Written for JRNL2201 at Northeastern University
TT The Bear’s Place, the legendary rock venue and club in Cambridge, once hosted raucous crowds and upstart bands like the Pixies, Arcade Fire, Smashing Pumpkins, and (according to urban legend) Nirvana. However, the club’s status did not spare it from economic hardships brought on by a rapidly changing live music industry, and unconventional measures were taken to survive. In its waning years, TT’s was financially buoyed not by local music shows and drink sales, but by a weekly ‘80s DJ night.
“The last five years, we were always 30 days away from being out of business,” said Kevin Patey, former general manager of TT’s. In order to keep the doors open, he said, “we had this dance night called ‘Heroes.’ One of the decisions I made when I came on board was consistently doing it. I said, ‘This is the only thing that makes us any money. We can have bands the other six nights of the week because this night keeps the lights on.’”
After 10 years as general manager, Patey’s time at TT’s would end in 2015 when the club closed for good following a lease dispute. Though his job allowed him to watch talented acts on a consistent basis, his biggest takeaway is the same one that many small club owners, bookers and managers are wrestling with today: live music is a money loser, and there aren’t many places that can comfortably stay above water in 2022.
A city that was once littered with independently owned and operated music venues ranging from a 200- to 400-person capacity now has a shortage, with many of them closing their doors. Along with TT’s, classic clubs which opened in the late 20th century like Great Scott, Avalon, and Axis have shut down, while practically the only venues thriving are newer, much larger ones. These places, namely House of Blues, Royale, Roadrunner and MGM Music Hall, all are owned and funded by live music promotion companies Live Nation and The Bowery, an east-coast partner of AEG Live. In the shadow cast by these behemoth, state-of-the-art venues, longtime cultural hubs which were once pivotal to the Boston touring scene don’t have the funds to keep up, and are dying out.
“I miss how it was because you could get a variety of shows,” said Brad Searles, live music aficionado and creator of bradleysalmanac.com, a blog cataloging live music in Boston. since 2000. “It was a great mix. It just provided more choice and more intimate experiences. We lost that place where the up-and-coming bands who could bring in a few hundred people could play.”
There are still older, independent venues selling tickets and packing crowds every night — such as The Middle East in Cambridge — but the nationwide trend is bleak. Increasing gentrification in cities across America drives up rent prices in formerly cheap neighborhoods, where many of these clubs formerly thrived. Despite PPE loans and the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program pushed by the National Independent Venue Association, financial fallout from the pandemic also has proved too strong, taking out a large swath of venues whose stages were empty for months and months. The social fallout can still be felt as well, with audience sizes at some venues still not completely back to full strength.
What has also made a major impact, according to Aaron Gray, talent buyer at The Middle East, is a change in the public’s consumption habits. “People don’t drink as much anymore,” he said, “which is a weird place to be. That’s good that people are getting healthier, but at the same time, we rely on that.” He also said there’s a misconception about what the club’s true profit margins are, especially from the bar. “People think you’re marking it up so much, so it’s got to be through the roof profit. It’s not. There’s insurance, there’s rent, there’s all sorts of things. What we charge in order to rent our spaces is not really even close to what we actually need.”
For a corporate-backed venue with a capacity above 1,000, Gray said that many of these issues become negligible due to the money from the company as well as the sheer number of tickets being sold. “A show goes on sale at Roadrunner, like a 3,500 cap room and they’re like, ‘yeah, it’s sold out. We’re going to do another night. 3,500. 7,000 tickets.’ It’s crazy.” He added that the overall audience engagement they receive is also a lot more sustainable. “Once you get to a certain level, it seems like people are just going to see those things,” he said. “When you get to 200 and below, those acts are really struggling because folks may have already been kind of disinterested in supporting stuff at that level unless they really loved to go see live music.”
