If you really think the 9:30 Club has a discernible better "sound" than every other venue on Earth, you are right that is subjective and you are entitled to your subjective opinion I guess. I would suggest you spend a few minutes looking reading about confirmation bias and consider if that might, in part, be the issue.
Neon Budweiser signs in no way impact my ability to enjoy a concert.
^^ I think in writing the previous sentence, it helps me to better wrap my head around why I find this continual fanboying of IMP so eyeroll-inducing. I legitimately don't get where a lot of you are coming from on this. I go to concerts to enjoy seeing a band. And for the most part, that happens 90% of the time. Sometimes I don't enjoy a band because their performance sucked that night. Sometimes I don't enjoy a band (on extremely rare circumstances) because someone in the crowd was annoying and spilled a drink on me or (on even rarer occasions) the venue is so godawful terrible it ruins the entire experience. But solidly 90+% of the time, its fine -- I have fun.
And then I get on here and a not insignificant subset of the members seem so cultish that it feels as if they go to non-IMP venues for the sole purpose of talking about how miserable they were. And I don't get that. For a community ostensibly centered around a love of seeing live music, some people sure seem awfully picky about the conditions in which they will see it. I legitimately, and with all sincerity, don't understand that. I don't understand how some tribal devotion to all things IMP renders and otherwise enjoyable experience moot and makes them focus on how much better it would be if the sound was indiscernibly different or there was no neon Budweiser sign.
I don't have any major gripes with IMP. The 9:30 Club is good. Merriweather is good. The Anthem needs a lot of work. But lots of other places are good. A great many more are perfectly fine. Jiffy Lube and Disco Rodeo in Raleigh are the only two venues I've ever been to where the venue was actively odious enough to merit me not going back.
I have lots of great concert memories. I attribute exactly zero of them to the particular venue I was in. Had I been with the same people seeing the same set and it was at VENUE X, I would've enjoyed it equally as much 99% of the time. I feel bad for people who go out and spend money to see bands and partake in this hobby we all share and cannot enjoy it fully if its not in their venue of choice. That's weird to me. Every IMP venue can burn to the ground tomorrow and all the bands you want to see will still play in town because its the 7th largest metropolitan area in the country and you know what, it would be fine and 99.9% of the attendees wouldn't know the difference. It only matters to a small subset of people who exist in this echo chamber. I feel like I should loan some of you the "______, venue CONNOISSEUR" nomenclature.
