On a cold, cloudy day near the end of 2020, I start walking toward my favorite venue. It’s an empty storefront now, with a loving tribute affixed to the door: a white poster with a cartoon drawing of a tombstone. “Vaudeville Mews: 2002-2020,” the epitaph reads. “Born to lose/Lived to win.” Flowers and two empty cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon hang from the bottom.
I literally wouldn’t be here without this place. More than a decade ago, family ties and an affordable quality of life lured me and my wife back to the area she’d grown up in and expected to leave behind for good. But Vaudeville Mews, a 230-capacity space in downtown Des Moines that had already hosted Joanna Newsom, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and an upstart Fall Out Boy, pretty much sealed the deal. Not just the venue itself, but the optimistic future it represented, one where a mid-size city better known for cornfields and insurance companies could have intimate access to the artists I’d often felt too busy or cash-strapped to see in New York. Where homegrown artists could nurture their own similarly lofty ambitions.
I first interviewed Mews co-founder Amedeo Rossi in 2009, before I’d even moved to town. Today, approaching Rossi for our planned meeting, it takes me a few seconds before I recognize him behind his white N95 mask. We stroll across the street to the martini bar he technically hasn’t shut down yet, two doors up from the Mews, although this place, too, has been voluntarily closed since the pandemic hit. “The Mews was always a weak business,” he tells me from a stool six feet away, as the old beer taps (and bottles of hand sanitizer) gaze down between us. “You could feel it was transformative for Des Moines. So as long as I was able to handle it, I was OK with it. But when you get four or five months behind in rent and you’re running through all your money—I was borrowing money to pay the lights.”
Rossi’s Twitter bio has long consisted of a single phrase: “Sucker for lost causes.” For years, as the neighborhood the Mews helped revitalize has continued to boom, and become more expensive, the venue’s fate has looked uncertain to those of us who believed in the place. Staring down six to 12 months or more of no revenue, Rossi finally decided in early October that this was a lost cause he could no longer afford to keep afloat. Some of the dearest people I’ve known over the last decade lost their livelihoods.
As for me, I merely lost the place that defined my late 20s and my 30s to date, the epicenter of my (former) real-life social network. The club’s closure leaves me with a sense of emptiness and dread about what my world will be like whenever the pandemic era finally ends. There were do-it-yourself and community-oriented events in this town before the Mews opened, and there are still larger venues too. The live music scene will come back, in my city and yours. It won’t be the same.
I ask Rossi—I call him Deo—if we should stop inside the Mews. I don’t say so, but it’s because I want to pay my respects one last time. He says he doesn’t have the keys anymore, and we politely part ways.
Live music was among the first economic sectors the coronavirus decimated. The U.S. impact began in early March, when major events like SXSW, Ultra Music Festival, and Coachella were canceled or postponed. In April, venues and promoters across the country joined forces to launch the National Independent Venue Association, or NIVA, a new advocacy group pushing for federal support. Provisions of the $10 billion bipartisan Save Our Stages Act, meant to aid independent music venues nationwide, have already passed in the House of Representatives, part of the $2.2 trillion stimulus package known as the Heroes Act. But divisions stubbornly persist between the Trump administration, Senate Republicans, and Democrats on a long-hoped-for relief package. NIVA, at least, has raised almost $2 million for independent venues via a virtual Save Our Stages music festival.
“I’m getting emails every single day of venues shutting,” says Audrey Fix Schaefer, NIVA’s communications director. Though the organization doesn’t have a complete list, hundreds of venues so far have closed permanently due to the pandemic. Boot and Saddle in Philadelphia, Jazz Standard in New York, and Danny’s Tavern in Chicago are just a few of the latest nightspots to throw in the towel. Another is Eighteenth Street Lounge, a Washington, D.C. dance-music institution that shuttered indefinitely in June, after 25 years. The owner, Farid Nouri, says he walked away because the lease was up and the landlord’s rent demands were “delusional”—particularly, during a pandemic, for a business that depends on crowds. “Emotionally and economically, it wasn’t the easiest decision,” Nouri acknowledges. “But what’s the other option?”
