The year of the empty Tuesday

Thirty-one people came to the Lantern Rooms on the second Tuesday in June. Three bands played. The promoter did the arithmetic on her phone at the back of the room somewhere during the second set, and by the time the headliner started she already knew what the night had cost her.

The four rooms

Halbeck has four venues that will put an unknown band on a stage. That is the entire list, and it has been the entire list since Unit 9 reopened in a railway arch in 2021.

The Lantern Rooms holds a hundred and eighty and has been booking six nights a week since 2006. The Brayfield holds four hundred and is the room a band graduates to. Unit 9 holds a hundred and twenty, has a low ceiling and a supporting pillar in exactly the wrong place, and is where most of what we write about happens first. The Aviary holds two hundred and fifty and books the fewest new bands of the four, for reasons its manager will explain at length if you let him.

Two of those four now book weeknights only when someone specifically asks.

The Aviary stopped in February. The Brayfield stopped in April, quietly, without announcing it — we noticed because a band we had been following was offered a Saturday in September when they had asked about a Wednesday in May. Neither venue has closed. Neither is in trouble in any way it would describe as trouble. Both have simply concluded that opening the doors on a Tuesday costs the same as opening them on a Saturday and returns about a fifth as much.

That is not a controversial conclusion. It is arithmetic, and the arithmetic is not in dispute.

A Tuesday costs the same to open as a Saturday. That is the whole thing. Everybody knows it and nobody says it out loud because saying it out loud sounds like giving up.

What a Tuesday actually costs

The Lantern Rooms opened on that June Tuesday with a sound engineer at $140, two door staff at $95 each, a duty manager at $110, and heating a room built in 1911 that takes four hours to stop being cold. Add the licence, apportioned, and the standing costs that do not care whether anyone comes.

Call it $520 before a single person is behind the bar.

Thirty-one people paid $9 on the door. That is $279. The bar took $410, of which perhaps a third is margin. The three bands split the door, which means the three bands split $279 four ways with the promoter and went home with about seventy dollars each for a night that cost two of them a van.

Nobody in that building was doing well out of it. The venue lost money, the promoter lost money, and the bands lost money. And the room was, by the standards of a Tuesday in June, not empty.