This Is Happening - a (sort of) guide to NYC’s music venues

Welcome to New York, It’s Been Waiting For You.It feels kinda wrong to start a guide to NYC music with a Taylor Swift lyric, but the woman has a point.

New York really has been waiting for you, and it doesn’t care about genre or coolness; it’ll play you a Strokes bootleg in a bar that looks like a condemned toilet, then drag you to a rave under a bridge in Brooklyn. It is marked out on the tour calendar of every artist with a big red X. It is the invisible extra member of countless bands, not listed on the credits but unmistakably there on every chord, beat and bar. It is a glorious, unwashed sprawl of noise and night, and you can find it in every room with space for a mic stand from the Bronx to Bed-Stuy.

And the true custodians of this scene are the rooms, halls and stadiums where it all happens. When that hot new band squeeze through a sweaty crowd to take the Mercury Lounge stage, your cheers hit the walls and come back louder, amplified by the sonic memories of Karen O’s yelps, Albert Hammond Jr’s Telecaster, and millions of dreamers, chancers and geniuses who’ve taken the stage and left it theirs.

This guide is really a love letter to those music halls, dancefloors and back rooms. How to find the venues, the bands, the gigs. How to get the tickets. What you can’t miss, what you maybe should (not much). It’s as much as anything an ode to a city this writer is leaving too soon, in the hope that it can be a guide to new arrivals as you, too, set forth into the night and set controls for the heart of the sun.

Back In The New York Groove - How to find the gigs you’ll maybe remember but never forget

• Start with the venues. Figure out which venues most fit the style you want to see (guide to this below). Check out the artists and styles they have on their listings. Check out the venues owned by the same promoters (e.g. Bowery Presents or Mercury East Presents represent a big chunk of the indie/alt venues so those two sites are a great place to start)

• Every artist you know and love and have ever heard of loves New York and will be playing here next time they can tour the US. So just keep an eye out on their tours (which are usually announced about the same time they announce a new album)

• Hot Tip: If you’re an expat, big UK/EU/AU etc artists all want to tour NYC but can’t fill MSG/Barclays, so will play way smaller venues than you’d expect

• Reddit / social media - especially r/NYConcerts and r/avesNYC (for dancier events). Artists also tend to do pop up shows in NYC a lot - pretty hard to plan for those, but if you monitor their instagram like an absolute fiend you may have a shot

• Blogs and websites

• The heart of the NY scene used to be blogs like Free Williamsburg, The Deli NYC, My Open Bar etc. Not many are around anymore, but have a look at Brooklyn Vegan for the best remaining site for this scene

• BandsInTown is pretty good at aggregating every show in the city possible, but you’ll need to set aside a good hour to clean through them all. 

• Record stores. The real connoisseurs of NY music are the guys and gals you’ll find in any record store in the city - go in and ask them where to see their favourite band. They may even have access to free/cheap tickets or being doing a gig in their backroom that night.

• Personal tip - go into For the Record in Greenpoint and ask for Lucas. There are probably at least three musicians looking through records or sipping a cortado at the seat next to you who will invite you to their next show

Turn On The Bright Lights - The venues, music halls, warehouses, bars…..

So where do you start? There are hundreds (probably) of amazing places to find live music. You’ll want to figure out the ones most suited to your vibe - so look at the last tour your favourite artist did and check out the listings at the venue they played in NY. But to give you some inspiration, you can find my own personal picks in this blog. Or, use this map to see what’s close to you.

You wanted a hit - scoring the tickets to the less underground shows

Ok so let’s get real. Most people only want to go see the bigger shows by artists they recognize, and that’s perfectly fine. So here are some tips to making sure you get to see these artists:

1. You probably aren’t going to get cheap tickets. But you won’t look back at the show in 5 years time and think “Gee those were some expensive tickets”, so just grit your teeth and do it if you can afford it

2. You probably aren’t going to get tickets by queueing on Ticketmaster at the onsale. But there’s no harm in trying - sign up to the mailing lists of any artist you want to see to get notified in time to get into the onsale, and watch out for presales (codes sent out to loyal fans to access tickets before anyone else). Brooklyn Vegan often get special codes so also check their website

3. You still probably aren’t going to get tickets first time round. Keep an eye on resale sites like Stubhub (which also has a great interactive map to find shows), especially closer to the event as prices often come down. 

4. Or try buying tickets on social media - e.g. reddit communities often have special ticket listing pages at face value - but make sure you pay for them using PayPal and select “this is a purchase”. If you got scammed PayPal will give your money back.

New York I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down

I couldn’t end this without referencing my favourite song about NYC, by my favourite NYC band, LCD Soundsystem. If you can only go to one gig to experience NY music, go to their yearly Christmas-time residency, usually at Brooklyn Steel or Knockdown Centre. Or keep an eye out for James Murphy (the singer and main songwriter) taking the decks at Good Room in Greenpoint.

And one last thing - James only started LCD at 32, so should be a constant source of inspiration if (like this writer) you harbor dreams of playing at one of these places some day. Maybe I’ll see you at your NYC residency in a couple of decades.

Note - This guide is heavily influenced by (/plagiarizes) the work of better-looking people with better ideas and more talent than me. If you want to get a proper understanding of the places referenced here, read “Meet Me in the Bathroom” by LIzzie Goodman, and then watch the film of it too. This should be required reading/watching for any music fan on the flight to NYC.

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ntny blog

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