Not only has the COVID-19 virus hurt our income by forcing cuts to our hours of work and forcing many people onto unemployment compensation, it is devastating many of the local institutions we love. Our favorite restaurants, coffee shops and our cultural venues are being severely hurt, some unfortunately will never recover and come back to life.
One important group that has not received as much attention is our music venues. By their nature, music venues thrive on not only the energy from the performers but the energy from the people in the audience who are dancing, singing and swinging to the music. You can’t quite replicate that on TV.
“Our business is a gathering place for people, with hundreds or even thousands of people gathering nightly in our venues. It is no surprise then that music venues were some of the first industries that shut down completely and will probably be some of the last to re-open.” says Gary Witt, CEO of the Pabst Theater Group that manages The Pabst Theater, The Riverside, Turner Hall and the Back Room @ Colectivo.
These venues along with other major cultural institutions and restaurants and bars are important parts of what makes a great city great. Without all of these elements, you have a bedroom community and places of work. Binge watching on Netflix is no substitute.
There is also a major economic component generated by the venues especially when a person spends money for a night at a concert rather than buying a product made in some distant country. Yes, the artist leaves town with a cut of take, but money still stays in our city. Also, money spent at a concert often includes dinner and drinks before or after and possibly a night at a local hotel for those traveling to the venue, keeping dollars circulating within our local community. And then there are the jobs and the venues in the Milwaukee area are responsible for thousands of local jobs.
So, What Are the Venues Doing to Help Themselves?
The independent music venue owners and promoters are entrepreneurial because every concert they book is a separate business venture and the risks are high. Throughout the year, you literally win some and lose some. You can lose many tens of thousands of dollars if the tickets don’t sell. There is very little room for error.
Because of the independent nature of this unique group of entrepreneurs, they hadn’t felt any great need to organize any kind of functioning national organization of venues. Now, with the closures from the pandemic, they acted to create the National Independent Venue Association, NIVA. One of the main organizers was Milwaukee’s Gary Witt.
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Because these venues are facing being closed for, perhaps more than a year, and their entire future is at stake, the national organization came together quickly. They had over 450 charter members from all 50 states and currently are at nearly 1,600 members including several from Milwaukee including Shank Hall, Cactus Club, The Cooperage, The Rave and the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center. They realized that a pandemic is a catastrophic and that America cannot let most of its venues end in bankruptcy. Like all important sectors of the economy, they turned to the federal government for financial assistance. NIVA hired one of Washington’s most prestigious lobbying firms, Akin Gump, to help. Those venues that have been in business for years and have email lists of hundreds of thousands of people who enjoy concerts, started with a strong base of support. Concert goers live in every state and every congressional district.
Specifically, What Can be Done?
The lobbying firm has laid out their case for federal support to the bi-partisan leadership of Congress starting with the huge economic impact these venues have on their communities. Every dollar spent on a concert—and the restaurant and bar spending that accompanies a night at a concert—has a large multiplier effect compared to a product produced in China or Vietnam where the money immediately leaves the country.
These venues also employ hundreds of thousands of service employees with families to feed and rent to pay. Unfortunately, this industry might have to wait until a vaccine is approved, produced, distributed and administered to billions of people before it can come back to life and that’s probably at least a year away.
The federal government’s current program, the Payroll Protection Program, does not fit the needs of many service/hospitality/entertainment businesses especially the venues that will have this long period of being shut down. The lobbying firm has laid out the various legislative actions that Congress could make in the form of loans, loan forgiveness, tax credits and several other adjustments that would perhaps make the difference between these venues re-opening next year or going out-of-business. Will congress add this to the next COVID-19 recovery bill?
Like so many small businesses across the county much of their survival strategy is now in the hands of the federal government. Can the government continue to provide trillions of dollars to save our businesses? The answer is categorically “Yes.” Even many very conservative economists admit that the federal government can and must. We, as a nation, can go into huge debt when we must to survive—as we did in World War II. We came out a much stronger nation with high employment numbers and tax revenues that provided us the ability to choose to pay down the debt incurred in these catastrophic times of great distress.
