NIVA Exec. Dir. Stephen Parker On 2025 Conference, State Of Live Report: ‘We Finally Have The Data To Match The Heart’

The hardships the majority of independent venues are facing is very real, as detailed in NIVA’s inaugural State of Live report, but as this week’s conference demonstrated, so is the community, optimism and collaborative spirit.

“Independent doesn’t need to mean isolated. We need each other. People being truthful about where we’re at and collaborating is essential to all of our futures,” Tom DeGeorge, owner of The Crowbar in Tampa, Florida, COO of D Tour and Current SE NIVA President, shared during the panel “One Night Live: A New Model To Support Developing Talent” on Tuesday.  

The fourth annual conference took place June 22-25 with panels and keynote Q&As held at multiple independent venues in downtown Milwaukee including Miller High Life Theatre and Turner Hall Ballroom. Nearly 1,400 folks were in attendance.

The event kicked off on Sunday with an opening party at the beautiful, historic Pabst Theater featuring a keynote conversation with Jim James and journalist Marc Hogan in which the My Morning Jacket frontman candidly shared about his mental health struggles and reminded us that it’s all about the healing power of live music. 

The next day, Hannibal Buress shared his perspective as both a comedian and independent venue owner who opened the 300-cap Isola Brooklyn in March. He was interviewed by NIVA Executive Director Stephen Parker, who noted that NIVA invited Buress to be a keynote speaker after seeing his name pop up as one of the conference attendees. The conversation was confirmed just two days before Buress took the stage.

Other keynote speakers during the 2025 conference included producer/songwriter Jimmy Jam, Ali Rivera, head of Live Music & Artist Partnerships at YouTube, and High Road Touring founder Frank Riley. During the conversation with Michael Dorf, Founder and CEO of City Winery, Riley was presented with the inaugural NIVA Independent Visionary Award.

On Monday, the NIVA Brew City Bash presented by Fever took place at The Rave / Eagles Ballroom, featuring performances by Elizabeth Moen, 2025 Live List Artist, and Milwaukee’s own Ladybird.

On Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, attendees could choose their “own Milwaukee adventure” as NIVA member venues across the city hosted shows, parties and hangouts. 

Shout out to Milwaukee’s own Social Cig for showing off its Midwest indie skate rock and putting on a super fun show as the headliners of the NIVA MKE Indie Showcase at Falcon Bowl on Tuesday.

Another stand-out performer was pop/rock/Americana singer/songwriter CeCe who took part in Ali Rivera’s keynote conversation on Wednesday (full disclosure, the panel was moderated by this writer) and then headlined X-Ray Arcade in the suburb of Cudahy, wowing the crowd with her vocals and hilarious stage banter. The show was presented by NIVA IDEA Committee, Etix and YouTube Music Foundry.

As previously reported, one of the major moments of the conference was the Opening Session on Monday in which Parker unveiled the results of its first-ever comprehensive national economic impact study, The State of Live. Key statistics include that 64% of independent stages operated without profitability in 2024, and yet the sector is also playing a significant role in the economy with indie live venues, festivals and promoters contributing $86.2 billion directly to the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) last year alone – more than the U.S. beer, gaming and airline industries.

Pollstar caught up with Parker, who was recently named to our Impact 50 list, to learn more. 

Pollstar: What’s been the biggest moment for you so far, seeing the conference come together and celebrating NIVA’s fifth anniversary?

Stephen Parker: This morning we did a First Timers Session for the first time at our conference and seeing more than 120 people there – that was at 9:30 this morning. There were probably more first timers, we just did it so early – and just seeing all the new faces. Most of the folks there are members and seeing people that are starting to interact with NIVA more since they’ve been around, that’s huge. Seeing all the new members come around because they heard about the conference. It’s seeing the movement expand. We represent all independent entities – all independent promoters, all independent festivals. We don’t care if you’re a member or not. But it’s wonderful to see more people coming into the fold.

That echoes what you said earlier today during NIVA’s Opening Session – that you’re looking forward, the Save Our Stages legislation and this study are just the first steps. The community spirit here is so real, everyone I’ve met has been so kind.

