Over the past 15 years, 20% of small music venues have closed, with 26 over the past two years. These venues, with capacities ranging from 200 to 3000, are the bedrock of the music industry, and can often be the best place to experience live music.
Virtually every band started their careers playing at a small venue: The Beatles at Cavern Club and Arctic Monkeys at the Boardwalk are two that spring to mind but there are dozens more from across the globe. Local, small and independent venues have two big positives: the customer pays (usually) a lot less money and the artist has the opportunity to put on gigs that sell out. No matter how good you sound, if you have 1000 monthly listeners on Spotify, you’re not going to be filling arenas. Without these venues, small bands would be unable to perform live until they have built up enough following to book a massive venue. This, in turn, makes it virtually impossible for any band that doesn’t have a significant fanbase, a solid reputation and a lot of money to play live at all.
In case you’re not convinced of the wonders of small venues, they also tend to sell significantly cheaper drinks (£6 a pint at O2 Academy Leeds compared to £2.80 at Manchester Deaf Institute), the queues for the toilet are much smaller, and you’ve got a significantly higher chance of being remotely near the stage.
Big arenas and venues certainly have a place in allowing lots of people to see their favourite artist, but for artists to get to the point where they’re selling out arenas they need somewhere to start, and that’s where local venues are crucial.
Like every other business, the lockdown has caused massive problems and reopening looks to be far away and a completely different experience to what we’re used to.
The government plan for to reopening has 5 stages: in short, it ranges from opening for rehearsals to opening at an undefined ‘limited capacity’ – which could mean as little as 30% capacity or the enforcement of the 2m rule. According to NME, this would mean an average of 25 attendees. You don’t need to be an expert on business or economics to realise that that isn’t going to be profitable unless tickets become ridiculously expensive. The article also claims that 93% of venues will not reopen at all, likely to mean that the only ones able to keep going are in big cities: Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and London, which means they’re not accessible for anyone further from these urban hubs.
The Music Venues Trust has proposed an alternative plan where the government pump money (to the tune of £50 million) into these smaller venues and allow them to remain closed until October. They argue that the money, which sounds like a large sum, is actually a fraction of the amount planned to be spent on the Festival of Britain, and could protect more than 400 venues from closing forever. Furthermore, Wetherspoons was given 48.3 million.
However, when the government’s own plan costs significantly less than that, and investment is going to be needed by virtually every industry, whether the money will be granted remains to be seen. In the meantime, the Music Venues Trust (MVT) has launched the #saveourvenues campaign, through writing an open letter to the government asking for the desperately needed investment and fundraising for their Grassroots Music Venue Crisis Fund, which last year saved 91 venues from closure.
Aside from the cultural importance of these venues, if all 400 venues closed that would result in the loss of thousands of jobs (210 000 jobs in the UK are supported by live music), buildings (some of which are listed) falling into disrepair and a change in how the industry works: if smaller bands can’t play live, streams become even more crucial, giving Spotify, Vevo and Apple even more influence. Furthermore, there will be clearly be a knock on effect: without bands building up a following, how long will festivals carry on for? Will arenas capable of holding thousands keep going when there are fewer and fewer new bands?
It also seems that if independent venues close, different genres will be affected differently: it’s not hard to see that mainstream pop may suffer the least, building up a following via TikTok or even through televised talent shows, which tend to be won by pop artists. Whilst this isn’t an inherently bad thing – pop is a genre which generates massive amount of money and requires no less skill or hard work than any other – alternative artists are unlikely to thrive in this climate meaning the massive range of genres we see at the minute could be reduced.
Saving an entire industry clearly requires government intervention, but there are things individuals can do to ensure that whenever normal life resumes we can get back to these valuable places. The MVT are encouraging people to tweet a photo of the last gig the attended with #LetTheMusicPlay, which is currently trending as a result of thousands of bands sharing it, as well as concert-goers, in an effort to show the government how important live music, and the arts as a whole is, and how desperately the investment is needed.
You can also use this map from the MVT to see which if any venues local to you are in danger, and consider donating to them and their fund – you can even ‘adopt a venue’.
Finally, you can stream and support small bands. Sharing their music with others and listening to it (on SoundCloud, BandCamp, Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, YouTube or any other platform) helps bands gain the following they need to book these venues. If you don’t know where to start, the three artists I wrote about in my previous post (which you can read here) are all small artists with a lot of potential. I would recommend giving all these artists a follow on Spotify:
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