Are Local Venues Killing Music?

[morgan138]

Reading some threads here, it appears you also have a substantial number of the up and coming generations that dislike F2F interaction so much they actually freak out if somebody tries to contact them by phone.

Haha, no way. I mean, I get that this is a thing that people grumble about and that websites write articles about to get attention, but it's not a real thing let alone something that's seriously affecting live music. Classic "kids these days"-ism.

Plenty of young people are playing in bands, going to school for music, etc. Maybe they're just less into the fairly specific types of music that talkbass tends to focus on?

 

[SunnBass]

I have also fallen into the habit of not supporting other local musicians by not going out to see bands play live (other than friends' bands). My 2017 NY resolution was to do a little course correction on that and go out and experience more to help support this. Its tougher for me with kids, family, day job... But I'm gunning to see a local band/musician that I'm not familiar with play live somewhere once a month this year.

^^^^^^^^^^^^ This right here!!!! I have recently made the same pact with myself.

 

[denhou1974]

There are a number of reasons. The revenues for ALL bars/clubs are down in the past few years. Around midnight the places start clearing out. I think tough DWI laws and the culture of the younger generations have something to do with it. The 21's of today didn't really grow up with rock music like I did. People are getting less social than in the past - they'd rather be at home with their heads in their cell phones.

YouTube/Internet has also created more players and there are more bands now albeit a lot of bad ones. People are accustomed to hearing perfect autotuned ProTools music these days. The people who do go to bars hear those 'bad bands' butchering their favorite songs and they just get tired of it.

 

[jnewmark]

I agree with you. Venues have not changed much in all the years I have been gigging.
Nowadays sports bars are the thing. 20 flat screen TV's and 50 patrons
glued to their i-phones. Less venues every year will lead to the demise
of local music.
People will drop $100 to see a big show but won't spend $10 at local venue.
Were doomed.

The pay has not changed since the '70's either. I went the private sector and casino route a long time ago. I just go to bars to drink, now.

 

[morgan138]

People are getting less social than in the past - they'd rather be at home with their heads in their cell phones.

This is really just not true. I was just talking to a guy who works door at a bar that only does live music (i.e. no DJ nights), and he's confiscating fake IDs every night they're open.

 

[Plutonium244]

I did the math once, for a typical bar for approx. 100 people capacity, the licensing form ASCAP/BMI amounts to about $7/day. This covers pre-recorded music as well as bands. Now, every bar needs music -- juke box, satellite stream, or whatever-- so most are doing this. If your bar can't support a $7/day expense, and you instead have a silent bar where only drunks hangout asleep with their head on the bar, then you really have no business in the bar business. Two drinks (or one) covers the cost.

It's the $300-500 that deters bar owners... not the $7 licensing. I get that, they need to recoup the cost, but maybe its not having live music that's the problem, but the promoting of it.

Bar owners are usually not business school grads, a lot are under-capitalized and limping along sucking a few bucks out for the owners, which, with no capital input, works. IMO they often do a bad job of branding their place for live music, keep changing their schedule so that no one knows when there will be live music, and frankly-- quite surprising to me-- often fail to even list the band/event they are having in the local music rags and websites.

It's frustrating that the owners often take no interest in lifting a finger to get the word out, perhaps expecting that promoting their bar is the band's job exclusively-- but that's dumb. If I own a business, I need to take charge of promoting it, not leave it to a parade of people (musicians) you don't know and whom you have no reason to believe are marketing geniuses. If I own a car dealership, I don't leave it to the car wash guys to do my advertising, or not.

 

[Grumry]

On Talk Bass we flap our gums a lot about the damage digital streaming has done to the revenues of original artists. But what about the damage being done at the roots of the music biz; the local venue? As a guy trying to play smaller clubs and bars, it seems to me like these guys are doing just as much to stifle the music biz as pirates.
When was the last time you went to a gig not to play, not to see a friend play, or not to see a bigger artist play? When was the last time you wanted to just be at a nearby bar or club? (If there is even a nearby bar or club.) As a consumer, by and large, most of them are dumps I don't want to be at. They are usually in sketchy parts of town with no parking and a weak selection of overpriced drinks served by a salty (at best) employees. Even ones that are only a few years old look decades old. Oh boy, more black and darkwood with red lighting! Will I get a staph infection from the bathroom? Who knows, it is out of order; not that the door really closed anyway. Really the only driver for these places are the live bands.
And how do they treat their live bands? Well, again, no parking. If you if leave your gear in the car it is totally going to get stolen. Loading in is through the small front door everyone is standing in front of. (Don't worry miss; go ahead and block my way while I drag gear that weighs more than you do, around you.) Stairs? Awesome! Is that a stage or two pallets you stacked on top of each other in the corner and painted black? They do such a great job advertising that the only people in there are the people I brought to the show. And for all the hard work they did, obviously they don't need to share the door or bar take with me; a solo cup half filled with Bud Light will pay for my gas and time.
Local venues seem to put zero effort into their appearance or amenities, then complain they aren't making any money. No duh; your venue is unattractive, has no vibe, and is a pain in the backside for customers and bands alike. If these small venues are the birth places of up and coming musicians, and are apathetically slumming their ways towards insolvency, where will the next generation of musicians go to cut their teeth? Where will young men or women go to catch the music bug? Will people want to go live it up at a place that throbs with the aura of necrotizing dreams?
It feels to me like a little paint, a mop, and maybe some working urinals could go a long way to rejuvenate local music scenes. Am I wrong? Am I taking crazy pills here?

