More Tequila, Fewer Cigarettes: The Changing Backstage Spread; Plus: Neo-Medieval Times

Now playing at Stems HQ: The 10-part Radiotopia podcast Light Box, on AI music and its consequences, written and hosted by musician/podcaster Mark Henry Phillips and produced by Friend of Stems Drew Thurlow; well worth a listen!

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Sometimes, the Stems team needs to take a step back from AI, streaming and other hot topics and focus on more timeless things, like backstage deli trays and red Solo cups. Recently our data insights team rediscovered a Web 1.0-era classic: The Smoking Gun’s trove of concert riders, which includes iconic riders like Van Halen’s “no brown M&M’s” manifesto. It got us thinking: what are the younger generations demanding? What backstage trends are we missing? And how can we turn those into amusing charticles?

With some digging, we were able to unearth new troves of more recent concert riders in some unlikely places: the Town of Addison, Texas’s city-council agendas, a 2015 public-records haul of Humboldt State University’s Center Arts riders published by the North Coast Journal, plus the public-records request site MuckRock. We then spent a couple bucks on DeepSeek’s API to help us extract salient facts and crunch some numbers (fortunately, the Trump administration’s current ban on government use of DeepSeek does not extend to mildly gossipy music-industry data journalism).

So what trends are we seeing on the open road? Perhaps not surprisingly, artists are eating healthier backstage: requests for organic food have risen more than sixfold. But bucking larger trends, artists are requesting just as much booze as they used to: demands for alcohol have been more or less flat since the 1990s. Let’s get into the numbers:

Are we going to look back at this era as Peak Hummus? Requests have risen more than sevenfold since the 1990s. Pop and rock acts appear to be driving this boom; the chickpea dip is much less common in hip-hop backstages. Meanwhile, rockers ask for the most vegetarian options and the most wine; country artists overindex on Dr Pepper.

We’ve always thought that Evian has a funny aftertaste, and the rest of the world appears to have caught up with us.

Pop acts (or at least their road managers) say “please” more, and rockers use more exclamation points. Caveat: Stems’ large language models aren’t sensitive enough to pick up on how many of those pleases are passive-aggressive. We’d welcome further study on this.

As you can see, cigarette smoking has dipped backstage, which is presumably good news for venue staff, who are breathing less secondhand smoke. As you can also see, tequila is ruling the roost among hard liquors; we credit Sammy Hagar’s pivotal work in the ’90s with helping to tip the scales. Salud!

Forsooth, thousands of fortnights ago, there was another era, one which also contained leaders with shaky mental faculties, occasional plagues, ill-advised incursions into the Middle East, and rumblings about the end of the world. It was called the Middle Ages, and it is so back. A Gregorian-monk-style chorus of music critics is praising the new album by UK nine-piece Shovel Dance Collective, Everything in Readiness (Glitterbeat/tak:til), which pulls in everything from drones and field recordings to English folk to bursts of noise; “Jer the Rigger” gives a good taste. Meanwhile, Bandcamp Daily just published “Return of the Dark Ages: The Rise of the Medieval Underground,” about a wave of emerging artists leaning into traditional instruments with experimental touches and hoary millennial themes. [Ed: that’s ‘millennial’ as in ‘circa A.D. 1000,’ not as in the Spice Girls and Guitar Hero.] If you are curious, you could start with Cocanha, a Toulouse duo who sing in Occitan, the endangered language of southern France whose 13th-century novel Flamenca inspired Rosalía’s El Mal Querer. On one hand, all of the above makes sense in a world where many folks are looking for authenticity, a deeper sense of place, and the opposite of whatever AI is giving us. On the other hand, are we ready for record reviews like this write-up of Everything in Readiness, which begins with a short history of the hammered dulcimer? Leave it to the fates to decide.

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