The behemoths of the live music industry have taken a hit, too. Soon after the public health ramifications of the coronavirus became apparent, Live Nation and AEG suspended all domestic and international touring. Live Nation embarked upon cash management and cost-cutting measures, including furloughing 20 percent of employees. Last month, the company announced that its revenues for the third quarter of 2020 tumbled by an eye-watering 95 percent.
Overall, live music will account for $10.4 billion in global revenues in 2020, down from almost $29 billion last year, according to projections from PricewaterhouseCoopers. For the first time since the CD industry’s collapse in the 2000s, revenues from recorded music—a projected $30.4 billion—will far exceed the money made from touring.
This is to say nothing of the economic loss to artists everywhere. According to one recent report, more than two-thirds of musicians surveyed predict their annual income will be $36,000 or less this year, down sharply from a 2019 average of $46,000. Even as touring opens up, the economic impact of venues closing will continue to affect the musicians themselves, who will have fewer places to play than they used to.
The inability to play shows certainly sidelines artists on the brink of success. In normal times, L.A.-via-Dallas singer-songwriter and rapper Liv.e’s breakthrough debut album, July’s Couldn’t Wait to Tell You, should’ve led to a huge year. Liv.e (pronounced “Liv”) doesn’t hold back on what her 2020 was like. “Pretty horrible,” she tells me. “Performing live is the most important part of what you do.” And then there’s the financial blow. “I’m pretty much back to square one, which is check by check.”
Given the partisan reality-distortion field around medical information this year, it’s perhaps no surprise that whether you could physically go see live music depended on where you live and what type of music you like. Country singer Travis McCready’s “socially distant” concert at an Arkansas venue this past May sparked a cease-and-desist threat from the state’s governor. An outdoor metal festival in Wisconsin—rebranded July Mini Fest after the name Herd Immunity Fest turned out to be not so cute—plowed forward despite band cancellations and rising nearby case counts. The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in August, where ’90s pop-rockers Smash Mouth performed for thousands of spectators, was a superspreading event, according to preliminary academic research. And proving that feckless behavior isn’t exclusive to the middle of the country, some New Yorkers held underground parties and raves where revelers went maskless and danced freely. In the Hamptons, a Chainsmokers drive-in concert even drew an official investigation after videos appeared to show fans rushing the stage.
Others have found more outside-the-box ways to keep music alive without running afoul of public health guidance. There were, of course, artist live streams both homespun and elaborately produced, and creative stopgap solutions like streaming events from empty venues and the aforementioned drive-in concerts. H0L0, a three-year-old Queens venue, produced audience-free live concerts indoors and projected them into an outdoor seating area permitted by the city and state liquor authority. “Technically what we were promoting was a listening and viewing party of a streamed piece of media and not a live performance, even though the performers were right inside in this other room,” says Sam Hillmer, H0L0’s creative director.
Unable to tour, some musicians resorted to guerrilla events. Luke Stewart, a concert organizer and bassist whose groups include Irreversible Entanglements, participated in one such concert in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza on the Saturday the election was called for Biden. “At a certain point, the thousands of people demonstrating in jubilance had left, and basically there was the noise show and there were the cops,” he says. “I remember during [electronic project] Sunk Heaven’s show, they were scraping their swords against the ground causing sparks, doing the crazy thing they do, and this white-shirt police captain was just watching, looking perplexed.” Stewart’s neighbor, saxophonist Chris Pitsiokos, organized socially distanced, seated events in the massive parking lot of Brooklyn’s Red Hook ferry terminal. One of the events, supported via donations and promoted without social media, was called the Friends and Neighbors Circustra, and involved about 20 musicians and non-musicians making noise in response to Pitsiokos’s loose cue cards. “If we get busted, we all just kind of shrug and act like no one’s in charge,” he says. “The flexibility of these guerrilla performances created a climate where DIY took back the performance scene in New York for a second there.”