What you just described costs a lot of money. Crappy dive bar owners don't spend money.

 

[two fingers]

This is really just not true. I was just talking to a guy who works door at a bar that only does live music (i.e. no DJ nights), and he's confiscating fake IDs every night they're open.

One guy at one bar in one town does not make a trend.

 

[Richland123]

Here is how it goes around here. My band plays at a private, old ethnic club a few times a year. The management messes things up more than they get it right for everything, including the entertainment. The last two times we were booked there, they either had no advertising or a different band advertised on our night. Well, it happened again for Saturday's gig. I got the local newspaper entertainment section and the club has advertised for Sat., Jan. 14th, "Free Pizza & Open Jukebox" and my band is not listed. Now, I have to call the manager and find out what's up this time.

 

[bassliner50]

There are clubs in my area that only have live music until midnight, since live music is for 'old people' who go home early. Then, from midnight until 2AM, when all the college kids come out, they'll have a DJ. I thought it was really strange at first, but now I see that it makes sense economically.

Funny thing I overheard the other night at a gig. We were tearing down and these kids were coming into the bar. One of them said, "Oh look, old guys with guitars. They must be a country band." In their view, any music with actual instruments must be 'country'. (Never mind the fact that we play Motown, Soul, and Blues.)

Seems to me, to the younger set, a DJ spinning records and shouting *is live music*. The landscape has changed. Your expectations should change accordingly. Many of the toilet/bar scene owners described above are struggling to pay liquor licenses, rent, promotion, proper insurance, inventory, employees etc. Many reasons for this. For one thing a generation or so ago people of "bar hanging age" might go to the bar to socialize or meet someone. Now that same demographic are home playing video games, and meeting up and socializing on line. Now get off my lawn!

 

[Altitude]

In my opinion, live music doesn't work in a local venue unless that venue is branded heavily towards live music. It has to be a place where a guy might check the calendar just to see who is playing over the next few nights. In other words, the value prop has to begin with the venue, not with the live act.

Restaurant managers who book bands hoping to retain their dinner crowd later into the evening are fools. I've seen my own [very tasteful] bands unload a full restaurant a hundred times. People come to restaurants to eat and talk; the correct level of the music in that situation is just loud enough so that you only notice it if you try.

Live bands in bars that are not live music bars scream "amateur" to me. Maybe it's because you usually find a buddies' garage band belting out Brown Eyed Girl poorly in those places, but it is rarely a good live music experience for the customers, the management, or the band.

OTOH, places like Quixote's in Denver and Invalid Link Removed work. A lot of regional touring bands play in places like those, but if you are an established local act you can get in.

 

[Plutonium244]

Here is how it goes around here. My band plays at a private, old ethnic club a few times a year. The management messes things up more than they get it right for everything, including the entertainment. The last two times we were booked there, they either had no advertising or a different band advertised on our night. Well, it happened again for Saturday's gig. I got the local newspaper entertainment section and the club has advertised for Sat., Jan. 14th, "Free Pizza & Open Jukebox" and my band is not listed. Now, I have to call the manager and find out what's up this time.

THIS.

I know bar owners/managers are busy but for Pete's sake, you should not sit on your hands and do nothing to inform anyone that there is a band, let alone a specific band, and then complain when too few people show up to hear the unadvertised music. And if you do take the time to spend 120 seconds making sure that the gig is listed in the local music rag where people check to see who's playing, make sure you get the correct band. It's not much better than no listing-- if I go to see a specific band, and they are not there, then odds are good I will leave, unless I am wowed and surprised by who is there-- but by then I am already annoyed that I was misled, and more apt to just leave.

 

[Plutonium244]

The most successful venues are ones that demonstrate CONSISTENCY. Have music on the same nights each week or each month. Something predicable, that people can rely on, and know they can see/hear/play music without consulting a decoder ring. If you get flighty and change it every few weeks -- we have bands, we dont have bands, we have bands alternate Fridays-- then no one builds up any confidence that they can just drop in and see music.

