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Sweet marketing music

Tanner Montague came to town from Seattle having never owned his own music venue before. He’s a musician himself, so he has a pretty good sense of good music, but he also wandered into a crowded music scene filled with concert venues large and small.But the owner of Green Room thinks he found a void in the market. It’s lacking, he says, in places serving between 200 and 500 people, a sweet spot he thinks could be a draw for both some national acts not quite big enough yet for arena gigs and local acts looking for a launching pad.“I felt that size would do well in the city to offer more options,” he says. “My goal was to A, bring another option for national acts but then, B, have a great spot for local bands to start.”Right or wrong, something seems to be working, he says. He’s got a full calendar of concerts booked out several months. How did he, as a newcomer to the market in an industry filled with competition, get the attention of the local concertgoer?

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by Beth Ewen
May 2006

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Real estate

Java J’s owner finds
living over shop makeswork,
home too close

Many stuck in commuter gridlock might envy Jason Cobb. He lives in a loft right above his ground-floor coffee shop, Java J’s Coffee, on 700 N. Washington Avenue in northeast Minneapolis.

After about five months in business, though, he’s planning to sell the living space and purchase another one a few blocks away. “It’s a little bit too close to work,” Cobb says. He’d like “even a two-minute car drive to get that separation.”

Cobb was in information technology, and used a severance package from his former employer and backing from his father to open Java J’s. He plans to purchase the shop in about a year at market value. He likes to own property. “If the coffeeshop doesn’t work then I still have the real estate,” he says. “I think that’s important.”

Cobb incorporated his high-tech background into Java J’s. “I made sure that nearly every spot is near on outlet, to plug in laptops. There’s high-speed Internet to use for free,” he says. And there’s a conference room, with flat-panel TVs that people can use for presentations.

“I see a lot of people having small-business meetings” there, including real estate brokers and an FBI agent. “If you’ve got a good spot, the coffee is just the price of admission,” Cobb says.

Jason Cobb, Java J’s Coffee: 612.236.9444;  jason@javajason.com; www.javajason.com