Incredible. You’re in your bunker. You’re a small business, you’re a nonprofit, you’re doing hard work every day to make sure that you keep your doors open, to make sure that you continue living your dream. Some of our members are personally leveraged – if their businesses go down, then their personal finances may be impacted in some way. And so just seeing people being able to come to this conference and being able to see people facing the same struggles but also seeing the same opportunities as them, it’s huge. And also the fact that they can share best practices between each other and talk about what’s going well, what’s not going well, and learn from each other is such a tremendous opportunity. The community that one, NIVA creates and two, that this conference creates is really, really important for our future. 

I love what you said about “same struggles, but same opportunities too.” The report that you put out today [June 23], things are dire for a lot of people. Two-thirds of venues were not profitable in 2024 – is that right?

Two-thirds of venues were not profitable. They either had no profit or they took a loss last year.

When you first hear that stat, you think, oh these venues aren’t doing well, maybe fans aren’t showing up to the shows. But then when you go through the other stats in the report, what these venues are doing for the communities, for the local economies, they are still a success. Obviously these venues need help and we need changes with legislation, but they’re still doing so much good for their communities.

I think, go back to what Hannibal said [in his NIVA keynote Q&A on Monday]. I asked him what are you most excited about for your club, what’s next? And he said getting out of debt. You have a star who decided to open a venue and has a lot of things available to him to be able to start this venue and even with that, the struggle is still real. Because he’s independent, because he doesn’t have the scale, because there’s no real competition in live entertainment now. Because it is so hard from a small business perspective to survive, especially with inflation, especially with costs really rising. The fact that Hannibal Buress is facing the same struggles that everybody else [at the conference] shows how desperate and dire the situation is. But this is not a failing sector. As I said in my remarks, this is not a sign of a dying sector. The promise of economic opportunity unveiled in this report is way more exciting than the struggles we have right now. We will get through them.

Do you feel overall hopeful then?

If you look at the data in the report, even from the venues that didn’t have profitability, they were all optimistic about the future. They were all optimistic that things would get better this year. Which was probably the most surprising thing we saw.

Do you think if you’re an indie, you have to be optimistic? That people with that characteristic are drawn to this business?

I don’t know. If you’re a heavy metal club, I don’t know if optimism is the first thing that comes to mind. 

Yeah, sunshine and rainbows. (laughs)

But, yes. I think you have to believe. I was talking to Gary Witt [the CEO and Co-Owner at The Pabst Theater Group, who was just named to NIVA’s Board of Directors], who’s our host here in Milwaukee. He said from the moment he heard about Save Our Stages, he never stopped believing.

That’s the type of optimism you have to have, even if it seems impossible, even if it seems uphill. You have to have that optimism if you’re going to be able to break through.

I think you can relate that to what’s going on in your country right now, the resistance to some of the U.S. administration’s policies. Laura Wilson, who was one of the speakers at the Opening Session, talked about the importance, even more so now, of upholding principles like diversity and inclusion in the live music industry. I love that that was brought up today. So many corporations have given up on their DEI policies.

The reason that independent venues can differentiate ourselves is the diversity of what we can put on our stage. And having not only diverse programming on stages but being able to do the marketing that they need to to get those diverse audiences out there and making sure the venues are accessible. It is hard work but it’s work that we have to do and aspire to. We have so far to go – I think every sector has far to go – but we especially have far to go and if we abandon a commitment to diversity, to accessibility, equity, inclusion, we’re not doing the right thing by our members. It will make them stronger economically and it will make them stronger culturally.

That’s a great way to look at it. It’s a win-win. It’s the right moral thing to do, but it’s better for business too. 

Exactly. It is the right thing to do. You have to put on the blockers and continue to focus on what we’ve always thought was right, which is diverse stages, diverse audiences, accessible venues. That’s what we have to do.

Any other big takeaways you wanted to mention from the State of Live?

I think just the fact that our contribution to gross domestic product is larger than the beer industry, larger than the airline industry and the video-game industry.

