Club Outlook Still Grim Despite Overcoming Hurricane (Tampa Market Focus)

Tampa’s club scene has taken some direct hits from mother nature, rampant development and competition from non-traditional music outlets. Margins are thinner, the pool of available talent is shrinking while small venues struggle to stay afloat along Tampa Bay.
Last year, hurricane Milton made landfall near the city as a Category 3 storm on Oct. 9, less than two weeks after Hurricane Helene made landfall about 200 miles to the north. Milton spawned more than 100 tornados across the state and shredded the roof of Tropicana Field, home of the MLB Tampa Bay Rays, and damaged the 20,000-capacity MidFlorida Credit Union Amphitheatre.

But even venues that didn’t sustain damage from the strongest late-season storm on record suffered.
A member of the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA), Tom DeGeorge, owner of 300-cap Crowbar in Tampa’s historic Ybor City, said his venue wasn’t damaged, but he still lost $100,000 in revenue due to canceled shows including a three-day festival. With a tight window to replace shows further complicated by soft ticket sales while the community rebounds, most dates go unfilled.

“When it’s gone, it’s gone and there is no way to get it back,” said DeGeorge, southeast president at NIVA, covering Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas as well as chair of NIVA’s industry affairs committee. “It impacts your business whether your business has been damaged or not.”

With repair costs and lost revenue, almost half – 43 percent – of small businesses never reopen after a major disaster and another 29 percent go out of business within two years according to FEMA.
NIVA’s foundation has been on the frontline fielding applications for Emergency Relief Funds from venues impacted by the storms.

“We had the most inquiries we’ve ever had after Helen and Milton,” said DeGeorge, who moved to Tampa in 2001 from Atlanta. “There were so many clubs impacted…The problem with our industry is that the margins are so tight. If you get hit with a disaster like that, you can’t wait for [insurance] money. By the time you get it you could be out of business.”

The recovery period has been challenging.

“I can tell you, personally, I didn’t know if I was going to make it to the spring season,” explained DeGeorge. “I had to definitely get very lean. I had to figure out where I could move money around. I had to figure out how to get more money through either loans or lines of credit, and somehow I was able to stretch out from those hurricanes to today, which is pretty much the start of my full calendar…The struggle is real to get to this point.”

Small-cap clubs were already facing challenges in the market after COVID. Of the four clubs in Ybor City going into 2020, only Crowbar remains.

“The rooms that are 500 and under cap, like mine, I would say those are going away,” offered DeGeorge. “Those are not doing well. But I also think rooms at the up to 1,500 level are also feeling it significantly. It is very hard to survive in the market right now.”

The reasons are common across the country, but no less troubling for the Tampa venues who are providing the grassroots infrastructure for artists to launch careers.

“You have artists that want to tour, but they can’t get from market to market as well as they used to, because the margins are so thin,” said DeGeorge. “Unless we reverse it, it’s going to have a dramatic effect in the years to come, not only on the larger level, but in those communities, in those markets around the country.”

Florida attracts tourists and snowbirds, but many tours bypass the state due to routing in and out around severe weather seasons. Up and coming artists often perform as part of a major festival lineup, which limits any other appearances in the market.

“You’ve got however many big headliners they have, but then you also have every other artist under the sun that now has non-compete clauses in their contract that maybe would have done the tour circuit,” explained DeGeorge.

Some of the challenges are homegrown including non-traditional outlets such as boutique hotels and breweries that deplete the number of available local bands and developers who squeeze out venues on the fringe by driving up real estate prices, imposing rent increases and subsequent changes to zoning and other ordinances.

DeGeorge opened Crowbar in 2006 with $50,000. Today, he says it would take 20 times the capital to open a club in Tampa. He plans on calling it quits in 2026.

“You know, three years ago, we were just happy to get open again,” he offered. “We didn’t realize once we did that, it’s like out of the fire and into the frying pan.”