The Writing Team of www.lookingglassresearch.net
Historic Hendersonville, NC is the official home of the annual North Carolina Apple Festival, a four-day celebration of the bountiful Henderson County apple harvest. The festival is held annually over Labor Day weekend on Main Street, culminating with the King Apple Parade on Labor Day. The street fair, which covers 9 linear blocks, is capped at 150 vendors to manage crowds and preserve the attendee experience.
For the 67th Anniversary in 2013, the NC Apple Festival Board of Directors commissioned an objective, professionally-conducted research study to examine the festival and its economic and cultural impacts on the community. From the estimated overall attendance of 250,000 in 2013, unique attendance was calculated; 182,065 attendees, with 37,168 Henderson county residents and 144,897 non-Henderson County residents. During the study, a total of 400 completed, randomly-administered iPad surveys throughout all four festival days and operating hours were returned at a response rate of 79%, with no incentive provided for participation.
Geographically, the majority of attendees were distributed regionally around Western North Carolina and the Upstate of South Carolina, within a 2 hour drive from Hendersonville. From the research study data, organizers can now obtain a clearer picture of where attendees were coming from, their demographic information, spending breakdowns for unique areas or demographics, how they heard about the festival, and also when and why they decided to attend the festival.
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Hey, nobody said the music business was going to be easy. It truly is a jungle out there filled with: snakes, rats, rabid carnivores, sharks.. well, you get the picture. In the course of your musical journey, there will be confrontations, arguments, misunderstandings, and miscommunications. You'll get jerked around, screwed over, ripped off and disrespected. So, you want to be a rockstar? Welcome to your nightmare.
But this is also a business of good people, who'll give you opportunities and chances and help you out when you least expect it. That's why it's so important that you, as musicians and as a band, act professionally and respectfully regardless of the behavior of those you encounter. You don't have to be a pushover and of course, you have a right to defend yourself against the questionable actions of others, but the music community can be a very small town and the behavior you exhibit will follow you throughout your musical career.
On the flipside of that, there are musicians out there who, either knowingly or unknowingly bring negativity on themselves through their own actions. Short temperedness, egocentricism, brazen entitlement, compulsive lying and just plain old psychotic behavior can brand your band as troublemakers and deprive you of important opportunities that you need to move forward in this business.
So, how can you make sure that you're doing onto others as you wish they would do onto you? What can you, as musicians do, to eliminate aspects of your personality that may be causing bad blood between you and the people you run across on your way to superstardom?
The following are a few tips that may help you to make sure you're exhibiting professional behavior at all times:
1.) Be Timely And Courteous---Whether you're playing out live or emailing booking inquiries from home, there is never a substitute for courteously or timeliness. At gigs, show up when you're supposed to, be friendly, treat others with respect, set up quickly, end your set on time, break down quickly, be mindful of other bands on stage, compliment those around you and don't forget simple things like, "please" and "thank you." When you leave a positive impression in people's minds, you'll be high on their list when it comes time to fill an open booking slot, recommend a band for a review, etc.
Your detail image should be able to stand alone on its own merits.
No matter what aspect of the work you are choosing to place at center stage, the detail
shot should be visually compelling, and well designed.
Ideally, a good detail image is also a superb composition with great colors, and formal
pictorial qualities. Think of all the formal properties of a good painting. The detail image
should be an eye-catching image that exists independently of the full view shot, even if
it is not projected.
Details should always offer as much information as possible about the work.
Consider in advance the fundamentally important or unique features of your work (never
forgetting the impact of a thoughtful and carefully arranged composition). The close-up
should expand on the information given in the full view image and further define the
particular character of the piece. Featured details of surface, functionality, or special
technique should always be viewed in that context. If the conceptual content is an
important aspect of the work, then the detail should somehow address that issue.
Your close-up should also be considered a companion image to your full view.
In many circumstances, only two images for each piece will be sent to the jury, a full view
and a close-up. This combination should be a fantastic "one-two punch" offering a lot of
straight forward information. Although there are no guarantees that your detail and full
view shot will be shown together, you can increase the likelihood that they will be by
placing your images adjacent to each other in a digital format. Additionally, be sure to
clearly label on both image and paperwork that this is a detail of the full view.
About a month ago I declared to the Universe (and Facebook!) that I wanted to do more public speaking. I absolutely love spreading the message that it's possible to do what you love and make the money you desire. I believe in this message with all my heart. Within a couple weeks of making this declaration I was asked to speak 3 different times at the 
"Hey Tom, I wanted/needed to e-mail you because I have some frustrating questions in terms of music and the mainstream music business and I just wanted to get some insight from you. Here it goes! Well for years now, besides practicing until my fingers bleed, all I could think about is how do I establish myself as a respectable guitarist and a musician. The thing that bothers me is that someday I would love to release my own neoclassical album, but these days I realize that in the United States high tech guitarists are not as admired as much here unless the music genre magically changes or if it was the 1980's again. But it bothers me that it all comes down to a question of what sells instead of what you like personally and what you're capable of doing in terms of composition and technicality. That ticks me off! I want to make sure that I keep my own musical integrity and show my full musical abilities that have taken me years to perfect, instead of holding back playing re-arranged power chords just to please the audience. For most people, if the music is not played on the radio, they don't want to hear it. I have my very own expectations in what I could do to make a killer song, but because if it's not like Blink 182 material or something like Disturbed it won't be respected. But I just wanted your point of view what you think about what to do in these case scenarios. I mean I am stuck between personal passion and simply what sells and this really sucks."
Recently, I came across a message from one of my readers named Tom who posted a simple but profound comment, "But when the entrepreneur is bleeding money and the artist can no longer buy art supplies it's a sad day indeed." I sat with this comment for a few days, until a response finally began to bubble up.
As the festival and event industry experiences continued growth, productions are being increasingly attended by a diverse range of attendees spanning many demographic characteristics. Whether a production is ticketed or non-ticketed, collecting and understanding attendee demographic data provides significant value to organizers in many ways.
The biggest factor affecting your sales is a combination of location of your food stand, the popularity of your product, how your food stand looks and how much competition there is at the event. This issue we are going to focus on securing a good location.
It happened again! I talk to a group of artists about using social media like blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. I tell them that this is part of a marketing program and that, yes, it will take time. I warn them not to get sidetracked using social media and forget to go into the studio–that the studio is always the priority. Still, they grumble, whine, and make excuses. (I had spies at the lunch table after my talk!)
When you promote yourself via e-mail or with the words you use on your web site, you have a choice. You can be straight-forward and matter-of-fact (also known as bland and boring). Or you can communicate with pizzazz.
Qualitative (descriptive) data can come from many different sources and is beneficial in many ways. Comments & feedback from attendees, vendors and volunteers, examining foot traffic patterns through the festival grounds, and assessments of festival signage & layout are all great examples of qualitative data. Often, this data is overlooked in lieu of traditional quantitative measures, such as economic spending, marketing effectiveness, and event satisfaction data. Although traditional quantitative measures are extremely useful to festival organizers, qualitative measures prove just as beneficial to their productions. But why bother with collecting qualitative data?
Consumers will be logging on ecommerce sites searching for holiday gifts and deals very soon. The traditional kickoff for holiday buying is Black Friday - the day after Thanksgiving. Last year, Black Friday sales through the following Monday, 'Cyber Monday', accounted for 18% of total online holiday sales. U.S. online sales topped $1 billion on Cyber Monday alone. Perfect your marketing and delivery plans as the year's most lucrative shopping season draws near. Here we have created a few tips to be get the most from this season: