If you’ve just landed here, this page explains what this site is, how to use it, and why you can trust what’s on it.
The short version: the Indiana Live Music Guide is a statewide guide to venues, open mics and live music — written and checked by someone who actually goes to shows.
What You’ll Find Here
- Venue profiles — more than 65 of them, from 2,000-seat theaters to corner bars with a stage in the back. What kind of music, how often, what to expect when you walk in.
- City and region guides — Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, Bloomington, Evansville, Terre Haute, Northwest Indiana and more, each covering the places worth knowing about.
- A verified open mic list — every mic we could confirm is actually running, with nights, times and sign-up details. If you play, start here.
- This Weekend — one page, rewritten every week, with what’s worth your Friday and Saturday.
- Festivals and music history — including the story of the Richmond studio where Louis Armstrong first recorded.
How We Check Things
This is the part that makes the difference, so it’s worth being specific.
Every listing is confirmed against the venue’s own website, its own social media, or its ticketing page — not scraped from a directory. Aggregators and old listings are treated as leads to check, never as facts to publish.
That sounds fussy until you see what it catches. A well-known Terre Haute venue closed permanently in early 2026 — and its website is still online today, looking perfectly normal. Plenty of guides still list it. We don’t, because we called. Another venue came off this site last week when its phone line turned out to be disconnected.
When we can’t confirm something, we say so rather than guessing. The open mic page has an honest section listing the mics we couldn’t verify, because sending a musician across town to a night that ended last year is worse than saying “we’re not sure.”
What This Site Isn’t
It isn’t a real-time concert calendar. There are plenty of those, and they’re mostly wrong about small venues.
What we do instead is cover the layer nobody else does properly — the neighborhood bar with a band every Saturday, the brewery with an open mic, the theater two towns over. Then once a week we tell you what’s actually worth going to.
Who’s Behind It
One person. I’m Greg — a guitarist, a Hoosier since I was two, and someone who got tired of hearing about great shows the week after they happened. There’s more on the About page if you want it.
That also means I get things wrong sometimes, and that corrections are genuinely welcome. If a detail is off, or your venue is missing, tell me and I’ll fix it that week.
Where To Start
- Looking for something to do? Start with This Weekend.
- Want to know a venue before you go? Browse the venue guide.
- You play? The open mic list is the most useful page on the site.
- New to a city? Try Indianapolis, Fort Wayne or Bloomington.
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Run a Venue?
Every venue profile here is free and always will be. If yours is listed and something’s wrong, or you’d like your own photos on the page with credit, get in touch. If you’re not listed and you host live music, tell us — that’s how this gets better.