Where independent venues are struggling to turn a profit, those that are corporate-backed are blossoming. These companies have only dipped into owning venues relatively recently, but have been fixtures on the touring circuit for decades, picking up connections in the talent, booking and managing industries and slowly but surely developing an all-encompassing presence across America.
“Early rock and roll tours were really just making it up as they went along. It was the Wild West,” said Jason Hanley, vice president of visitor engagement at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “You’d deal with a different concert promoter in every single city and a different venue in every single city. Eventually, you get the birth of these big companies like Live Nation or AEG. They start to build concert venues in multiple cities that are owned by the same company, so they promote the tour across a number of venues. It changes the logistics. It makes it so that it can be a larger, more profitable endeavor.”
It’s no surprise that today, these companies are so heavily relied on throughout every stage of the touring process. They’ve built up strong relationships in the live music industry, and are able to bring in money at a time when few others can. The money they bring in gives their venues some huge advantages over independent ones, like the ability to sink funds into a huge show and recover easily if it doesn’t pan out. “They have more money because they have the ability to lose money,” said Melissa Ferrick, music industry professor at Northeastern University and former touring musician. “Smaller, indie-promoted clubs don’t have that to fall back on.”
On one hand, Boston’s corporate venues are an undeniable draw for national touring artists and audiences alike, featuring pristine facilities, crisp sound, and anywhere from double to nine-times the maximum capacity of a bar like TT’s. “They’re the shiny new toys,” said James Sullivan, arts reporter for the Boston Globe. “The facilities for the bands themselves are absurdly nice. If you’re a relatively famous performer, you sort of demand some comfort, and they’re giving it to them.”
They’ve also undeniably brought increased business to areas where they opened, like Roadrunner in Allston. Larger venues means more people routinely coming to the neighborhood, which leads to more places opening up around it. “That foot traffic and money moving through the economy by people going out has been huge,” said Sullivan. “It really made the city feel very much more modern and cosmopolitan than it did when I was younger.”
The negative impact of the changing tides in the live music industry is still real though, and isn’t solely felt by management groups at other venues. Such dominance over all facets of the touring process means corporations can overcharge audiences for tickets, which Live Nation has recently been under intense scrutiny for. They can also, indirectly, lock local small artists out of coveted opening slots at bigger clubs. “These booking agents package these shows together where they have their baby band on their roster go on tour with the big band,” said Patey, the former TT’s general manager. “It used to be local bands would always support the big national acts and that doesn’t really happen anymore.”
Some independent clubs have attempted partnering with these corporations to reap some of the benefits they provide. TT’s experimented with The Bowery briefly, joining their plethora of Boston venues, which yielded mixed results. “It was the smart thing to do, and it was a good thing to do because they got us bands that we wouldn’t have any business getting,” said Patey. “The deal was that we worked out because it was a 100% on them,” which means The Bowery entirely handled booking costs, giving the club increased financial flexibility.
Ultimately though, once The Sinclair, a 500 person, Bowery-owned venue in Cambridge, opened up, the company’s focus shifted entirely. “Now we were not a priority,” said Patey, “We were getting the occasional touring act that they couldn’t fit in their own room, but they weren’t they weren’t paying any attention to local booking, and so for the first time in our 40 plus years of existence, we were closed because we had no band booked.”
There are not many ways where independently owned and booked venues still hold a competitive edge over the high-spending top dogs, but an advantage still exists. Though corporations have crept into the small-venue playing field, Aaron Gray said The Middle East caters to a market that they don’t want to go near. “They’re not going to do crazy extreme metal bands and stuff, or hardcore bands. They’re not going to touch them,” he said. “Stuff that’s maybe a little risky to try, they’re not going to do it, so we have a competitive edge in that sense.”
Ultimately though, this advantage may be fleeting. As proven over time, corporate entities in live music have the power to drive out the many smaller venues that once vied for power over Boston’s music scene. “If they really want to, they can bury us,” he said, “They just have bottomless money.”
Henry Bova 
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