It's easy to want to listen to all the most polished and professional music, but local bands bring a whole different experience to the stage. So not only do you want to fill your summer going to top artist concerts, but hit up a few of your local bars and support local bands. Here are a few reasons as to why you should support your local bands:
1. Fun!
Watching live performances is a blast. What better way to blow off steam after a long day of work than to move around to the beat of the music? At work, you're not allowed to yell or dance or really have any fun but at local shows it's all fair game. Once the music gets going, your day gets better.
2. Cheap!
No more paying hundreds of dollars to get one ticket. You can get in to my hometown venues for about $15 a head. And if you contact one of the bands playing in advance, they'll knock five bucks off the price! The venues even have pizza, water, earplugs, and tons of band merch for sale right inside the door and it's not marked up a ludicrous amount like at most stadiums. Your whole night could cost less than $30 and who can argue with that?
3. Find A New Obsession!
Going out and listening to six bands for $10-$20 is great. What's even better is when you find a band that really resonates with you in that group. There's nothing in the world like finding something new to obsess over. Every time I find a new band that I really like, I listen to like an album of theirs a day for months until the shine wears off. And in a local scene you can get introduced to way more bands more quickly than at expensive concerts.
4. Closer Relationships With Artists!
I played at a coffeehouse at my high school in like eleventh grade. We had a special guest headline that coffeehouse, a band called Small Town Titans. I stayed and watched them and absolutely loved their mix of old and new school rock with powerhouse vocals and followed them ever since. In the years since, I have bought all of their merchandise and got a signed copy of their CD's, wrote an album review on them, and started taking vocal lessons from the lead singer, Phil Freeman. There's no way that I would've thought that I would take vocal lessons from the singer of this band that I looked up to and yet here we are.
5. Find The Next Big Thing!
A friend of mine just toured in Asia because his band's (A Scent Like Wolves) music is really big there. Another friend of mine's band (Heart For Hire) is playing at Warped Tour for the second time, which is also pretty dang cool. Heck, just the other month my band (Lasciaté) opened for both Ice Nine Kills and August Burns Red, which are pretty big bands in my opinion. It takes a while and a lot of hard work, but sometimes a local band will make it to the big leagues, and the good ones remember their biggest fans. Imagine being a fan of The Beatles when they were still playing hole-in-the-wall bars and watching them take off. Any one of the bands that are charging pennies on the dollar for a ticket right now could be the next Beatles, so go now before you can't afford to!
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