Yeah, I toyed with that one a lot before finally dropping it actually. There's a lot of things you could put in it, enough that you could make several thematically appropriate performs actually. But it does diminish the bard a lot, and I ultimately decided to let people be concert flutists or super drummers on their own, but get any magical bits from performances out of being a bard.
Now, if you wanted to replace the Bard with the Duskblade or Beguiler and do a bunch of perform skills for people instead, that's pretty workable. But it wasn't something I wanted to do to start.