If you work as a musician, sooner or later you will have to do something kind of humiliating in order to pay the bills. A lot of musicians play weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, or graduation and birthday parties. Others write songs for commercials and soundtracks. In my case, I pay the bills working in a cover band.
It is a harder gig than you might imagine. You really have to stay on top of the tastes of the bar crowd, and that can be tough. At first, I really did not know how to stay up to date. I looked at the top 40 music charts, figuring that that would be the best way to figure out what was popular and what was not.
As the band leader, I got to decide the songs we played. The Billboard top music songs seemed to work pretty well for a while, but the crowd was not quite with us. They would nod along to the music, and we would make decent tips on most nights, but for the most part no one really listened to what we were doing. The top 40 music songs just were not working. Whatever the reason, we were not in sync with what this crowd wanted to hear.
For a while, we switched it up. We disregarded the top 40 music entirely, and focused on classic rock and oldies, mixing it up with a bit of blues and R&B. That seemed to work pretty well for a while. We would have more folks actively listening to us, and we seemed to get better tips as well. The weird thing was that people would not stick around as long. Mostly, the younger folks would go somewhere else. It is possible to make a living off of the tips of the 35+ crowd, but you really don't want to alienate younger listeners.
We only hit on the right formula when we decided to mix things up. We would play top 40 music, oldies, and a few more obscure numbers for the music snobs in the crowd. Somehow, that was the golden formula. Usually, you can not keep everyone happy, but at this bar we could. People who liked top 40 music got enough to keep them around, but we also kept the classics there for people who favored older tunes. It was a good bar, so it wasn't that hard to get everyone to stick around once we figured out the right mix.
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