Brewery customer chiming in

Albuquerque NM

Description

I'm neither a brewery owner/worker nor a musician; I am a brewery customer and actually worked for a music venue here in ABQ at one point. Bottom line from my perspective: sorry but the brewery folks posting are correct. There is one band in town I will seek out if I hear they're playing a gig at a local brewery or restaurant. Other than that, the music is background noise, and more often than not, my friends and I will try to get in and have our beers and leave before the music starts because loud live music makes it hard for us to talk to each other, which is the main reason why I meet up with people at breweries. I go to breweries that have good beer and good food or food trucks, and anything else they offer is at best a bonus and at worst something to work around or outright avoid. Just how it is, sorry. The person who said that ABQ has not had a local live music scene (where people follow bands) for a number of years is correct. At the venue I worked for, success with local bands was very hit or miss. Some bands killed and we made tons of money and others - including some bands that were very popular elsewhere - tanked and we made nothing. For every show we made money on there were many more where we barely broke even or lost money; it mostly just evened out in the end. No one was getting rich. I don't blame the brewery owners for wanting to focus on brewing beer and selling beer and seeing live music as maybe a nice adjunct to what they do. It's not their principal business. I have friends other places and I know in places like Portland, and some places in California, there are huge local music scenes and bands can develop local followings and make a lot of money playing smaller gigs. If your goal is to make even a partial living purely as a musician I don't know that it's possible in ABQ, or at least I have not seen that. I have a couple of friends in bands and they play small gigs and make maybe a couple hundred bucks a gig; they play mostly for the fun of it. They have day jobs that support their life, the music is a sideline. If you look at the history of NM music, many bands who started here only made it big once they left and went somewhere else (The Shins, Beirut, etc.). Don't look to brewery gigs to help you break out or support your lifestyle as I just don't think that happens here. If you want to make a living as a paid musician, that's likely gonna have to happen somewhere else.