other Idea is on the opposite end of the spectrum. The data is here but I’m not sure what the story behind the data is exactly. Spotify recently released data about Austin’s listening habits, as well as 1,000 other cities across the world. I’m not sure how, but I could potentially use this data to some how tell a story about how Austin listens to music and why we’re different than the rest of the world. But I feel like Spotify already told this story a bit with they’re interactive map and the Playlist of Austin.