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I live in a [mod cut] one horse town in Texas. No music scene, no job opportunities. Not much of anything, aside from casusal racism and bad country/****** tonk bars.
I am a singer/songwriter who is very serious about pursuing my goals of becoming a working musician. I don't need any pointers ot lectures about the difficulty of what I am aspiring to. What I do need are some geographic and economically informed opinions. I am in my early 20's with no degree, and not a ton of money. I need to move somewhere where the price of living is decent and the music scene is at least exsistant.
With all of this in mind is Boise the type of place I could survive/thrive? My research is telling me I'm not gonna find apts for less than 800. I'd like find a roomate and pay about this, or 600 on my own. I'll be coming to wherever I go with about 3- 4 thousand to sustain me for a couple months and get me started. Other places I am considering are Nevada(due to its relatively decent cost of living and proximity to California), and Ohio. Opinions?
Last edited by volosong; 01-12-2017 at 08:27 AM..
Reason: profanity, even mildly diguised not tollerated in the Idaho forum, and not permitted per the T.O.S.
Boise is a fantastic city to live in but I would HIGHLY recommend to postpone your relocation to Boise (and Nevada) for now and move to Pasadena, CA instead to apply into LA College of Music or other short-term local music school. In a year or two of intense studies they will get you professionally trained and you will get connected and referred.
Either way you decide - Good luck!
Last edited by Novatoman; 01-12-2017 at 07:14 AM..
........ I'll be coming to wherever I go with about 3- 4 thousand to sustain me for a couple months and get me started. ..........
That's not much money to be moving to a new town with no job lined up. Perhaps you should be inquiring what it is like to be homeless in Boise?
I'm just guessing, but I suspect that you need a place where there are jobs that actually pay musicians to play their music. I suggest Las Vegas because the are about a zillion small bars that might pay for a live musician.
If you can't get some sort of job immediately, it is too cold for busking right now in Boise. You don't say whether or not you are qualified to do another sort of job that you could do to keep yourself fed while you try to make a living with music.
There are a lot of nice things about Boise, but "famous for its music scene" isn't the first thought that pops into my mind when I hear the word Boise.
The picture now changes dramatically, as the chart above shows, with smaller cities rising to the top. Austin is the overwhelming leader with more than 23 bands per million. That makes sense: Austin is the festival's hometown. Oxford and Brighton, England, take second and third, with 20 and 19 bands per million, respectively. Athens, Georgia, is fourth with 16. And then there's a big drop off with Nashville (5.7); Boise (4.9); Hamilton, Ontario (4.5); Copenhagen (4.1); Montreal (3.9); and Leeds, England (3.8) rounding out the top 10.
As someone who's husband has been in the music industry since 1971, you NEED to move to Nashville. Here you can get a job a a studio musician which is where most start. If fact even Grath Brooks says most studio musicians are better than the 'stars.' We found that to be true when hiring them.
23 bands per million doesn't mean they get anywhere beyond the city limits. SXSW is headquartered in Austin. Of course Austin would come in first by that alone. Great for LISTENING, if you want to go watch them play in a bar. Or if that is your goal, playing in a bar the rest of your life.
Nashville numbers are low as the bands are employed as studio musicians. Not playing in bars.
Except for Portland Oregon being much more expensive, I would otherwise suggest that town. It is like a small San Francisco. Their downtown is very interesting. Mass transit works there too. You might be able to find something outside the city that might be cheaper, like Beaverton or some place similar.
If you're wanting to make it big; I'm not sure Boise would be the right place. While the city has a pretty decent arts and music scene that is still very relative to the size of the city. You're probably increasing your chances for success more than smaller towns or maybe even other similarly sized cities, but still pretty tough. Since there is a relatively well known alternative music festival in Boise now and let's say you somehow got on the roster, you could maybe get somewhere. But otherwise, even if you were to rise to local fame I would imagine that would only be equivalent of a part time job in pay.
