How to join one of Charlotte’s most exclusive clubs for music lovers

“This may not be for everybody,” founder Larry Farber admits. “It’s for anyone who wants to hear music with fewer people, better acoustics and in a small intimate venue.”

Great music comes at a price, though. The club’s one-time membership-fee is a cool $600, plus an additional $600 per show. The experience is aimed at Charlotte’s elite, who’ve been attending these shows since the club was founded in 2007.

How it works: Music with Friends hosts three concerts a year for its 500-600 members at the Sandra Levine Theatre at Queens University.

• The $600 membership locks you in for the season’s three shows.
• The club determine each season’s performers via a membership poll.
• Tickets will grant you access to a reception before the show with hors d’oeuvres and an open bar, a 90-minute performance by a well-known musician and a 90-minute afterparty, where the performers often mingle with the crowd.

“You’re hearing the greatest legends in the world with 550 to 600 of your closest friends in a way that you’ve never experienced before,” Farber said.

The other side: “It’s unfortunate that the best work of one of Charlotte’s most important cultural forces happens in private,” Ron Stodghill wrote in Charlotte Magazine in 2015, pointing out the Gatsby-inspired soirees put on by Farber are a little out of touch. 

• Yes, but: “We pay these artists the same amount that they get when they’re playing for five or 10,000 people,” says Farber.

Between the lines: During the pandemic, music venues shut their doors and risked closing forever. Music with friends was no exception. The club relied on federal grant money to survive. “It helped basically save us to go into the next year,” Corporate Director of Development and Membership Tonda Rifkin tells Axios; explaining that even though the world stopped, their expenses didn’t. 

• The pandemic wasn’t the first time the club faced hard times. “We lost quite a few [members] during the recession of 2008 and 2009,” Bruce Hensley of Hensley Fontana Public Relations said. 

What’s next: Music With Friends will host St. Paul and The Broken Bones on Tuesday, September 20, 2022. And Smokey Robinson on Monday, November 28, 2022. Keep up with the latest season line-up here.

• Of note: The shows are on weekdays and never in the summer, to avoid conflicts with vacations, Panthers games, and other weekend activities.