"Musicians, I do not recommend performing here. Or, at the least, ask the owner/event coordinator what the expectations for the evening are before confirming a show here. My band, after setting up and soundchecking, was told to go home because "there's a genre discrepancy."
For context, I play in a progressive rock and metal band...so I'm not sure why they hired us for the night knowing what our style of music is. We were not told that we were supposed to play background music for the evening.
But the management needs to communicate with performers more clearly and set expectations before more musicians waste hours and hours of hard work. Also, the owner or event coordinator should have taken responsibility for the situation and spoken to us directly. He used the poor sound guy as the middleman.
FWIW, the sound guy and the bar staff all seemed sweet, the venue is quaint and clean, and we were compensated for our time."