My band just had our first release back in Feburaury and is now set to play our first show in April. Right now we're spending most of our time writing for a full length album in the future, and I don't want to play too many shows to the point where it takes time away from writing. On the other hand, I think it would be unwise to play most of our shows in our town and I'd rather play shows in nearby cities to attract more attention. My question is; now that we're finally getting noticed, how often should we be playing shows?

Well I would say as often as you can, writing is important, but getting your music out there is more in the long run.

Keep in mind that new bands usually get very few gigs at the start so I wouldn't fret too much about time for writing, there will be plenty. You guys will start playing just one or two gigs a month at best at the start, and that is being very optimistic.

So grab every opportunity to play live you guys can, the more you can build a following the better. If you keep the right rhythm eventually you will want to tour, however, for smaller bands tours last about 15 days to a month so it isn't much time either.

playing local gigs is like practicing playing shows. so I say play as often as possible until you can draw a crowd, then focus on playing out of town and hold out on playing locally until there's a sweet gig.

Hey there!
I agree with Ebheron, play as often as you can. And I would add to what he said, try opening gigs tot other bands of your city/region, I'ts good to meet other bands/musicians, it will help you grow as a musician and you'll have more chances in the future to play again with them/other bands. Also, go to other band's concerts, support your local scene.

Where I live, there are a constant amount of local shows, and me being in a band, I will do my best to answer this from both a musician's perspective and a show-goer's perspective. As a musician and someone who plays in a band, I love the feeling of going in front of a crowd of people and playing jams and watching the crowd's reaction, no better feeling than that. However, no one wants to see the same band play EVERY single show, you feel? If I were you, I would play about once every two-ish months. That gives you time to gig a decent amount, and write music. Also, the less you play shows, the more "hyped" people are going to be whenever you do play a show, if that makes sense. There's a band from my hometown that is actually pretty big in the hardcore scene, they tour, yet they hardly play local shows. But when they do, they draw a huge crowd and I think that has something to do with the fact that they only play live once every 4-6 months.

It's all about finding the balance. As Flowermouth (Or Floormoof where I'm from) has said, you want to play enough to get some recognition without burning people out. You might well be excited to get your first offer of a gig in a proper venue, but you have to weigh it up - who else is on the bill? Where is it? When is it?

Generally, you don't want to be first on a 5 band bill of bands of similar reputation to yourself, on a wet Tuesday night in a venue with few public transport links (if you live in a big city). But for your first couple of shows, anything which can get you used to playing live is good, then you can start to be more selective. I would say get out into your town and get playing.

The networking aspect is also important. Get to know musicians in your town, even those playing different types of music. Its a cool vibe (if they are cool people) and you never know when you might get an opportunity to play a cool gig, or a one-day festival, or help out at something.

I'm at the point with my band that we might play live twice a year at most in our town (Stockholm). We've been playing live for five years now and most of the people in the scene here have seen us multiple times.

We're a band that has played more outside of Sweden than outside of Stockholm, ffs!

Stockholm is already a reasonably sized city of about a million people, but even at that size, depending on your genre, it can get to the point where the audience that's it's realistically possible for your amateur band to have has seen you a handful of times in the last couple of years, and it's just not worth the effort to organize shows too often. Trying to break through to a larger audience would make operating the band more like a job than you might want, and your musical style might be such that it's nearly impossible in a smaller city.

It's good to see bands play alongside a variety of other bands (if available) and gather more fans along the way, rather than the same ones each time. It's also good not to have to wait too long for a band's next show if you can't make it to one. I follow some bands that play quite often, once a month or so. But I also like to see them complete full-length albums.

Actually it's 2 million.

Truth is, you can only cover so much ground here before you have made yourself visible enough and generally speaking, people are very comfortable here and while there are a lot of people who listens to extreme metal, very few actually take the time to go and see bands unless it's one of the veterans (both Swedish and foreign). It's been like this since back in the late 90's.

The underground scene is very small and you basically see the same people at every gig.
Apparently, a couple of years ago Onslaught played in Stockholm in front of maybe 10-20 people. That should tell you about the type of audience that we have, but I'm guessing it's like in other countries as well.

In other news, my band is going to Dubai next month to play.