Portugal. The Man performs on stage at Mississippi Studios in January 2018 in Portland, Ore.
Propelled by Taylor Swift’s colossal Eras tour and massive global runs by Beyonce, Bruce Springsteen and others, 2023 has been dubbed the year live music not only regained its footing, but sprinted into the stratosphere.
"Demand for live music continues to build,” proclaimed Michael Rapino, president and CEO of Live Nation, which powered the year’s three top-grossing tours, in announcing results for the company’s Q4 and full-year, during which revenue rose 36% from 2022 to $22.7 billion. “We expect all our businesses to continue growing and adding value to artists and fans as we deliver double-digit operating income and AOI growth again this year, with our profitability compounding by double-digits over the next several years."
At Portland, Ore-based Mississippi Productions, the picture is less sanguine. The home of five independent venues including the 1,000-seat Revolution Hall—a tour stop for the likes of Todd Rundgren and Boz Scaggs—and the 350-seat Mississippi Studios and Polaris Hall continues to weather overall revenue at 60%-70% percent of what it was in 2019, “which is really difficult when our expenses, in many cases, have as much as doubled,” says owner Jim Brunberg.
“Margins are gone, and independent venues are folding left and right. We are having a pretty dire set of circumstances right now. The picture isn’t good.”
Brunberg’s narrative isn’t unique among the owners of indie venue around the country—a fact of which he’s well aware through his role as vice president of the board of the National Independent Venue Assn. Their collective stories weave a tale two recoveries since the return of live music. On one hand are the arenas and stadiums that house the tours that broke records last year. On the other are the small, independently operated rooms that are still enduring a host of pain points.
Among them, says Holly Hagerman, co-founder of Amptup, which provides a platform for booking and managing live events, are a lack of standards around booking performances, high rent loads for venues, and fan lifestyle evolutions including the “Netflix
“People will pool their resources to go out to a big show they want to go to, whereas before they may have stopped somewhere on the way home from work to get something to eat and see live music,” Hagerman says.
Brunberg says he’s had to become a master of even more trades, as finding and training steady, dedicated staff across all aspects of venue operation remains a challenge.
“One of the things we are struggling with is where to find these people because a lot of the most skilled, entrenched people, when Covid hit, said, ‘There’s no work in the foreseeable future.’ In Oregon we were closed for 18 months s and after the first year some of our most skilled people, we had tearful goodbyes and they were just drifting off into other careers,” he says.
Hagerman also points to the toll on the mental, physical and emotional health of owners and production staff. “You have long hours, you have loud music, you have heavy drinking, you have people that may have imbibed too much and may feel entitled and be abusive,” she says.
“For us it’s fun to go to be where there’s loud music and the lights are flashing, but when you are doing that every day, every week and you’re going until 4 in the morning regularly and doing other things like literally, scraping bubble gum off the ground—it just takes a toll.”
The shrinking of community-rooted venues is not only eroding opportunities for local artists to perform—it’s eroding the local flavor that makes each ZIP code unique, says Jim Lucchese, CEO of Sofar Sounds, the music events company that stages pop-up concerts in nontraditional locations.
“Cities have become increasingly hostile, during and after Covid, to traditional smaller venues that typically book local artists, with a modest cover charge, where you would just go discover new music live,” he says. “But artists are the soul of the city, and the deeper local roots and unique nature of performance spaces in cities make them special.”
While Lucchese supports “big rooms for big artists to do a nationwide tour,” he says spaces that showcase local creative character are apples to those oranges—both for artists, and for patrons.
“To put it in perspective, the ticketing fees on those [megatour] tickets are greater than the price of a Sofar ticket,” he says. “Artists who are touring in those [indie] venues are often playing Sofar shows along the way, and because Sofar doesn’t announce lineups ahead of time or ask artists to promote, they can play a Sofar show on Friday night and sell tickets to a headlining show on Saturday night.”
And then there is the question of artist development.
“Without smaller spaces for artists to grow, what does that mean for the future sustainability of the industry?,” he opines. “The stadium and major festival artists of today were developing artists in a van, touring the country and growing their fan bases few years ago,” Lucchese says, noting more than 100 Grammy nominees played Sofar shows earlier in their careers including Billie Eilish and Finneas, and Boygenius members Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker.
This topic will no doubt be on the minds of attendees at the third annual NIVA conference, June 3-5 in New Orleans.
“The thing that is good is the owners and operators of independent venues feel it in their blood and their hearts,” Brunberg says.
“These people are soldiers, and they will keep fighting for what’s right in terms of how to treat artists, employees and guests in the long run—not just posturing and coming up with short-term things that sound good but rather, real sustainable touring mechanisms.”
