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Just like any business that works, touring is a money game. Financially, the advantage of a tour is the ability to play to a new market every night. Bands hire booking agents to arrange tours, and the job of a booking agent is to schedule the most lucrative shows possible. But there’s a catch.

Because the bottom 99% of touring acts travel by tour bus or van, shows have to be arranged around the scale of a reasonable day’s drive. That’s easy enough in the Northeast and Midwest where big markets often are clustered within 150 miles of each other. But it’s a different game in the South where agents have to pay closer attention to tour routes and the sequence of cities as they relate to days of the week. Agents want their acts to play the big markets on Fridays and Saturdays—nights when the most people go out. That leaves smaller markets such as Baton Rouge to fend for mid-week shows when crowds are smaller and so are the paydays for touring acts.

Geographically, Baton Rouge is in a very interesting position. Almost every big-name tour that travels the South plays Austin, Houston and Atlanta. Houston and Atlanta are roughly 1,300 miles apart, so bands generally have to stop at least once in between. New Orleans has always been one of those pit stops. The UNO Lakefront Arena, the New Orleans Arena and the Superdome have established good relationships with major tour promoters such as Ticketmaster. Baton Rouge has only the River Center and the PMAC, which now is used almost exclusively as a sports facility. Club-size venues in New Orleans such as House of Blues and Tipitina’s have been more effective at snaring national touring acts than their Baton Rouge counterparts—1,000-capacity venues such as The Varsity and SoGo Live—and the reason is simple.

Promoters who invest big money in these shows depend on drawing an act’s fans from many miles around. The talent buyers for shows at the Superdome and the House of Blues depend on fans from Baton Rouge to drive to New Orleans to make a concert sell out. Therefore, their contracts with booking agents prohibit the bands from scheduling an adjacent show in Baton Rouge—or any other venue within the radius of their target market.

As Baton Rouge grows into its new role as the big market in the region, talent buyers here will have access to tons of shows—from arena-rock to club-size niche bills—that would have gone straight to New Orleans before. Baton Rouge still isn’t near the size New Orleans was before Katrina, but the road map of the South literally forces touring acts to stop somewhere in our region between more lucrative stops in Texas and Florida. Now it’s up to Baton Rouge’s talent buyers to outbid their cash-strapped counterparts in New Orleans. That is, provided gasoline prices don’t elbow everyone below Motley Crue out of the touring business altogether.

(Grant Widmer is guitarist for The Eames Era.)