I see the whole thing as simple supply and demand economics. You can look at this either way as a negative or a positive thing, but there is just a huge supply of decent local bands in columbus in comparison to the amount of people who regularly check out local shows. On top of that, I'd say a good amount of people who check out local shows are part of the huge supply of local bands.
Just to add a spice of credibility to my argument, you can just look at comfest to exemplify the amount of quality acts in this city (and everyone can make their arguments on whether the bands are actually quality or not, but I find all the bands to be enjoyable), there's what, at least 30 bands on the offramp stage alone over the entire weekend? We can comfortably say there's AT LEAST 50 good (active) bands in columbus that some people of the local music faithful would like to check out at some point, and that number is defeinitely higher. In combination with a lot of local bands' desire to play out at least once a week, this makes it so that there can potentially be anywhere from 4-10 good local shows on any given night. When there's that much competition, sometimes having a free show just won't help your show that much.
I don't know how Carabar's system works because I've never played there, but most free shows I've played have a pretermined percentage of bar sales they'll give you after the bar makes a certain amount. For example, once the bar makes $250, you get 20% of total bar sales after the $250, the justification being that the 20% of the first $250 ($50) goes to sound. If a band then decides, "hey, there's 4 other free shows going on that most local music fanatic's will go to before mine, but I know my 20 broseph's will come to my show whether it's free or not," it probably becomes more sensible for a band to charge a cover. The dude's bro's demand it, so they'll pay.
So, in terms of financials, 20 people show up to a free show, each spend an average of $10 at the bar, the bar makes $200, and the bands get nothing. 20 people show up and pay a $5 cover, minus the $50 sound charge, now the bands have made $50 vs. nothing on a free show. Sometimes it just makes sense to go with the cover. On top of that, the bar now doesn't have to feel any guilt and get's to keep their sound percentage. This is an explanation of a small time operation, but still a good model.
You can also find this in comparing other cities, for example a place like Cincinnati and New York. I'm by no means an expert on Cincinnati, but to me it seems like every time I've played there we've gotten a gaurantee and it's normally a free show. This isn't too rag on cincinnati or anything, because I think there's a lot of really good bands down there, but I just think the supply is less than in columbus. Thus a bar can be confident that people will just show up to their free show because there isn't much competition. Then you look at a place like New York, and there's so many competing shows and good bands, that venues down there are now charging around $10 for a local show!
Basically, I'd say no show can follow a standard format. You need to determine the competition, look at how long you have to promote it, and at the end of the day the quality of the line up is huge when deciding between a free show vs. a cover. Free shows are good encouragement to get people out who've never seen you before, but you have to have good promotion behind it to get new people out. If it's the same 30 friends who would show up no matter what, you're probably just better off doing a cover. There's always tons of other factors of course, but this is what I think it boils down to.
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