Think of recent history as divided into two archeological time periods: the craft-driven epoch and the market driven era. The former goes back many, many, many eons–at least to 1970–and was characterized by technology-based connections between parties in the live sound continuum: artists, sound companies and mixers chose each other almost solely on the basis of how good the technical fit was between them (with allowances, of course, for economics). The market-driven era, which we're in now, still has a technological dimension to it, but it also takes other factors into consideration. For instance, the kind of musical instruments used on a tour or in a music video is a function not only of what the musicians and technologists on the project want but also of what kinds of cross-marketing deals might have been made at levels above the trenches. The kinds of microphones in a venue might depend on which company has paid to banner that place. Those sorts of considerations only increase in importance and pervasiveness in a market-driven environment. That's why I thought that a new company, Guesthouse Projects, which launched earlier this year, fits the zeitgeist so well. Founded by Greg McVeigh, former vice president of touring sound at Meyer Sound, Guesthouse Projects takes the conventional relationship between touring artist and touring sound company and creates a multidimensional object by bringing a tour sound equipment manufacturer into the picture in the earliest stages of the relationship. Instead of a deal being struck between the first two parties, and then the manufacturers of the equipment leveraging their presence on the tour by following up with press releases, Guesthouse Projects proposes to have the equipment manufacturer become a dynamic rather than reactive participant in the process of putting sound systems together for artists and tours.
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