Austin, Texas – The Live Music Capital of the World
Austin, Texas is recognized as the live music capital of the world and is touted as having the most musicians per capita of any city in the country. With over a hundred live performance venues, there are always dozens of Austin, Texas bands to check out anytime you want in everything from country to rock to a variety of eclectic styles that can’t be heard anywhere else. place.
Austin, TX is also the host of the South By Southwest music conference, which is a nationally known music festival featuring 1,800 bands of all styles booked from around the world at over 80 clubs in Austin over a period 5 days. South By Southwest was originally just a small music festival that grew into an event with the most live bands at a festival in the state and continues to grow as the years go by. There are also other world-renowned emerging music festivals in Austin, including the Austin City Limits Music Festival, Urban Music Festival, and Fun Fun Fun Fest. Held annually in the fall, the Austin City Limits Music Festival is a three-day music festival featuring more than 130 bands from all genres on eight stages. This concert is known to attract more than 65,000 visitors and bands from all over the world. The Urban Music Festival began in 2006 and drew a crowd of over 10,000 people to hear some of the best Urban Music bands. Some of the Urban Music Fest artists have been Cameo, Boyz to Men and Sugar Hill Gang. The Fun Fun Fun Fest is another annual music festival that started in 2005 and has had a wide range of artists over two days on four stages. Some famous artists of the Fun Fun Fun Fest have been Bad Brains, All and The Dead Milkmen.
How this Texas town became the home base for so many Austin gangs remains a mystery, but as the live band scene grew over time in Austin, the stigma that it was the place to be found and rising to stardom began to attract a broad base of gifted musicians from across the country. Bands and musicians who came to Austin in search of stardom soon discovered that there was no industry to sign them there, apart from the brief visit of industry professionals during the South By Southwest music conference and the wide range of musicians and Austin cover bands that were only made. Acquiring gigs is even more difficult due to all the stiff competition. The number of bands from Austin, TX far outnumbers the number of venues offering concerts, so only the most talented bands end up getting the jobs, furthering the popular perception that Austin bands tend to be the best. of the state. Many musicians who had come to Austin hoping to make it on the local scene returned to where they came from to face less competition and found that being a big fish in a small pond was easier and more productive than fighting hundreds of bands in a city for the few jobs that existed in such a competitive music market.
There are many musicians who hail from Austin, Texas including Robert Earl Keen, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Willie Nelson, George Strait, Pat Green, and The Lonely Boys to name a few. All of these things add up to make Austin, Texas a city recognized as the “Live Music Capital of the World.”