That’s impressive.

It’s pretty incredible and it was surprising. Not going to lie. It was very surprising. And from our perspective, the fact that these were conservative numbers. … And even with that, the fact that we serve 183.7 million fans a year and we have 153,000 events. There are astronomical numbers but they’re done 20 employees at a time. I love it.

That’s pretty neat when you think about the large scale of these big numbers versus the small scale of the average number of employees at each venue. 

We started off talking about the hard truths of the venues that weren’t profitable but I came away from this gathering and this report joyous about our future. But we have to fight in order to maintain that joy.

So what’s the next step? 

The next step is telling our story and getting this into the hands of lawmakers. We met with all of our [NIVA] state [chapter] leaders and I gave them a copy of the report. They asked what they could do and I said, as soon as this comes out, email this to every state legislator and every city council member, every county executive that you know. We will be sharing this with policy makers; we will be sharing this with the public; we will be using this to tell our story with convention and visitor bureaus – and making sure they’re investing in us and working with us to get heads in beds, which is very important to them because we help get people into cities and communities across the country. But I also think the most exciting thing is that in the fall, we will have 50 state reports that will be exactly like the national report – they will have all the stats that we saw today for each state. We’re also going to work with Live Music Society to put together a report just for small venues under 300 cap to look at their economic value to communities across the country.

And that organization helped put together the State of Live report.

They gave us critical resources to be able to afford to put together what was a significant undertaking in terms of data collection and making sure we had the right economists at the table.

I know it can be hard for some venues to give up that data.

It was. We worked with a better part of 1,000 different venues, promoters and festivals and performing arts centers, which was tremendous.

It’s neat that independent venues are not only providing a sense of community for local music scenes, but then also bringing in out of town visitors for shows, resulting in money spent on hotels, restaurants, etc. 

As I said, we finally have the data to match the heart. I mean, having that now as an additional tool, it’s actual raw numbers that show our value is so important for us moving forward. And this data will live on for months and years. There are so many different stats that were uncovered, Kendall [Gilvar] on my team who led this for us and I were joking that if we had time, we could have literally rolled out a state every week for like three months and we would have had enough narrative for each state –  But we decided to release it all in one bang. We really want to dive into what each number means and we’ll be doing that for a while.

Anything you wanted to add at all?

Last night was pretty special. One of my favorite nights at NIVA ever. Even before I was the executive director, I came to stuff. I was just so floored by “the feels.” Right? The vibe.

The Q&A with Jim James – at one point I was thinking I gotta get outta here, I’m going to cry. I think he just captured it so well, how music is so healing. The atmosphere in the room was so uplifting. That was an amazing conversation.

It was amazing. Just kind of seeing the reaction in the room. Our people are loud. They don’t like to listen. (laughs) Just hearing them in silence in that room, it was very different. Our job is to make a special experience for people. We pay attention to the reactions. We’re all standing in the back of the room or the front of the room trying to see the reaction on people’s faces. Just last night seeing how fulfilled people were leaving was pretty special.

Absolutely. It was so inspiring. And really sums up why everyone here does what they do – the magic of live music.

It’s not the profit margin – we know that now! (laughs)

Kudos to the NIVA team for the Opening Party. And the keynote conversation with Hannibal was so hilarious and insightful.

He carried it. I didn’t have to do that much at all. He was great. I called him on Saturday and asked “Who do you want to do this?” And he was like, “What about you?” I [said] “I’m not funny!” … What an honor to be on the stage with him and be able to converse. That was not on my bingo card. Not only for this conference but this job. But I’ll take it.

That’s awesome. I remember seeing him on “Broad City.” He’s so funny.

Oh yeah, that’s what our team said. Like, “Oh my God! Hannibal!” A lot of excitement on our team. We’re all just fans.

READ MORE:
NIVA’s State of Live Survey Finds Independent Venues Generated $153.1B In Total Economic Output Across U.S. In 2024, 64% Stages Struggling With Unprofitability

Audrey Fix Schaefer Named NIVA Board President

NIVA 2026 Conference To Take Place In Minneapolis