Vancouver venue offers $4 music event

One Vancouver live entertainment venue is offering music lovers the chance to see four bands for four dollars, to keep the city’s music scene going amid the rising cost-of-living.

For more than a decade, Fox Cabaret has brought live music and entertainment to the city’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood.

One of the venue’s staple monthly attractions has become its “4×4: Four Bands for Four Bucks” event, which allows patrons to see four bands for four dollars and offers one of the city’s most affordable music events.

Adam Fink, local music coordinator for Fox Cabaret, says the monthly music showcase is cheaper than a drink and stemmed from his own experience exploring the scene.

“There was a lot of nights in the city where it would be a bunch of pretty new bands, and I would go out a lot and see a lot of bands and notice cover would be from $15 to $20 and that would turn people away from the door, initially,” he said.

“Especially if you weren’t into the community and knew about the bands, you would see this, and it would be gibberish to you on a sandwich board. You’d be like, I’m not going to pay $20 to maybe have something that I’m not really into.”

The four-by-four event has been putting bands onstage at the Fox for about seven years and features all sorts of music.

Fink says one of the initiatives that inspired this monthly event was a desire to cultivate a sense of local community and culture — something that he says Vancouver lacks a little.

“It’s not the fault of the artist or promoters or venues, it’s just that there are very few venues. The scene is small,” Fink said.

“With four-by-four, the nice thing is having these very different bands come out and play with each other. They become friends, the community gets a little bit bigger, it opens itself up so it’s not just hardcore bands, punk bands, metal bands, or hip hop bands in these small little scenes.”

While every audience member can appreciate an affordable, inclusive event, the artists putting it on say they have a tough go of it in Vancouver, shouldering high costs and finding fewer and fewer places to play.

Patrick Bartel, a member of the band The Lonesome Town Painters, says Vancouver simply lacks live music venues.

In addition to a dwindling numbers of venues, the venues that do support live music say they’re having trouble with money, which has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and inflation.

Darlene Rigo, general manager, director and managing partner at the Fox Cabaret, says costs of everything has gone up.

“Staffing costs have gone up. Everything has gone up with inflation, and people are drinking less,” Rigo said. “And although that’s healthy, it makes our business model more challenging, and we have to work on making some adaptations to make it work.”

The four-by-four event, in more recent days, has been sponsored by a liquor company.