In small communities, teens and young adults often try to find outlets for their creative interests, but also to find themselves outside of their education or careers. Music has been shown to be a good outlet, but also helped many people mentally. In a report done by O2 Media, a festival space in the U.K., just 20-minutes of concert going and attending a music venue has been seen to improve someone’s health and wellbeing.

The issue about going to concerts is that many people ignore local concerts, many people ignore local concerts, smaller budget shows, and even concerts that are free for publicity, even though the most you could pay is an average of 15 to 20 dollars. On Friday the 13th of October, local punk bands gave a free concert to the community in Downtown Roseburg. The bands Ausekara, Caged Ape, Prager Youth, and Wake of Disaster performed to a relatively small crowd, composed of mostly teenagers. After the show, we got the chance to ask some of those teens about their experience and how they felt about it. Barrett Tyler, a sophomore, stated, “I think it’s important for teens to get a outlet out for their creativity and inspiration for their own projects that could be of the same nature, and also get them more involved with local scene, meet new people, and also gives you something to do in a smaller town like this that doesn’t have a lot.”

Other students seemed to resonate with the idea of local shows bringing them together. 

Cohen Blemmel, another sophomore, “I think that it’s good to make like, it helps with like, bringing people closer together, creates more of a sense of community than like going to a massive show out of town, don’t know anyone there, don’t recognise any faces. [Local shows] kinda help out smaller groups that are having some troubles getting out there and taking off. Overall, it helps a lot.”

Concert going is necessary for expressing ones-self and finding a community and promoting local music, smaller bands, and performance venues is the way to do it. In Oregon, there are small concerts now being held every other week with $15 dollar entry at Urban Blendz, an all age venue with small and rather unknown bands for people of all ages to discover.