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Everyone in the music industry remembers that chilly day in early March when Austin’s SXSW announced it was pulling the plug on this year’s festival. Reading the news from a distance, it felt surreal—a confirmation that an invisible menace we didn’t quite understand away was much closer than we thought, and it was going to effect all of us. Six months later, our cities are slowly opening back up, for better or for worse—but America’s live music industry is still on pause, with no clear indication of when we’ll be able to gather together in public again and feel the mysterious sensation of a bassline vibrating up through the floor.
For independent artists who rely on touring as their primary source of income, the pandemic has been financially devastating; for independent venues who host them when they come to town, it’s an extinction-level threat. Part of the problem is that nobody knows when it’ll be safe to open for business again, mostly because nobody knows when we’ll finally have access to a vaccine. But the live music industry runs on razor-thin margins to begin with, and even with no money coming through the door, the bills for mortgage, rent, utilities, and other operating expenses are still coming due.
If music is an important part of your life, the consequences are almost too upsetting to fathom: In a survey by the National Independent Venue Association, an organization uniting 2,800 entertainment establishments and promoters from across the U.S. in the fight to save America’s stages, some 90 percent of independent venues reported that they will be forced to shutter permanently in a few months without relief from the Federal government.
James Moody, owner of beloved Austin venue The Mohawk, was on the ground the day the city became ground zero for the pandemic in the music industry. On this week’s episode, he takes us behind the scenes to describe what the past six months have been like for the people who work tirelessly to bring music to our cities every night of the week—and what the pandemic means for the Austin scene and the communities that depend on it. We also talk with Audrey Fix Schaefer, director of communications at NIVA and Washington D.C.’s iconic 9:30 Club, about why the fate of live music in this country rests in part on an upcoming vote in Congress regarding two pieces of legislation, the RESTART Act and the Save Our Stages Act—and how the crisis has brought a notoriously competitive corner of the music industry together.
Read more about NIVA:
Under threat of closure, famed music venues unite to lobby Congress
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