As far as music fans and bands are concerned, there’s no time like the present for live music in Lawrence.

As evidence, take a look at tonight’s downtown options: Brand New at Liberty Hall, Catie Curtis at Lawrence Arts Center, Rusted Root at The Granada, Thomas Mapfumo and Blacks Unlimited at The Bottleneck and Arthur Dodge and the Horsefeathers at Eighth Street Taproom.

But for the promoters behind the scenes, the thriving market comes with a catch: the law of supply and demand.

“For Lawrence to have the volume of shows it has is a mixed blessing,” says veteran promoter Brett Mosiman, owner of The Bottleneck and Pipeline Productions. “It’s great for Lawrence culture-wise but it’s hard for the promoters because we’re splitting the pie six ways.”

Healthy competition is only part of what makes it so difficult to survive in today’s live music market. Promoters must confront a series of new challenges — rising ticket prices, high insurance costs, competition from multimillion dollar corporations, a decline in disposable income — all of which threaten to put them out of business. To compete in the new market, they must find ways to adapt and develop their own niche.

In Lawrence, six promoters have done just that. Though the people portrayed in this article by no means represent all of the diverse and hardworking promoters working to keep Lawrence on the radar, they do represent a cross-section of those responsible for a revival in the local live music scene.

Whether your bag is British black metal or Brooklyn glitch-hop, these are the people who make your Friday nights rock (or bounce, bop, slam, bump, thrash, boogie … ).

No more corporate rock

Two years ago, Jacki Becker and Josh Hunt were the guinea pigs in a great experiment.

Local Music promoters, clockwise from left, Terry Taylor, Jacki Becker, Jesse Jackson, Edwin Morales, Alison Olewnik and Josh Hunt are responsible for keeping Lawrence a hotbed for live music.

House of Blues Entertainment — the second largest live music promoter in the world — was attempting to extend its reach into the Midwest. Even though there was no HOB venue in the Midwest, the company would hire experienced area promoters like Becker and Hunt to coordinate shows in private venues. In return, Becker and Hunt would get regular paychecks for the first time in their careers.

“It felt like a lot of burdens were going to be taken off of us,” Hunt said. “All of a sudden I’m like, ‘I’m going to have health insurance; I’m going to get a paycheck; I can go to the dentist.'”

In their first year with HOB, Becker and Hunt (along with former Avalanche Productions owner Jeff Fortier) booked and produced more than 400 concerts. Hunt used his old ties with bands like Static-X and Slipknot to become one of the premier nu-metal booking agents in the Midwest, while Becker traveled state-to-state coordinating shows and running up cell phone minutes.

But as quickly as HOB came into the area, the corporation left, sighting low revenue and the lack of its own venue in the area.

According to Becker and Hunt, the parting was mutual.

“I think Josh and I both agreed that we weren’t corporate people,” Becker says. “There’s a lot of paperwork. The people are located in L.A. They don’t know Lawrence.”

Eventually the two formed Eleven Productions and helped set up the “912 Collective” — a nondescript house in the student ghetto on Tennessee Street that serves as office space for a handful of independent promoters, which also includes Bill Pile, Jesse Jackson, Regina Cruse and Clayton Snodgrass.

Both promoters’ bread-and-butter is their relationships with bands and booking agents. Those relationships are what allowed Hunt to stay with Insane Clown Posse as they rose to Juggalos-all-up-and-down-Mass.-St. fame, and what allowed Becker to stay with buzz bands like Dashboard Confessional and Thrice.

“It’s not like we’re David trying to slay Goliath,” Becker says, referring to leading corporate music promoter Clear Channel. “We’re trying to keep our niche and book bands at a small level and develop them.”

Josh Hunt

Hip-hop and ya don’t stop

If Becker and Hunt are the veterans of the Lawrence promoter scene, Edwin Morales and Alison Olewnik — founders of Downplay Productions — are the rookie-of-the-year candidates.

When Morales and Olewnik were teenagers growing up in Manhattan, their friends’ parents would frequently drive them to Lawrence to see shows. The type of shows they came to see, however, may surprise people who know the duo as the team behind Lawrence’s healthy hip-hop and electronica scene.

“We used to both be huge ska fans,” Morales says proudly. “I used to wear a three-piece suit every day for like a year and a half.”

These days, with his full-neck beard and tousled hair spikes, Morales looks less like a rude boy than a “Survivor” outcast. He’s easy to spot even in the dim light of The Pool Room, where he can be found every Friday night (usually beside Olewnik, his girlfriend and business partner) reveling in the shows he helped bring to town.

