Alternative Bands Booking Agents

The booking fee for alternative music artists can start at $10,000, with booking prices for alternative music bands going to fee of over $1,000,000.

What is alternative music?

As a subgenre of rock music, alternative music or alternative rock rose in popularity in the 1990’s but has its roots in the independent and underground music movement of the 1980’s. As an “alternative” to standard rock, today the broad genre consists of one of the widest varieties in terms of style and element, incorporating everything from pop, hip-hop, and country, and the sub-subgenre of alternative music, “grunge,” which rose to popularity in the early 1990’s.

With its foundational characteristic as the rejection of commercialism, and with lyrics that tend to explore social issues such as environmentalism, depression, and drug addiction, the first pioneers of the alternative music movement began to crop up in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Notable bands in the earliest part of the genre’s uprising include Patti Smith, Lou Reed and the Sex Pistols, with the iconic hit “God Save the Queen.” From the mid to late 1980’s, most alternative music performers and bands relied on small club performances, college audience fans, and word-of-mouth publicity to for promotional opportunities. Bands such as the Violent Femmes and Dream Syndicate cropped up during this period, as well as R.E.M., which became one of the first alternative bands to find mainstream success with its early albums and hits such as “Stand,” “Losing my Religion,” “Everybody Hurts,” and “Shiny Happy People.”

By the end of the 80’s, alternative music had grown to incorporate pop-oriented groups such as They Might Be Giants, industrial rock-oriented bands such as Nine Inch Nails, and bands such as Sonic Youth which incorporated elements of the “noise rock” genre. By the early 1990’s, bands such as Jane’s Addiction had found steady success, at the same time as alternative’s own “sub” genre, the “grunge” genre, emerged from Seattle. With its characteristic murky guitar sound, bands such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Red Hot Chili Peppers also found strong crossover success. Nirvana in particular, provided songs today regarded as near anthems for the generation, such as “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Come as You Are.”

But with the untimely passing of Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain in 1994, both grunge and alternative music as it was currently known experienced a decline, only to be revived again by the early millennium with bands such as Foo Fighters (“Best of You,” 2005) and Greenday (“Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” 2004.) Today, alternative music is ubiquitous and varied, with bands such as Cold War Kids, Imagine Dragons, Of Monsters and Men, and even Mumford and Sons all classified as alternative acts and all of which have enjoyed top ten mainstream hits in recent years.

Alternative music continues to evolve and sustain itself well into the millennium’s second decade; it’s reasonable to expect for continued changes and growth to the genre in the coming years.