Drum Corps is a peculiar activity. It’s marching band, but with fewer instruments. It’s a full time commitment over summer break. It’s the equivalent of the professional league of its activity, yet the members have to pay large sums of money to participate in it. While it’s a peculiar activity it’s one that I’ve loved and been following for the past 15ish years. I proudly marched 2012-2013 Colt Cadets playing snare drum.
Drum Corps seems to be at a diverging point. In the last two years the corps Santa Clara Vanguard and The Cadets have both suspended touring for the first time in their histories. Corps suspending touring is almost never something corps do, or at the very least something they ever come back from. While neither corps has officially folded I’d imagine it’s going to be a long road until they return.
Corps come and go all the time, there is always some flux in the background of the community of corps that spring up and ones that fold. But these two corps are two of the founding members of DCI. Out of the 51 years of DCI only 10 corps have won the championship title, only 6 corps have won multiple titles, and the Cadets and Vanguard are two of those corps.
I read a reddit comment that was along the lines of “In terms of the MLB this would be like if the Dodgers and Red Sox could no longer field a team”. These two corps were pillars of the activity. There are certainly specific financial circumstances each corps faced, but there is also just the plain fact that the costs of running a drum corps have gone up (seemingly) significantly.
THE COSTS GO UP
Sure there are the regular things that make the activity expensive to begin with. Housing, feeding, transporting, and teaching a group 165 16 to 21 year olds for 2-3 months full time just costs a lot. There is no getting around that.
There could conceivably be the “minimal cost drum corps”, one that:
Is not full time and the members live locally
Only tours to a few shows
Show design is modest
Corps doesn’t have to feed everyday
Members perform in uniforms that are many years old
There is no additional musical equipment beyond the instruments that the members play
Now that drum corps would admittedly be out of date by a few decades at this point. Who knows how many members it would even attract. But it’d still be a drum corps.
What we seem to have now, especially at the top levels, seems to be what you could call “Maximalist Band”. This can be characterized by taking a maximalist approach to every aspect of the corps and the show.
Once move ins happen the corps is together full time until the end
Full summer touring, and touring nationally
Show design is one of the most crucial components of the corps, with thousands of dollars being poured in to get the best results from top talent (who by the way are not crops members but hired design staff)
Corps are fed and housed every day, they’ll even stay in hotels
Performance uniforms are new every year, and every guard and front ensemble member has their own unique garment
There is additional electronic musical equipment that has to be purchased, effectively used, and takes an additional staff person (not a member) to oversee and manage
There are many additional props that take up enough space that it takes an additional semi truck to haul
Now for what I listed above, each one of those individual items is not necessarily bad on its own. If a corps has the budget for them and it fits with their show, then they should go for it. The problem arises when seemingly EVERY corps has to do all of these just to keep up. It’s a race to the top for everyone, every corps is trying to do everything they can to do a little better.
And what could be bad about a race to the top? The activity is built on the idea of teaching, encouraging, and promoting excellent performance from its members. A race to the top is what they’re trying to encourage, each individual member striving to be the best and hopefully using those learned lessons for the rest of their life.
The issue is that the race to the top isn’t just in the members, but in so many aspects that the members have no control over. This is a problem because there is no real direct financial gain for corps in this race to the top. There is no real prize money award for the winning corps. There is no influx of big sponsorships. At best the prestige of doing better is that you can recruit better talent for next season and possibly charge higher member dues. There is also the fact that donors might be more willing to donate to a corps doing well, but again it’s indirect.
WHO TO LOOK TOWARDS?
I’ve tried to figure out which sport/activity league DCI most resembles. And out of all the sports, the activity it is most closely related to seems to be Formula 1. F1 and DCI groups have to develop their competition product every year, F1 has cars and DCI has shows. Both are logistically very complicated to pull off and very expensive. In both, all the teams are competing all against all at all times, instead of individual matchups. They also have a race to the top attitude, where there are seemingly infinite details that they can improve upon to get better results.
This version of race to the top issue isn’t something that a lot of sports have. You don’t play better football with better pads and uniforms. You don’t play better baseball with better plays (there aren’t even plays). Hockey games aren’t meaningfully won or lost based on the grip on the hockey sticks. Each of these activities are much more heavily focused on the aptitude of the athletes in both athleticism and teamwork that aren’t filtered through the additional layer of something the team has to design.
