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http://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/jazz-club-is-going-digital/2810 http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-smalls-jazz-club-musician-revenue-sharing-project The first time I was paid to perform at Smalls was in December, 1997, as part of a two-guitar group featuring Eddie Diehl. The place was packed both Friday and Saturday, with lines down the block. Bear in mind that Eddie, though, a great player, is at best a minor jazz celebrity and I'm not sure I've heard of myself. The club's cache had to have something to do with the business we were doing. We also got paid what was a decent wage for non-names on a weekend at a NYC jazz club. Fast-forward to the other side of a little thing we like to call 9-11. As someone said 'everybody (in the nightlife business) got creamed'. No more long lines just to get into a cool place. The club started struggling like everyone else to survive and eventually it got to be too much for owner Mitch Borden, who closed down for a while. Enter Spike Wilner, chief owner since 2007. He kept the place going with local talent as always and performers made less, to offset operating costs. But Smalls was, and there was a difference: Spike, a pianist, is an inveterate archivist. He felt it was important to document the music being made, and he has turned out to be visionary in other ways. Soon a huge archive, video and audio, was amassed. Now Spike is using this digitized archive to hang a revenue sharing plan for performers (See the article and the link to the fundraising campaign). With a Netflix-like model, patrons would pay for unlimited access into the video and audio archive into a fund that would come back to the performers. There would be additional benefits from the revenue stream such as a charity fund, the Harry Whitaker Foundation, that would help Smalls performers in emergency times. The bugs naturally need to be worked out, and at least one idea is perplexing to me (the idea of popular performers---i.e. the ones most requested could end up making the most money could cause some resentment), but for a club seating 60 with a world-wide reputation there has to be sources of income for the musicians other than those long-disappeared lines. I wish Spike the best and commend his out-of-the-box thinking. Perhaps this is the start of something. I will let him know I posted this in the hopes that he will speak for himself and expand.