The Insane Lec­ture Business

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!