While more strictly beholden to official rules, nonprofit arts groups have also tried inventive approaches to in-person performances. Baltimore’s Creative Alliance has facilitated more than 400 “sidewalk serenades,” where local people could pay to have brief outdoor concerts on their front stoop or in their backyard. Creative Alliance’s performance director, Josh Kohn, says these events have put $65,000 back in the hands of mostly Baltimore musicians, with artists of color receiving a higher share of proceeds. At the same time, the organization has lost $200,000 in ticket proceeds, forcing sweeping job cuts. “Every week we deal with budgets that don’t make sense,” he says. “It’s like you’re rubbing a magic bottle and hoping you get your wish.”
New York free-jazz nonprofit Arts for Art has improvised as well as the musicians it celebrates. They’ve held perfectly legal concerts in the outdoor parking lot of their Lower East Side office building and in privately owned community gardens around the neighborhood. The organization’s co-founder, Patricia Nicholson Parker, notes with satisfaction that it took only about a week to coordinate one recent set of three performances, played from the vestibule of the office building for passers-by on the street. While many of this year’s make-do substitutes for the familiar rituals of live music felt like pale shadows of the full experience, creative attempts like this are a reminder of why gathering together to witness a performance was so special in the first place. The sound is in the air, and then it’s gone.
Around the world, as COVID-19 has spread, live music has been collateral damage. Mexico’s OCESA—the third-largest concert promoter globally, behind Live Nation and AEG—has said that it is consulting with the government in preparation for reopening large venues, which have been closed during the pandemic. Lollapalooza’s festivals in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil have all been pushed to November and December of 2021. In Nigeria, large gatherings have been under state-level restrictions since March, shuttering nightspots. Researchers in South Africa recently found that almost one-half of live music workers there were thinking about leaving the industry permanently.
In Europe, strict lockdowns during the spring wave of the coronavirus typically gave way to a loose environment in the summer; restrictions have tightened again over the last few months, amid a deadly resurgence of infections. “Even though we have it much easier because of city and state funding, the uncertainty of this situation is pretty stressful,” says Juraj Hoppan, who curates events for Slovakia’s Sensorium Festival and Next Festival. As Daniel Konopáč of artist-run Prague venue Petrohradská Kolektiv tells me, “The first lockdown lasted two months, but now we are in a much more desperate situation and the end is not yet in sight.”
Parts of Asia may be in better shape. In Taiwan, after about six weeks of heavy restrictions in March and April, venues reopened as normal. “Masks and temperature checks are mandated at larger spaces, and at smaller clubs it’s pretty carefree,” says Allen Huang, a Taipei-based booking agent with Awesome Agency. After all, community spread has been near zero. But artists and venues alike are suffering from the island’s 14-day quarantine requirement for inbound travelers. When Ultra Music booked overseas acts for its recent Taiwan festival, some performers ended up breaking quarantine and facing stiff fines. For most musicians, waiting in lockdown for two weeks to play a gig isn’t feasible, anyway. “There is definitely a lack of variety now,” says Hsu Chieh, owner of Taipei venue FINAL, which has turned toward local talent, installations, and theme parties to make up for a lack of international bookings.
For most of the year, South Korea was another relative success, keeping infections low without a lockdown. Nightclubs largely could stay open, but with capacity limits, masks, and an aggressive contact-tracing regime that has raised privacy concerns. But now the country is battling a fresh surge of coronavirus cases. “The pandemic situation isn’t too bad in Korea compared to the U.S. or Europe, but we also went through a hard time having no shows, which led us to serious financial problems,” says Boram Momo Lee, art director of Senggi Studio, a venue-studio hybrid in Seoul. “Indeed, a lot of music venues and clubs in Korea have shut down.” Huang, the Taipei-based booking agent, says some big venues in Japan, China, and the Philippines have also shuttered due to the pandemic.