In F1 they are always trying to improve by tiny percentages. A small change in the front wing could reduce lap times by .2 seconds. Using a high tech paint made of new materials could save .003 seconds a lap. These teams pursue all of these in order to win. And there is an incentive for the race to the top, because the top team gets a bigger share of all the prize money. It pays to be better.
But even though it pays to be better, it’s not all good. Like DCI, F1 teams along the edges come and go a fair amount too simply because it is very expensive to operate. The way F1 awards the prize money also makes it hard for smaller groups, because the top group gets most of the winnings while hardly any is given to the worst performing teams. It costs a lot to develop a car, let alone the costs to build a winning car. For most F1 teams the race group isn’t the real business, but is a research and development offshoot of major auto manufacturers.
Even with being a subsidiary of a giant business the costs can get prohibitive. If a team can improve their cars in infinite ways then there are seemingly infinite problems money can be thrown at in an attempt to improve slightly. This turns into a money race where even the winning team could conceivably spend more money trying to win than they’d ever earn back.
So what F1 does is place caps on what improvements the teams can make to their cars. They make very technical mandates that every car must follow. These can be from engine size, wing size, moving parts, car length, and almost literally every aspect of the car. They put caps in place to keep costs from skyrocketing which would in turn make the activity unviable for teams to compete in.
WHAT DOES DCI NEED TO DO?
I think DCI needs to think long and hard about some caps to what the activity is. They need to institute these caps to make it more financially feasible for corps to continue operating. There is only ever so much money that will go into drum corps. That amount can fluctuate year to year, but in the end there is only so much money that donors will donate and members will pay in dues. There aren’t really any secondary gains like research breakthroughs, advertising a real product, or prize money that can make the activity more financially feasible. Each corps stands on its own.
Let’s say a corps has a $1 million budget (just using an easy round number with no basis in reality) for one year based on member dues and donations. It’d be wise to try and spend as little as possible so that they can survive another year and continue to exist. So if they can put on the production for $950,000 then that’d be wise because that leaves financial reserves if things take a hit (cough cough covid).
But in the race to the top model, the corps would try to max out using all $1 million to better their results. That’s new equipment, more staff, better designers, more music rights, the list goes on. When they use all of their money every year trying to maximize their show they have no money in reserve and are more vulnerable to having to fold.
There is no financial backstop to DCI like there are in other versions of the activity. High School and Collegiate bands are both backstopped by their respective schools. Sure, band funding can go up or down but it’s still paid for by taxes which are more reliable. School band as an activity is not at risk of dying because of financials in the same way DCI is. WGI stands on its own too but is more financially resilient because the costs of each group are much lower since they almost only operate on weekends and tour in a more limited fashion.
DCI is trying to do “Maximalist Band” and I think it’s putting the activity on a financial footing that is less stable. Sure we want to see our corps be their very best, but we also want to make sure our corps can keep operating into the future. There needs to be more caps to what the activity is and is not. Unless there are some universally governed and enforced caps, the corps will continue to spend more and more just to compete in a way that will financially ruin the corps.
The race to the top we want to see is from the performers. This whole activity is billed as education for students. While the activity is centered around the performance of the members there is a ton of spending on so many things that aren’t the members. Sure all the extra stuff can make shows better, but are we ready to let corps bankrupt themselves trying to grind out an extra .75 points on their GE scores? If I remember correctly the banner in the tunnels at Lucas Oil says “DCI Welcomes the World's Greatest Performers” and not “DCI Welcomes the World's Greatest Drum Corps Show Designers”.
However the reforms come about they have to come about by putting limits on the upper limits of show design, and by de-emphasizing GE in the scoring. If the choice was between “The best shows the artform has ever seen but the activity dies in 5-10 years because all corps go bankrupt trying to compete” or “Shows that are not as showy but are still entertaining because of the talent of the members and the activity continues on well into the future because it’s financially viable”, I think almost everyone would choose the second option, at least I’d hope so. I hope Drum Corps can continue on as an activity for many years to come. I got so much out of the activity, and hope many future generations can too.