A Scene Dies a Little Each Time Familiarity Becomes the Booking Policy
Programming can favour artists who can already bring an audience while depending on earlier rooms that once helped those artists develop one.
Put yourself in the position of someone responsible for a Friday night. The room costs money to open. A sound engineer needs to be paid. A musician who can tell you how many people might come brings a degree of certainty that another musician simply cannot offer. Giving that certainty some weight is a reasonable decision. If every room in the city makes the same decision for a good reason, the collective result can be a city with very few places to acquire the certainty they all require.
One response is to turn emerging music into its own branded night. That can put a name in front of a room and protect a portion of the week. It can also be the evening on which all the acts are asked to be experimental while the listeners who might develop a serious relationship with them are elsewhere. The question is whether the programmer is helping musicians meet an audience or making a temporary audience from the friends of four musicians on the same bill.
The support slot as a musical proposition
A well chosen support act can make someone hear the established act differently. A spare voice can reveal the noisiness of the singer who follows it. A fast, significantly younger band can make a crowd notice how slowly the more celebrated act considers a beat. The material may suit the room even when the fans have never seen the first name on a ticket. Programming becomes a kind of criticism when it can make a real proposition about the music a listener might hear in sequence.
The room has an interest in getting this wrong sometimes. If every unfamiliar act proves immediately welcome, it may be doing little more than supplying a slightly cheaper version of something the audience understood on the way in. Risk need not mean spending the entire budget on somebody who has given no account of their work. It can mean using the security supplied by one artist to make time for another person whose audience is still somewhere in the room and does not know it yet.
I want to see whether a local night can produce a listener who comes back for a different act, and a musician who starts a different project because they met somebody there. That is a demanding sense of success. It calls for more interest in the relationships a night makes possible than in the extent to which its existing reputation guarantees a full room once.