I do one gig, a jam, where you NEED consistency, which started as a "First and last Thursday of the Month" jam but eventually I had to advertise it on facebook with this simple rule to know if the jam is on:

“First Thursday and last Saturday of EVERY month, except April, which is on the first Friday instead of first Thursday, and May, which doesn’t have a last-Saturday jam, and June which has its first Thursday jam on the SECOND Thursday, and July, which doesn’t have a 2nd Saturday jam but only a first Thursday jam”

 

[Engle]

i've been in venues where turning up the lights is a big mistake... the carpets have years - sometimes decades - of fluids of all sorts, all full of dirt and dust and germs. and SUCH an interesting smell some have, from years of spilling booze, soda and juice into the carpets without steam cleaning... plus residual cigarette smell from years gone by...

some are so dirty that if you have lighter colored woven outside cables (which i unfortunately did at once point) that just having them on the floor during shows will turn them grey or scary brown.

At work we have to deal with casino carpets! You pull up the carpet squares, lift the raised floor tiles, and run cabling underneath. I'm not dead, so think it has strengthened my immune system.

 

[Acoop]

Musicians are killing music, the venues are just buildings and the owners are just businessmen. ... 99% of bands play covers. ... So if you're not good enough or brave enough to write and perform your own songs why complain when no one, but your parents, come see you performing those cover songs? ... Every original band started at the bottom. ... Cover bands start a notch above the bottom and wine when they stay there. ... All musicians should study song writing and work at getting better at their craft.

 

[Korladis]

While I am on my soapbox - no one wants to play Mustang Sally, etc.

What do people request? Mustang Sally etc. (Songs they know).
What do djs play? Mustang Sally etc. (Song they know)

You are there to entertain the patrons, not yourself. You want to play just the music you want? Stay home and play. I have a band that does that - rare gigs, killer music, killer musicians.

I've actually never even heard Mustang Sally requested or played live. Not that most bands I see even take requests.

Nor played by any DJ.

Bands that play originals, AKA singer/songwriter, is the direction live music is headed in my area. I'll take a change on an up and comer over a cover band any day.

Same in this area.

One guy at one bar in one town does not make a trend.

Except it isn't one guy at one bar in one town.

A bunch of people have posted on this very thread about how live music is thriving where they are.

Like I said earlier in the thread. Wednesday night, one of my bands (not the one in my signature... Talkbass will only allow one link, annoyingly) played our first show, in Santa Craz. We play original music, not covers, and shoegaze/doom metal at that; not the most accessible/marketable stuff out there. And it was a weeknight. A rainy weeknight. But the place was packed anyway (presumably for Treeherder and Worship, the two other bands on the bill that evening). People came out and packed a bar for live music, even though it's a pretty niche style.

This has been my experience in Oakland, too.

 

[morgan138]

One guy at one bar in one town does not make a trend.

Okay, but I was mentioning it to illustrate that "young people are scared to go outside" is just another silly kids-these-days-ism that mainly gets trotted out to get website clicks. I go to shows all the time and the crowds are still 20-30 year olds, same as they've always been.

Like, come on. Every generation in the history of human generations has convinced itself that the one(s) after it were magically different and mysterious and maybe bad.

 

[morgan138]

I've actually never even heard Mustang Sally requested or played live.

Yeah, I think if people here are using a 50 year-old song as a shorthand way to describe what they think of as "live music," that's pretty much the issue. I have no trouble believing that those kinds of shows are drawing smaller audiences, and definitely fewer youths!

 

[Korladis]

Yeah, I think if people here are using a 50 year-old song as a shorthand way to describe what they think of as "live music," that's pretty much the issue. I have no trouble believing that those kinds of shows are drawing smaller audiences, and definitely fewer youths!

Clearly.

One of my friend's bands does quite a few covers, as well as originals, but they're mostly of Tom Waits songs, which have remained cool.

 

[pcake]

this all got me thinking.

years ago, i was talking to the singer for what was at the time my favorite band. he was a great singer and also an excellent entertainer, and he was complaining about how cheap the venues were when it came to paying bands. honestly they were doing better financially than any local band i've known, but his contention is that if club owners respected and enjoyed the bands, they'd show their appreciation by paying them more. we were talking about a specific venue, and i pointed out that it was a large club paying rent, payroll, insurance, a liquor license, booze and juice and soda, cleaning supplies and glasses, utilities, etc. the singer was infuriated at me - he said "so you're taking their side!", walked off and never spoke to me again.

my point isn't that bands should be exploited - it's that it's expensive to run a club, at least here in l.a.. i know people whose clubs went under after they had taken second mortgages to try and keep their clubs afloat, hoping they'd make more money. i'm not taking any side, but you gotta be realistic - a guy who can barely pay his staff and is floating all his booze and supplies on credit really may not have the money to pay bands the big bucks and regularly steam clean his carpets. a guy who's renting on the cheap in hollywood with a second floor band area doesn't have the money to build a load-in elevator for bands, and his landlord probably wouldn't let him anyway.