The Live Music Scene

bermuda said:

It's been a lot of years since I regularly did 5 sets, but I was reminded recently at Swallows Inn playing from 7:30-12:30! The hardest part was coming up with extra songs.

Bermuda

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Woo Hoo...Capistrano, Swallows...and there were probably some Eagles there too. Ive been there, but thats a club I have not worked in...cooks corner on Sunday afternoon is a great gig for cover bands out here, That place is constantly busy Fri, all day sat, sat night and all day sun...country, rock

Here in the greater Baltimore, MD/Washington DC area, there is a good, active scene for both cover and original bands. Cover bands can work a fair amount, usually 3-5+ times a month, depending on your booking agency. The more appealing your set list is to a general bar patron audience, the more work you'll likely get. A really small handful of groups in this area are very popular, and able to earn a living doing it, full time. Overall, there are plenty of profit turning bars to support working bands.
On the original music side, the venues choices are far more narrow, and the order of the day is "pay to play". The venues/promoters usually will require local original acts to do a minimum of 25-50 pre-sale tickets, whether its to open for a big national, or to get a good time slot on a 5-7 multi-group bill. Text book examples of how to exploit musicians. The market is also saturated with "hungry" bands, so the practice continues.
Despite all of the this, the scenes aren't what they used to be in either market. Gone are days of the $2000 cover gigs, it seems. The first huge difference was the ban on smoking in bars(MD/VA), and the second being, of course, the national economic decline. As a non smoker, I loved when the ban took effect,but it sure did hurt the attendance at live shows Many established original music venues were also forced to close.

NYC is alive and well

of course not as well as it was a 10 - 15 years ago...but there is work

a good amount of the great venues are now gone and are either bakeries or clothing stores

Jazz does well

cover bands do well

original rock bands have it tough simply because no one is really interested if they don't know who you are but word spread like wild fire out here if you are good .... but in that scene ....when you are big around NY they love you...as soon as you expand out of NY they abandon you and go on to the next band that no one ever heard of

just how it is here

caddywumpus said:

Here in Portland, there are venues clamoring to get people to play on their stages. None of them pay, though. Being an "artistic" town, it seems like EVERYBODY is a singer-songwriter, and everyone wants to get on stage just to perform their art, but in recent years, because of home studios I assume, people are staying home and making music that way.

To get paying gigs in Portland, you have to hustle to get one of the few paying gigs anymore, or, what most people do nowadays, is rent a space and create a concert/event and advertise the snot out of it through social media. Gone are the days of guarantees in the clubs in Portland, before I even started making music my full-time gig back in 2007.

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Exactly. When I moved to Portland in 1996 (at the age of 22), all of the older guys that I played with told me how badly things had deteriorated since the 80's, when they were playing clubs five nights a week (for decent pay). And it's just gone downhill from there.