Farther south, Australia’s vast geography and relatively sparse population have added to the pandemic’s pressures on live music scenes. While Western Australia was able to hold concerts almost normally beginning in July, the state of Victoria—home to the musically rich city of Melbourne—was under strict lockdown from June to October; now restrictions are slowly loosening. “Any kind of national touring circuit has been put on hold,” says Emily York, founder of Melbourne promotion company Penny Drop. Arena shows returned to New South Wales and its state capital, Sydney, in late November, but at half capacity and fully seated. Ash and Sophie Miles of Melbourne label and touring company Mistletone urge the Australian government to do more to sustain music and the arts. “The whole music system here is fragile,” they say in a joint email.
Australian sound artist Lawrence English, who owns the experimental Room40 label, says he performed a socially distanced show in Brisbane in September. The sell-out audience was only 125 people deep—small compared to a 500-capacity Merzbow show he’d booked in the same space before the virus hit—and all were appropriately spread out, but after months of isolation, it freaked him out. “I had this sudden sense of the density of people in a shared space,” English tells me. “The idea now of a massive festival crowd seems so unreasonable and unrealistic.”
Aside from Taiwan, the clearest vision of live music’s post-COVID future might be New Zealand, which has so far managed to stamp out the coronavirus. Government benefits supported the creative community during two tough lockdowns, and now live shows are back as normal, no masks necessary, says veteran Wellington promoter Ian Jorgensen. “Everybody just runs out of their houses, heads into shows, and goes crazy.” But long-term planning is complicated by the ever-present risk of a third lockdown—“like a knife hanging over your head,” Jorgensen says—and touring is strictly domestic. Ben Howe, co-director of the country’s legendary Flying Nun label, says concertgoers have seemed eager at least to pour the money they might have spent on a Foo Fighters stadium gig back into supporting local music instead. “We were incredibly lucky.”
Auckland act the Beths is emblematic of the New Zealand live music scene’s anxious euphoria, where the tension of lockdown is never far from mind. The night before I speak to singer-guitarist Elizabeth Stokes, the Beths win Album of the Year at New Zealand’s annual Aotearoa Music Awards, for their sparkling sophomore album, Jump Rope Gazers. The band recently completed a successful domestic tour, but typically they would support a new LP by touring overseas. During their tour closer on November 6, at the 1,500-capacity Auckland Town Hall, “I played the last song, put the guitar down, and breathed a sigh of relief,” Stokes says. “I looked at the audience and immediately started openly weeping on stage.”
As the plague year of 2020 comes to a close, the questions facing the American live music industry are largely the same as they were back in the spring: Where is the government relief, when is the vaccine arriving en masse, and can what’s left of the live music infrastructure survive until then? The industry’s big players appear to be betting that with millions of vaccine doses expected to be distributed by the spring, live music can resume in the second half of 2021, but probably not much sooner.
In a recent conference call, Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino said that he expects large-scale shows to return next summer. SXSW, which historically happens in March, has gone virtual for 2021. Coachella is still officially scheduled for April, but the clock is ticking, and recent speculation that the event could be postponed again looks increasingly on the money. Bonnaroo has already moved from its planned June dates to the weekend before Labor Day. Miami’s Rolling Loud, previously set for February, has shifted to May. Lollapalooza’s 2021 dates remain unannounced.
“One of the biggest lessons to be learned from the pandemic is you can’t really count on much of anything,” says Ashley Capps, a Bonnaroo co-founder whose Knoxville, Tennessee-based Big Ears Festival recently opted to scrap a full-scale March event in favor of two smaller gatherings later in 2021. But if too many festivals aim for the same time period, the competition for artists could get fierce. “It’s going to be ugly,” says Matthew Morgan, co-founder of Brooklyn’s Afropunk Festival, with a chuckle. “It really is.” Hoping to stay out of the clutter, he teases plans for a new launch in 2022.
