Carolina Music United and The State of the SC Music Community

March 10th
4pm-7pm
CMU First Meeting
5 Points Pub

There are a lot of things that go along with having a healthy music community. Check out the Facebook thread to read a lot of comments on what people think goes into that.

Carolina Music United is a new music organization focused on bringing the music community together. The first meeting happening Sunday brings many different music enthusiasts together to network with musicians and have a chance to get to know each other on a more personal level. A very noble and respectable cause.

We at SceneSC are looking forward to it, because we don’t agree with the statement that the music scene is “in disarray and fractured.” The list of people below is our argument that it’s strong and there are many people doing their part, a lot of them doing it pro bono (like us) to help promote some of SC’s fine musicians. But that’s the magic of this meeting, that we all get to express our opinions and be open minded to what others have to say.

When it comes down to it, the music community is about music lovers of all types. When bands with SC connections make it to the big-time we all smile a little bit. Watching Shovels and Rope and Needtobreathe on Letterman brought a huge smile to my face. When Band of Horses performed on Letterman last September and Ryan Monroe wore a Josh Roberts and The Hinges shirt we all had to have been a little bit giddy. All Get Out just played a couple of dates opening for Grammy winning Fun., one of the hottest bands in America at the moment. And Toro y Moi, wow, Chaz pretty much invented a genre and is now selling out shows and playing huge festivals all over the world. In the last year we’ve had a handful of artists do Daytrotter sessions, a wildly popular recording series. This year we have a handful of artists traveling to SXSW, and local record label Post-Echo co-hosting a showcase with SC’s own Stereofly Collective.

All of this success comes from one general area. Lump in South Carolinian’s on American Idol who have had success. Add in our Country music artists that have found success along with all of the other genres that do well here. There is seriously that much talent around the state that not one person or organization can keep up with it. That’s why there are so many media outlets these days, because there is that much newsworthy potential content available.

South Carolina and the city of Columbia in particular is a unique area. Appreciate it all for what it is, and don’t become frustrated as a musician if you aren’t gaining fans on a local level. Metro Atlanta has over 1 million people more than our entire state. Asheville has a huge arts community, Charlotte is a quickly growing big city. We here in SC aren’t comparable to any of that. We don’t have as many people to market to, but we have a lot of great things going. Music Crawl, Dig South, and Fall For Greenville are all great arts festivals for the size of our community. We’ve got some really cool venues around the state, and tons of people working hard to push the great music we have here. We’ve got some fine up and coming record labels, wide diversity in our music, and a pretty neat network of house shows.

At SceneSC we push people who care about music to do their part. Start a blog, take some pictures, go to a show, record some video, post it to Youtube, tell your friends about your favorite band, buy an album, do just even the slightest bit to let other people know we have talented musicians here. If you’re reading this, then you probably already do your part.

With the amount of amazing bands we have in the state right now everyone must be doing something right. Of course it would be nice to have more people out at each and every show, but when it comes down to it, we just have less dedicated music fans than other areas of the country. Hopefully that’s something that can change with everyone working together. This CMU meeting is a great start for more progress. But dammit, South Carolina music lovers must be doing something right to push the talent we do have as far as they’ve gone. In fact, I’ve been to 3 sold out locals only shows this year alone. I’m sure there have been many more than that.