From the responses and replys I have read from my threads, it seem like gigging is not much of a priority with many bands.
In response to your thread title, yes, the culture has changed---not so much among musicians as the culture around the live music scene. For the past 30+ years, the popularity of live music has been declining.
For a long time, live music was the only option in many cases, and then for a while, coinciding with the birth and rise of rock music, live music was popular because going to see bands was a cool thing to do. I think that phenomenon peaked in the 70s, but it has been declining from the 80s to now. This is a big-picture broad and slow process that neither musicians nor club owners can do anything about, so I think a lot of people either don't see it or ignore it to focus on the things they CAN affect. But I think that's what's really behind the steady worsening of the outlook for bands.
As the number of people interested in coming to see bands dwindles, you get as effects a lot of what people complain about. There are fewer gigs available, even for good bands. Back in the day, a traveling band could book a week at a club. Now they're lucky to get one night, which raises the cost of traveling. And, fewer people coming out means less money, so pay stagnates. It is often noted in discussions of the subject that bands today are making about the same as bands 35 years ago, in dollars that don't buy nearly as much. I think that started because people quit coming out.
And that was when there were a bunch of good bands touring around to keep the calendar full. Yes, many bands playing out in any given city are pretty bad, but, don't you think club owners would book good bands that could draw and hold an audience if those bands were around? They are few and far between. Even in a huge city like Chicago, if I wanted to start a rock club and make sure we always had really good music, it would be a challenge to keep the calendar full.
After a while, when the scene has shrunk to a certain point, it''s not worth the time and trouble to have a top-shelf serious band---musicians can't make an acceptable living at it. So that dries up even more the number of good bands available, because now you're restricted to a smaller geographic area to draw from, since people have day jobs. Nowadays, I'd bet that the substantial majority of players in the good bands, playing the good-paying gigs at the top venues, still have day jobs.
And that also means that successful bands now have to appeal to a fairly low denominator. When there's a huge audience for live music, even a band with a smaller niche appeal can still find enough people to play decent gigs fairly regularly. But when that audience shrinks, the small niche gets even smaller, and so if your band doesn't play one of the few still-working formulas, you can end up playing just a couple times a year.
It should go without saying that lots of bands and club owners make stupid decisions that impede their own effectiveness, but, even if everyone was doing everything the best way they could, the supply of people wanting to play would still exceed the opportunities do to so playing quality gigs for decent pay. The audience for live music has been shrinking for two generations and I think the current ****** bands/****** clubs vicious circle is a result of that, not the cause.
). It's just ridiculous, and demonstrates how much higher the bar used to be for local bands then it is now.