“We’re doing what we’ve dreamed of,” Morales says. “If everything were to end right now we would walk away with a smile because we did what we wanted to do.”

Alison Olewnik and Edwin Morales

Morales and Olewnik are the promoters behind Project Groove, a weekly event that single-handedly transformed The Pool Room from a good-ol’-boys watering hole to one of the most respected hip-hip hop venues in the Midwest. In addition to packing the house for local artists like Mac Lethal, SoundsGood, Approach and Archetype, Project Groove has helped bring dozens of well-known national hip-hop acts (Ming & FS, Blueprint) to the heart of the prairie.

The success of Project Groove has allowed Downplay to branch out and do shows at larger venues: Prince Paul at The Bottleneck, MC Paul Barman at Abe & Jake’s, Prefuse 73 at The Granada.

“A year ago, half the time we were losing money and half the time we were breaking even,” says Morales, who also DJs under the name Konsept. “Now it’s kind of like breaking even and sometimes making money.”

Tightening the noose around the ‘Neck

Terry Taylor may be the most straight-laced barfly in town. A non-drinker all his life, Taylor — a talent buyer and show promoter for Pipeline Productions — hits the office at 10 a.m. every morning, fielding calls from agents and massaging show contracts.

Taylor’s job might seem simple on the surface: put bands on stage in an already popular bar, allowing more people to come in and purchase more alcohol. But once the contracts are signed, the real fun begins: figuring out a spot for the band to park its tour bus, getting the act fresh towels and bottled water and making sure there is a 12-pack of the rare German beer it requested.

It’s a challenge Taylor has been up to since he began booking hardcore shows in his hometown of Sioux Falls, S.D., in his early teen years. At the ripe age of 14, Taylor was already out on the road touring with his band Face of Decline.

“For some reason all these bands just started giving people my number saying I book shows in Sioux Falls — which I didn’t,” he says. “So I just started renting Masonic Temples and VFW halls … next thing I know I’m bringing in Green Day and The Offspring.”

Terry Taylor

Granted, those were the days before the aforementioned bands sold millions of records. But when Green Day’s “Dookie” and The Offspring’s “Ignition” turned the acts into mall-culture icons, Taylor suddenly became the agent responsible for booking them into 10,000-seat arenas.

“It was a hobby that just kept going and going and going,” Taylor says.

Since moving to Lawrence in August, Taylor has given The Bottleneck an organizational facelift, pasting load-in and soundcheck times up with the precision of an army general and wallpapering the bar with show flyers.

“He’s tightened it down,” says Bottleneck bartender Andy Morton. “You can’t move without seeing a flyer he put up an hour before.”

In addition to booking national bands, Taylor is making a concerted effort to put local bands on bigger shows.

“I really want to get back in with the local bands, because they’re the ones in the end who are going to keep people coming back,” he says. “They want you to succeed as much as you want them to succeed.”

Taylor said it can be hard to book locals at The Bottleneck because, regardless of how many people show up, the band must cover the cost of running sound. Smaller venues like The Replay Lounge and Eighth Street Taproom don’t have a sound fee and pay bands 100 percent of the door.

“When you get into the 500-capacity thing you have more expenses,” he says. “It’s $150 just for us to open up the door and turn the PA on and to pay sound guys and maintenance.”

Brett Mosiman

Survival of the wittiest

If there’s one person qualified to talk about live music in Lawrence, it’s Brett Mosiman. Since buying The Bottleneck in 1985, Mosiman has been the driving force behind legendary shows like Radiohead, Oasis, Trip Shakespeare and thousands more. Pipeline has also promoted hundreds of concerts in Topeka and K.C., from Johnny Cash to Flaming Lips.

But his job has become increasingly difficult the past few years thanks to competition from House of Blues and Clear Channel.

“My distaste for how business is done in this industry is very high,” he says. “The two big promoters in this country have a business model of just being outrageous bullies.”

Thus, whereas Mosiman used to be able to develop and retain fast-rising artists, he now must face the prospect of outbidding multimillion corporations for the rights to promote a show.

“They commonly lose money to steal talent (bands) from small promoters,” he says. “You can’t blame the bands for taking more money, but then what would have been a $10 ticket at Liberty Hall turns into a $25 ticket at the Uptown, compliments of your good friends at Clear Channel.”

But Mosiman does have some advantages in his corner. Since he owns The Bottleneck, he is able to sell tickets for face value. He also controls his own drink prices.

“There’s a niche for small promoters because they’re real, and I think over time that’ll win out,” Mosiman says. “Throw-it-on-the-wall corporate rock sucks, and most people at the club and theater level know it.”