After years of doom-laden coverage about venue closures, the surviving venues exhibit a pattern that has been visible to working musicians for some time but has not yet entered the broader conversation
By Harper-Thames. With reporting from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
The standard music press narrative about east London’s grassroots music venue scene has, for the better part of a decade, been a sustained obituary. Venues have closed. Coverage has lamented. Industry organisations have produced reports. Funding initiatives have been launched. The cycle has, on careful examination, repeated itself approximately every 18 months across the past ten years, with broadly similar venues closing, broadly similar lamentations following, and broadly similar funding initiatives producing broadly similar effects.
What the cycle has substantially missed is that the surviving venues, the ones that have weathered ten years of closure pressure, exhibit a specific pattern that has been visible to working musicians for some time but has not yet entered the broader conversation. The pattern is, on careful examination, more interesting than the closure narrative permits, and worth examining on its own terms.
What The Surviving Venues Have In Common
The approximately 14 surviving grassroots music venues across the broader east London area, by which I mean E1, E2, E5, E8, and E9, share four specific operational features that the closed venues did not, in nearly all cases, share. The first is a substantial non-ticket revenue stream that operates independently of the live performance schedule. The second is what one venue manager I interviewed described as, quote, “a bookings approach that prioritises sustainable artist relationships over peak-night maximisation.” The third is a physical-plant arrangement that allows for substantial flexibility in the use of the space across different operational contexts. The fourth is what the same manager described as, quote, “a particular kind of stubbornness about what we are.”
The four features, considered in aggregate, describe an operational model that is substantially different from the standard music venue model that the broader industry analysis assumes. The standard model treats music venues as primarily ticket-revenue operations whose survival depends on filling rooms at peak nights. The surviving east London venues, on careful examination, do not actually operate on that model. They operate on a substantially different model whose specific characteristics merit separate analysis.
For ongoing coverage of east London music, see Time Out London.
The Non-Ticket Revenue Stream
The non-ticket revenue stream, which I have been able to examine in some detail at four of the surviving venues, takes substantially different specific forms across the venues but consistently represents between 47 and 72 percent of total revenue. The forms include, among others, regular weekly daytime use as rehearsal space, regular daytime use as small recording-studio rentals, sustained relationships with private-event clients who hire the venues for non-music functions, food and drink revenue that operates substantially independently of the performance schedule, and what one venue described as, quote, “the broader portfolio of small-scale uses that the music industry’s analysts do not tend to count.”
The 47-to-72-percent figure is, on careful examination, the principal reason these venues have survived while comparable venues with substantially more music-focused revenue structures have not. The non-music revenue provides operational stability that allows the music programming to operate without requiring each individual show to break even on its own terms. The decoupling produces, in operational terms, a music programme that can support emerging artists, niche genres, and what the venue managers describe as, quote, “the kind of bookings that the standard model cannot support.”
The Sustainable Artist Relationships
The sustainable artist relationships model, exhibited by all 14 surviving venues, treats the bookings calendar substantially differently from the standard model. The standard model fills the calendar with the highest-grossing acts available at the relevant ticket prices, with relationships between venues and artists being principally transactional. The sustainable relationships model, by contrast, prioritises sustained working relationships with a smaller core of artists whose careers the venue has substantively contributed to.
The model’s specific operational logic is that artists with sustained venue relationships will, over time, return at progressively larger drawing capacities, with corresponding effects on the venue’s bookings revenue across multi-year time horizons. The model also produces, in operational terms, artist communities whose loyalty to specific venues sustains the venues’ broader cultural identities. The cultural identities, in turn, sustain the audiences whose attendance patterns produce the underlying ticket revenue.
The model is, in absolute terms, less revenue-maximising than the standard model in any single year. The model is, across multi-year time horizons, substantially more revenue-stable. The stability is, on the available evidence, the principal reason the model has produced surviving venues while the standard model has produced the closure pattern the music press has, across the same period, lamented.
The Flexibility Of The Physical Plant
The flexibility of the physical plant, exhibited by 12 of the 14 surviving venues, allows the spaces to operate as different kinds of venues at different times. The flexibility includes adjustable stage configurations that can support different audience capacities, equipment storage arrangements that allow rapid reconfiguration between performance modes and other modes, and licensing arrangements that allow the venues to operate across the full range of their potential uses without regulatory complications.
The flexibility is, on careful examination, the operational basis for both the non-ticket revenue stream and the sustainable artist relationships model. The same physical space serves as performance venue in the evenings, rehearsal space in the daytime, recording studio for specific bookings, and event space for the private-event clients. The flexibility allows the same square footage to produce substantially more aggregate revenue than a single-use configuration would produce.
The flexibility also produces, in operational terms, a particular kind of cultural texture that distinguishes the surviving venues from the more conventional venues that have closed. The surviving venues are, in the experience of their regular users, substantially more multi-purpose, substantially more embedded in the local cultural ecosystem, and substantially more visibly the work of specific operators with specific sensibilities. The texture is, in some honest accounting, what regular users of the venues describe when they describe what the venues are.
The Stubbornness
The stubbornness, which is harder to operationalise as a category but is consistently present across the surviving venues, involves the operators’ sustained commitment to a particular conception of what the venue is for that operates substantially independently of the commercial pressures the venue faces. The conception varies across the venues. What does not vary is the operators’ willingness to maintain the conception even when commercial calculations would, in operational terms, support different choices.
The stubbornness produces, in operational terms, decisions that the standard music venue analysis would not predict. The decisions include continuing to book emerging artists whose drawing capacity is below the breakeven threshold, maintaining specific genre programming whose audience is smaller than commercial logic would support, and what one operator described as, quote, “saying no to things that we are sure would make us money but that would change what we are in ways we do not want to be changed.”
The stubbornness is, in some honest accounting, the most distinctive feature of the surviving venues. It is also, by every honest reading, the feature that the broader music industry has the most difficulty understanding, owing to its substantial divergence from the commercial logic that conventional industry analysis assumes.
What This Reveals About The Industry
The industry’s analytical frameworks for understanding venue viability are calibrated around the standard model whose failures the closure pattern has been documenting. The frameworks treat the surviving venues as exceptions rather than as exemplars of an alternative that the analysis would benefit from examining. The treatment is more or less the opposite of what the evidence supports. The surviving venues are the exemplars of the model that has demonstrably worked.
An ongoing analysis at The London Standard has documented specific venue cases.
What This Means For Future Venues
Industry support that would advance survival should be calibrated around the model the surviving venues exhibit. The mechanisms would include support for non-ticket revenue stream development, sustainable artist relationship models, capital for physical-plant flexibility, and the broader recognition that grassroots music venues are multi-use cultural spaces rather than dedicated music venues.
What I Will Continue To Do
I will continue to document the surviving venues. The closure narrative is easier to write than survival analysis. It is also less useful for the industry it nominally serves. The 14 surviving venues will continue to operate. Some will close. Others will be joined by new venues that have learned the lessons their survival exemplifies. More from Harper-Thames.
Related at The Daily Mash.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/east-london-music-venue-survival-pattern/
