The Club Market In 2024: ‘The Future Is Scary’

“Due to circumstances beyond our control, this Rockwood Music Hall location has closed its doors today, Sunday Nov. 10, 2024. Hence, all shows going forward are canceled. Apologies for the short notice and thank you for the support. Please reach out if needed.” — X, Social Media Post, Nov. 10, 2024 

It’s heartbreaking when any music venue closes. More so when it’s one that’s helped build thousands of artist careers and created peak life experiences for hundreds of thousands of fans show by show. This past November, the 330-cap Rockwood Music Hall, which for 19 years was located on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, shuttered. The list of artists who performed there is jaw-dropping. It included such stars as Lady Gaga, Childish Gambino, Sara Bareilles, Jon Batiste, Norah Jones, Lewis Capaldi, Sting, Mumford & Sons, Elle King, Jessie J, Gary Clark, Jr., First Aid Kit, Big Thief, Margo Price, Shaggy, Marcus King and many others.  

“If I were to sum it up in one sentence, the clubs are hanging on, but the future, particularly the immediate future, is scary for a lot of them, particularly smaller clubs,” says Stephen Parker, the Executive Director of the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA). “Generally speaking, I have not talked to anybody that has a room 500-cap. or smaller that has not run into some issues in terms of increased costs; not a single one. It doesn’t mean that all of them are at risk of closure, but it does mean that there is a bigger issue here in terms of the ability of being able to book artists and compete with some larger players and being able to afford the increase in costs. Very few of them, if any, have said things are going really, really well. It is a struggle.”

That struggle, though, according to different club owners, is exacerbated by a number of factors: increased artist and labor costs, rents, interest rates and capital improvement costs along with lower alcohol sales, shifting spending habits and an upward market force hurting smaller venues.

“For all the talk about how great the market as a whole is, it was very different in clubs,” says Phoenix-based Stephen Chilton, who owns 325-capacity The Rebel Lounge and Psyko Steve Presents. “It feels like music fans are prioritizing A-list events at the expense of the developing and club artists far more than pre-COVID. The big issue is that A-List tickets have gotten so expensive so quickly that major acts are absorbing fans’ capacity to buy tickets. I am not competing with what show is across town tonight or tomorrow, my competition is whatever shows went on sale last week. If the average fan dropped $250 or $500 per ticket for an event next summer, it is really hard for that fan to spend $30 or $40 in a club before they even see another paycheck.”

While Chilton also mentions club-level artists’ increased expenses and larger touring teams, as NIVA’s Parker noted, not all clubs’ challenges are universal.

For Jordan Anderson, talent booker at the L.A.’s iconic Troubadour, 2024 was one of their strongest years. “I don’t know if we are the representation of everybody right now,” Anderson says. “We’re doing better than most, and maybe it’s just being in a major market in general,” she says, of the iconic West Hollywood club. “Overall, for the Troubadour, our show count is up. We did 289 shows this year and had 301 events total in the room, which is the most I think we’ve ever had, which is crazy. Part of that is there’s so many bands touring on our level. I was pretty much booked every day September through December. I think I had like 10 avails.” 

This doesn’t mean everything is coming up roses for the Troubadour, which infamously had a GoFundMe campaign in the spring of 2020 not long after COVID’s onset. That news shocked the industry and public helping galvanize NIVA and a national movement to support clubs. That eventually led to a bipartisan $16.25 billion Shuttered Venues Operating Grant program that Uncle Sam approved in 2021.

In the wake of that historic grant, which is now firmly in the rear view mirror, many clubs still face challenges. 

“Our livelihood is and has been the bar, and that’s not even close to what it was in 2019—even with having more shows,” Anderson says, noting changed consumer spending habits. “Which is interesting and it’s causing all of us to see this as the new norm and shifting how we think about our offers or deals and how we rethink revenue and new revenue streams. That is something we are actively doing.”

One partial solution may lie in promotion and marketing, though that’s another added expense. “Clubs having a solid marketing strategy in place is absolutely necessary,” says Carson Vickrey, Director of Events & Marketing at Marauder, a marketing company. “It’s an interesting time because if you know where your target audience is most likely to pay attention to you (email, social media, sms, etc.), your content doesn’t need to be revolutionary. Take inventory of the tools at your disposal. Look to your ticketing platforms, partners, or even booking software, which likely have marketing channels you can access that otherwise go untouched.”

Thankfully, with the notable exception of NYC’s Rockwood Music Hall, the U.S. market this year has yet to experience the volume of club closures the U.K. market underwent over the last few years, which some say could be a harbinger of things to come in the U.S. 

The devastation across the pond has resulted in a concerted response from the Music Venue Trust (MVT), an advocacy group whose mission is to “to protect, secure and improve grassroots music venues in the United Kingdom.”  

MVT says 125 grassroots venues in the UK permanently closed in 2023 and in 2024 saw one club close per week. As Pollstar reported in November, the MVT is working with the U.K. Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee on a plan to tax arena and stadium concert tickets to support the struggling grassroots music sector. 

A similar plan introduced in the U.S. would likely face industry and consumer pushback, especially with attendance for the 2024 Top 100 Worldwide Tours in 2024 down by 5.68% and stakeholders and fans feeling stretched economically. Also, the incoming Presidential administration’s predilection for deregulation and states legislatures filling the breaches suggest a federal solution is unlikely.

NIVA has commissioned an economic study of the independent venues to better quantify, understand and ameliorate the hardships its constituency face. The report will be released during the association’s annual meeting slated for June in Milwaukee. The goal is to better understand what works and what doesn’t for independent venues, develop best practices and protocols and strategize a way forward. 

“I’m very well aware of the data that’s coming out of the UK and my counterpart (MVT founder) Mark Davyd,” says NIVA’s Parker, who says his organization isn’t pushing for a levy but is finding some success working with city and state organizations supporting nightlife economies. 

“I’m at right now in Nashville where our members banded together, along with NIVA, and created a Tennessee Live Music Fund that was passed in the legislature last year and will be implemented and fundraised for this year,” Parker continues. “We’re hopeful that there will be state appropriations and outside corporate gifts that can help fund it. In Tennessee we have a direct parallel between the solution that the Music Venue Trust came up with and what we’re trying to do at the state level. We’re expecting other states to take up a similar model this year to replicate what Tennessee did last year.”

“I am optimistic about next year,” Rebel Lounge’s Steve Chilton says. “I think one of the problems this fall had was that fall 2023 was so strong that a lot of acts went too big this year – they pushed ticket prices and pushed room sizes, and this fall we felt a lot of those misses — and the promoter is the one feeling it. I think what we are seeing next year is a lot more reality in what acts are trying to do.”