Finally, someone sees the reality of being in a bar band. It’s not about the band or the show, you are a live jukebox encouraging people to dance and drink. Nobody cares how you power through the hard parts or restart a song, they are concentrating on applying generous portions of social lubricant to a potential one night stand and offering to buy someone a drink after a dance is part if that ritual. The reason bar band pay is not what it used to be is due to changes in social norms, women are less prone to be doormats and men are less prone to be date rapists so the volume of patrons and the money they spend has dropped dramatically. If bars were still full on weeknights, bar bands would still be in demand on weeknights. There is also the hard fact that rock has come to where blues was forty years ago. It’s mostly old folks listening and old folks can’t go out on Wednesday and drink all night and still get to work the next morning. These days bars are hiring EDM jocks like my nephew. He shows up with a six foot table and two milk crates full of gear, sets up and taps into the house audio/video system and makes the same money as a bar band. He also works a lot of Wednesday and Thursday nights because the (young) people out during the week prefer EDM to live ear bleed rock. It’s not the quality of the bands killing bar band opportunities, it’s the same thing that killed the coach making trade, times have changed and live bar band music was one of the casualties of that change.