Although the long-hoped-for relief package of Save Our Stages still stands a chance of emerging from partisan gridlock, the outlook for independent venues in the U.S. remains dire. Consolidation appears likely. Deeper pockets mean that “when the concert industry does open for business again, Live Nation and AEG will have the smoothest path forward,” as Billboard reported in April. The corporations have even joined forces on their own pandemic relief lobby, #SaveLiveEventsNow, which raised some eyebrows—particularly considering that the National Independent Venue Association said it wasn’t asked to join. Lollapalooza co-founder Marc Geiger has unveiled SaveLive, a $75 million venture that would buy at least 51 percent stakes in dozens of small venues. Some decried the move as predatory, which Geiger and his main investor denied. (Geiger, who has previously done consulting work on Pitchfork’s festivals, declined to comment for this article.) “The sharks are in the water,” offers Vaudeville Mews’ Rossi, but he also admits that the Mews might have taken a hypothetical deal like that, as a last-ditch effort.
Virtual performances seem likely to stick in some form. “The running mantra is that live streaming is here to stay,” says Olivia Junell of Chicago nonprofit Experimental Sound Studio, which hosted more than 170 streaming performances between March and November, everything from lo-fi saxophone skronk to soundscapes generated by live chickens. Nick Dangerfield, who dreamed up the Oda home speaker concert series even before COVID-19, singles out an October 22 live-streamed performance by Angel Bat Dawid that offered him an entirely new sensation: “It was so visceral, so intense, that I have a memory of being there, in a way.”
Looking beyond the increased interplay between real-life and digital tools, H0L0’s Hillmer envisions the spread of multifaceted venues that also act as labels, creative agencies, or multi-purpose community centers, akin to the Knitting Factory in New York or Cafe OTO in London. Along similar lines, Jonathan Zwickel, board chair at The Vera Project, a Seattle all-ages nonprofit space that turns 20 years old next year, argues that community-oriented venues represent a sustainable post-COVID business model for live music. The traditional for-profit model, based heavily on liquor sales, was already flawed before the pandemic, he says, not least when it comes to safety and equity for BIPOC, women, and the LGBTQ+ community. “The kinds of gatherings we need to see are ones that cater to a community that can gather there nightly, regardless of what the bill might be, because they know that the space itself is there for them,” Zwickel says.
COVID-19 wasn’t the only tragedy that shook the world this year. In the ongoing spirit of this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, several people I spoke with emphasized the need to make live music more racially equitable. “It’s time to burn it down and redesign,” says Andre Perry, executive director of Iowa City nonprofit performance space Englert Theatre and a member of NIVA’s diversity task force. He acknowledges that real change will require more than broad rhetoric: “I think pretty deeply about our hiring practices, but we don’t have a hiring practices guide that ensures that our operations director is really doing the work to get a broad application pool when there’s an opening for a house manager. I know that’s hyper specific, but we’ve got to get to that level.” Others, like Fitz & the Tantrums singer Noelle Scaggs, have offered up touring-specific initiatives to fight the industry’s homogeneity. Her recent Diversify the Stage project highlights the need for a “comprehensive, central, and industry-wide resource for hiring touring staff,” as well as youth programming that helps underrepresented communities gain a foothold in the live music world.
After dozens of phone interviews, Zooms, and email conversations, I’m still uneasy about the future of live music. The pandemic has battered venues, cost countless jobs, and stifled an unknown number of creative opportunities. DJ and producer Nina Hudej, co-founder of the Pritličje performance space in Slovenia, reminds me that some of the damage to live music’s infrastructure and fragile ecosystem of cultural capital is probably irreparable. “I’m actually afraid of what will happen next,” Hudej says. “There’s no guarantee that building anything from the ground up can give a certainty of building it better and wiser.” But she’s confident that live music will remain a fundamental part of the physical human experience. So am I. Too many believe in it too much for it to go extinct.
I text a friend and learn something encouraging, which Vaudeville Mews’ Rossi soon confirms: He has been scouting potential locations for a new Des Moines venue, in a neighborhood where the rents are lower. The next time I stroll past my old favorite spot, the handmade shrine on the door is gone.
