Aberdeen Music Venues: 20 Rooms and 19 Open MicsPOST Aberdeen wrote about their city's venues this month. This is their piece with a tape measure held against it.

A local magazine described the circuit. We can count it

Every so often somebody writes the thing you have been trying to say, only better and with more affection. Chris Sansbury and Kevin Mitchell at POST, an independent culture magazine in Aberdeen, opened their August newsletter with the city's venues and laid the whole thing out by tier.

P&J Live takes the international acts. The Music Hall, the Arts Centre, the Lemon Tree and the Tivoli take the touring bands. Drummonds has been putting local bands on, in their words, since before most of them were born. Krakatoa runs as a worker co-op and puts the money back into the scene. The Tunnels and Unit 51 keep the underground underground. Then underneath all of that sit the back rooms and cafés that host a night, as they put it, not because it pays but because someone decided the city needed it.

That last line says it better than anything on our own website, and it was written by someone who lives there.

Counting it is the one thing I can add, because I happen to have the database sitting open. So this post is their piece with a tape measure held against it.

What Aberdeen actually holds

We hold pages for 20 venues in Aberdeen and 19 open mic nights, spread across 6 days of the week. The one night nothing runs is Monday, which seems fair. Even the people playing every open mic in town need a day off.

The midweek skew is the number I keep coming back to. 15 of the 19 Aberdeen open mics run Tuesday to Thursday, and Wednesday alone carries 7 of them. That is almost exactly the national picture: across the 1,192 open mic nights we list in 78 cities, around 80 per cent run midweek. I wrote about why that happens last week, and the short answer is that a pub cannot win on price on a Saturday, so live music is what a Tuesday is for.

Aberdeen is not an outlier. It is the pattern, in one city, at a size you can actually walk around in an evening.

Every Aberdeen room we hold a page for

Here is the lot, linked. Each one goes to its own page with whatever we have confirmed: capacity, backline, whether there is a PA, when the open mic starts. This list is read from the directory when you load the page, not typed into this article, so it changes as the city does.

What checking this against a local's list turned up

This is the part I would rather not write, and the reason I am writing it is that POST's list is better than our database was.

Reading their piece next to our Aberdeen rows, two things fell out. Cafe Drummond was in our London directory. Not tagged oddly, actually filed under London, along with 61 other venues that are not in London, all written by one import batch back in May. Aberdeen was missing a working venue and London was carrying rooms from Truro to Fort William. That is fixed now, re-derived through the same city resolver the rest of the pipeline uses.

Then Cafe Drummond and Drummonds turned out to be the same room at 1 Belmont Street, imported twice from two different sources. One of them is now hidden.

So the honest version of our Aberdeen coverage is: better than it was this morning, and still not as good as somebody who lives there. If you know a room we are missing, tell me and I will add it.

One thing our number is not

Twenty venues is not twenty grassroots venues, and I do not want anyone quoting it that way. Our Aberdeen list includes the Music Hall at 800 standing and the Beach Ballroom at 1,000, which POST rightly puts in a different tier from a back room with a PA in the corner.

The small rooms are the ones that carry the scene, and they are the ones that go quietly. POST noted that the Blue Lamp closed at the end of last year, ending 75 years. A venue with that much history does not usually get a headline when it stops, which is exactly why somebody should be writing it down.

If you want the honest national picture rather than a single city, our venue directory holds 2,548 venues across 90 cities, and the market statistics page shows what that adds up to. Music Venue Trust does the advocacy side of the same problem.

The useful bit: 13 August

POST flagged something worth more than any of my numbers. On 13 August there is an open music stakeholder meeting at the Carlton Bar function room, for promoters, musicians and venues with a stake in Aberdeen's alternative circuit. If that is you, that is where the actual decisions get made.

And their closing ask is better than anything I would write, so I will just repeat it: pick a night, pick a venue, go and stand in front of a local band. A £5 ticket in August does more work than the same fiver in November. Read their piece and then go to something.

I will re-run these numbers after the 13th, once there is something to re-run them with.

Annual refresh commitment

This guide was published on 4 August 2026 and is refreshed every August. Aberdeen venue and open mic listings change as rooms open, close and change hands, so annual verification matters. We re-verify every reference, recommendation, and data point once a year. Next scheduled refresh: August 2027. If any claim is outdated before then, email support@gigxchange.app and we will update it within 24 hours.