Abstract
Contemporary live music venues are an increasingly important component of the live music business and of cultural and social life in cities. This is particularly true for small and medium-sized venues which, despite their popularity, often operate under precarious economic conditions. With the rise of COVID-19 and the subsequent physical distancing measures, including a ban on live music events, the shaky foundations of most live music venues were eroded even further. Against this background, our contribution addresses the following questions: How did COVID-19 and related measures to reduce contact impact live music venues in Germany? Which values of live music are particularly affected and how? What are the likely long-term consequences for the live music sector? To answer these questions, we conducted exploratory research in the northern summer of 2020 including 14 semi-structured interviews with key actors in the live music sector (e.g. club owners, politicians, live music associations). Our findings indicate that music venues are confronted with an existential crisis that exceeds their economic pressures, including facing the loss of informal support networks within the sector and decreasing ties between artists, venues and audiences. They also highlight the importance of live music events as social spaces and the importance of venues to the live music ecology.
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Notes
- 1.
While we acknowledge the benefits of this proposal, in this chapter we nevertheless use the term live music in order to facilitate discussion on the matter rather than debating terminology.
- 2.
Van der Hoeven, Behr et al. (2021a) compiled a list of approaches and motifs to measure these types of value.
- 3.
Research on Dutch live music ecologies provides insight on the different approaches and motivations to measure and attribute value in this context (Van der Hoeven, Behr et al. 2021a, b). The findings indicate that, in live music ecologies, value is attributed disparately in a complex dynamic of actors and institutions.
- 4.
Live music-specific aid programs had only been announced when we conducted the interviews. They were launched later in 2020.
- 5.
Usually scholarships address emerging talent, designed as one-off funding programs with varying budgets (e.g. 5000 euros for artists in Bavaria or 195 million euros for 29,500 scholarships in North Rhine-Westphalia) (Bundestag, 2021).
- 6.
Cover bands are musical groups whose live repertoire mainly consists of songs they did not originally write or record.
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Blömeke, N., Üblacker, J., Krause, J., Huseljić, K., Rühl, H. (2022). The Shape of Clubs to Come: Exploring the Pandemic’s Impact on Live Music Venues in Germany. In: Morrow, G., Nordgård, D., Tschmuck, P. (eds) Rethinking the Music Business. Music Business Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09532-0_6
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