Which US cities get at least a decent number of quality concerts?

I'm going to be moving within the next year, and I can go just about anywhere. While good concerts aren't enough to make me move to any one city alone, I would really like to live in a place that gets a good number of bands going through. Here's a list of cities that I know get a lot of quality concerts:

Austin
Baltimore
Boston
Chapel Hill
Chicago
Los Angeles
Minneapolis
New York City
Philadelphia
Portland
San Francisco
Seattle
Washington DC

Possibly (?):

Atlanta
Denver
Memphis

I also have a friend who recently moved to Salt Lake City and said they get a good number of shows, but I don't know for sure. Is this list pretty accurate so far? What else belongs on it?

some bigger ones not on that list:

dallas
san diego
st.louis/kansas city (2 hours apart so why not)

some smaller ones not on that list:

omaha, ne
athens, ga
bloomginton, in
lawrence, ks

four hours apart! we're two hours apart from both and no one stops here, wtf

yeah whoops

another small one is des moine

Suggest you go the events page of Last FM, plug in the city names and see what kind of shows are coming up at each one. This should give you a pretty good idea of the health of the live music scene

i imagine phoenix (and maybe tuscon) would get decent coverage as spillover from socal

for a town in the middle of nowhere with only about 2000 people, Marfa TX has quite a lot of shows.

Nshville seems to fare pretty well

Louisville, KY?

another small one is des moine

More bands play in Iowa City than in Des Moines.

Philly does get a decent number of shows, but it seems every time I check the tour page of a band I want to see they do the whole East Coast swing but skip Philly

also if you live in a place like Philly, you can easily drive up to NYC/down to Baltimore, DC, etc.

Good call on last.fm...I hadn't thought about doing that. Does anyone have any preferences on St. Louis, Kansas City, or Omaha in terms of how much you like the actual cities? That's one region I'm kind of interested in, just for something different.

Ask Mefi is a good place to assess the boho-friendliness of various towns:

http://ask.metafilter.com/tags/Moving

Not every tour goes automatically through Ral/Dur/Chapel Hill lately, but they usually hit a city within 2.5 hours (Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Richmond). Ashville is a bit beyond that, and pulls bands off our path sometimes. They get us on the next pass through.

Denver gets a lot of shows, but its location makes it skippable for a lot of tours, it seems.

if you are checking minneapolis tour stops, be sure to plug in saint paul as well since we are the same city functionally, no matter what jerks in either city might say.

Austin gets pretty much everything except the stadium-sized headliners, and if you're interested in any of those it's but a short drive to San Antonio, Houston or Dallas.

Boise has the Knitting Factory, no kidding!

madison & milwaukee get plenty of shows, but not as many as chicago and minneapolis

Boise has the Knitting Factory, no kidding!

So does Spokane, for all your dire meth-rock needs. But I did see Sonic Youth there last week.

Basically I love their website where you get to choose from NY, LA, Boise, and Spokane.

Does anyone have any preferences on St. Louis, Kansas City, or Omaha?

The first two have infinitely more of everything than the latter (unless you're counting religious zealots.)

Move based on which city has the best song named after it (this would keep Omaha in contention with St Louis & KC).

Places I've lived ranked best to worst concerts (all of them were relatively good though):

NYC
Atlanta
Austin
Dallas