Hits home for me. One of my old bands had a guitarist who constantly tried to book a show every week. It started out with 15-20 people a show but quickly dwindled down to less than 5. Not the best experience for us or the audience.
While some of the points are...good I guess, this came across as a super arrogant article. You can make these points without being condescending about it. Also, the fact that it's specified how many shows he's played at the bottom of the article, nobody (should) cares. 1. Yes, if a band sucks nobody will want to see them. That goes without saying. However, the first few gigs a band plays are rarely going to go over spectacularly. There is a break in period that no amount of rehearsal will solve. Other than that, fair point. 2. Absolutely. This is an issue that my label is constantly trying to address, how to host shows without having the same bands playing them and how to keep them spread out. Spreading them out is the easy part. 6-8 weeks is a bit conservative. 3. This is completely dependent on where you are. I know places that have shows every night of the week, and depending on who is playing there could be a sellout regardless of the day. The example he provided is a complete gimmick, and sure it may work once but I don't see that working multiple times, especially once out of town bands start to get involved. You don't need a theme to run a good show, you just need decent music and promotion. Every else, while it may work and add to a show, is nothing to live by. 4. I agree with the author on not paying to play. That's one of the biggest scams out there. As for selling advance tickets, it's again highly dependent on the circumstances and the venue. Most of the time it's not up to the band, but up to the venue on if advance tickets will be offered or not. 5,6,7: All three of these cover the same thing. I more or less agree with them, especially point 5. One non-tangible thing that is missed is the ethos of the scene that the band is in, along with the size of that scene. The people involved (be it bands, fans, promoters, etc.) are different depending on what genre of music you play and how that scene as a whole functions. This differs a lot geographically, obviously larger cities will generally fare better than smaller ones for Independent music. It's hard to get people to go out to a show if they have to go out of their way to reach a venue. Obviously this isn't something that can always be overcome, depending on the number and sizes of venues in a particular area.
When I was at Front Bottoms and You Blew It the other night the local opener was a bunch of guys my age playing their third gig ever, which I'm pretty sure is the "newest" band I've ever seen if you don't count this white guy who came out and interrupted a Topic set last year and started dropping weird rhymes about suicide, anyway, they rocked. Surprisingly. I wanna say they were called Fade but I feel like they forgot to introduce themselves or maybe I was just drunk. Anyway I was a bit surprised that someone quite so inexperienced was opening for the bands above, both of whom are big and getting bigger. Large crowd for a third gig. However they proved the exception to your rule because they played a professional set, or at least as professional as the situation called for (not very).1. Yes, if a band sucks nobody will want to see them. That goes without saying. However, the first few gigs a band plays are rarely going to go over spectacularly. There is a break in period that no amount of rehearsal will solve. Other than that, fair point.
How was You Blew It! live? Thinking about seeing them two weekends from now out here with Prawn and some other bands. The bit about the interruption is hilarious, I'm imagining that everybody was really confused for a little while when that was happening? Anyway, that's great! I haven't seen that happen too often, usually it's more experienced bands opening. My point was, admittedly, a generality and it is possible that some bands are exceptions to it.
YBI! was pretty solid, the crowd was mostly there for Front Bottoms so it wasn't as wild during their set, but they sounded great. I don't know their songs well enough to have really keyed in on it. Front Bottoms on the other hand, knew every song they played except maybe two, someone started a mosh pit ... much harder concert than I was expecting.