Anyways, sure you know all that stuff. Boise does have low cost of living, but rents are jumping. You could find a place for around 600 - it won't be very nice and it may be hard to get due to stringent qualifications. Jobs don't pay well, and cost of living continues to go up. This isn't unique to Boise, but people are often blinded by what seems like an inexpensive Utopia. A lot of people get around this by coming in with lots of cash from equity they received from selling their home in a high cost area. So if you don't have that safety net Boise isn't going to be anymore comfortable than most places these days.
Also, keep in mind that Boise is very remote. The next cities bigger than Boise are several hours away by car (Portland, Salt Lake). So gigs would be pretty much isolated to the Boise Area. This is somewhat of a catch 22 and is likely in part why Boise is somewhat of an arts and culture destination - there's nothing else nearby.
I played professionally for 30 years, all over the intermountain west. I began in 1964, and hung it up in 2001.
Early on, I learned how lousy music was as a full-time career, and I intentionally made it my second, part-time career. There are 2 arcs in a musical career; the first goes up like a rocket and falls as fast, and the second is like a roman candle- a lot lower arc, but one that flies a lot further. In my time, both were plentiful. Nowadays, neither are.
I never relied on music alone to bring home the bacon, although there were many times when it made me more money than the other things I do. Much of it came from the necessity of travel; the road rules the life, and the road demands sacrificing as much as it rewards.
My years were the easy ones. Live music was everywhere, jobs were easy to land, and I worked at it like it was a job; I did something musical every day as a part-timer, and I eventually became a pinch hitter, a go-to player who could walk in cold and fill in for a missing band member and get through the night on experience and an ability to improvise.
That led to a lot of session work off and on. The session work led to other jobs. I've played in orchestra pits, in so many rock, country, pop, bluegrass, and jazz bands I can't remember them all, and know a lot of famous folks, but those times are gone for good now, and apparently won't be coming back for years to come if ever.
I could have continued, but by 2001, I saw the writing on the wall; the live music scene was beginning to fade a lot by then, and in the 15 years since, has nearly faded out altogether. Not just in Idaho, but all over the west. All over the nation, too.
You didn't mention what your goals are. Do you want to be a performer, or do you want to make a living selling your songs? I know some very successful and famous folks who are one or the other, and a very few who do both; if you want to be a songwriter, you don't need to live where there are lots of musicians. You need to write a lot of songs, learn who will listen to them, and submit them. Constantly, daily.
The best songwriter I know lives in tiny Belgrade, Montana. He has written more million-selling songs than any other I know, and what I wrote above is exactly how he does it. He gets up at 8 am, takes his dog for a walk, and begins writing a song singing to his iPad while he walks. He once said he writes 1,000 songs for every one that became a hit. He treats his profession like a business, and writes 5 songs a day, knowing most will never go anywhere.
If you want to be a performer, then you will need to be an exceptionally good singer, or have an exceptional vocal quality, and/or be a very good instrumentalist. You will need to have a lot of stage presence, and you will have to go to a large city, with well over 200,000 people or more. Only cities of that size still have healthy live music scenes.
In every one of those big towns, you will be competition to those who are already there, already know the scene, and have already found their niche. Some will have been professionals for longer than you have been alive, and none are going to give up their gig to give you a break. Even in the good cities, the scene is not what it once was.
Here's the facts:
Everyone who can sing, or has ever written a song, dreams of being famous.
Guitarists are a dime a dozen.
Hanging out in the music scene is hanging out. No one gets famous by hanging out except groupies, and they aren't in it for the money.
Getting to be known demands major skill and major effort, and neither guarantees any ultimate reward, no matter how good one is or how hard they work.
These days, a beginner is better off learning how to self-record, self-produce, and self-market than trying to seek to break in by the older traditional ways. There's still money to be made in the music business, but all the old models and methods simply don't work now like they once did.
There are no guide books and no road maps for this new reality.
The more imagination you have, the better your chances of creating a career there will be. It all takes a lot more steady, disciplined work than it once did.
That said, know that Boise isn't going to help you. Look at cities with over a million people in them. If .01% of a million people love to hear live music, that's enough to make it a career for the music makers.
Last edited by banjomike; 01-15-2017 at 01:55 PM..
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