Uncertainly Sure: How A Global Pandemic Has Shattered the Rules of the Live Music Industry
We as a society have grown well aware of our lives following the events of March 2020. Once bustling areas of Los Angeles dissolved from their mundane routines, faltering into an era that seems chaptered and distantly bookmarked. A large crux of American first-world pleasantries and luxuries, parties, weddings, college life, societal comfort and recreation, have all suffered under the weight of nature’s compromise.
As people have utilized social media as an avenue of expressing outlets during the pandemic, so has a severely crippled live music industry. Battered by the necessary precautions of social distancing regulations, live venues, musicians, studio owners and concertgoers alike have chosen to make the best of a dire, unforeseen situation and adapt as effectively as they can.
And that, in effect, is the industry’s reaction to the toppling mass avalanche of live music staples, which, in its own right, have amassed a great source of income, exposure and cultural relevance for artists both shifting toward and wavering in the limelight of modern spectacle.
These festivals were no small loss; Coachella’s infamous presence on both Southern California and national celebrity culture had vanished overnight, along with losses well above $100 million. Despite that harbinger of loss, no canary could ever properly assess the danger of the music industry’s financial coal mine, which has shown a projected net loss of almost $6 billion by the end of just this year alone. The tradition of live music as a construct itself, threatened by lack of preparation and precedent, is at stake during this pandemic.
In order to weigh in on the severity of the Coronavirus pandemic’s damages to Los Angeles’s local music scene, I had to establish a starting point with which I could juxtapose the past and present. Essentially, I needed to gather information and understand how the industry worked prior to the lockdown era. To essentially calibrate my compass, I reached out to local artists and musicians who have been working through the pandemic to produce content and retain a sense of artistic presence despite circumstantial misfortunes.
“Getting a concert together is like throwing the greatest, most unbelievable house party with all of your friends,” says Shaunt Avakian, a local singer-songwriter who performs under the moniker of CardNoire. “But, you gotta understand, it’s incredibly expensive; and as more and more time has gone by, we’ve seen less of a reliance on the ‘local scene’ as we know it.”
Reaching out to Avakian, I could tell his story, while reflective of many up-and-coming artists, was unique in that he seemed prepared for these changes that are manifesting through this period of lockdown, something that he says seemed to be inevitably arriving to the forefront of the music industry. As to what these changes may entail, he first dove into why this concept of a “local scene” has grown increasingly obsolete in recent years.
“Well, in a place like LA, where everything is overly saturated with a million different artists all playing different shows every night, it’s hard to get people to come to your show in the first place,” says Avakian. “If you actually go from somewhere from the middle of nowhere to a place like Los Angeles to get recognized, you’re actually doing yourself a disservice, as you need to first gain recognition from your hometown to really get anywhere from then on out.”
This makes sense, given that Los Angeles and New York, having been the economic, most populous city centers of the United States, have also become massive entertainment havens, alongside cities like Las Vegas and Nashville, which carry the distinction of having the most concerts per capita on a daily basis than any other cities in America. Knowing this, what sets cities like Los Angeles apart, and why do artists struggle in an area like this?
The answer lies in the infamous underground nightclub circuit on the Sunset Strip, which is home to some of the most iconic and controversial venues in music history, whether it be The Roxy Theatre, whose Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa shows broke the artists into the American classic rock mainstream markets of the late ‘60s or the renowned Whisky A-Go Go, whose stature led to the rise of the LA Heavy Metal scene of the ‘80s with bands like KISS, Guns N’Roses and Van Halen playing regularly throughout the decade.
So, in an effort to grasp the legacy of these venues, I reached out to both in order to get a sense of how they’ve been affected independently of each other. After reaching out multiple times, I was notified by a gentleman operating the phone for the Whisky A Go-Go.
“What is there to look for? Everything’s been shut down since…March!” he told me, disappointedly. “If there was anyone to refer you to, I would, but nobody’s here anymore. Not here, not on other parts of Sunset (Boulevard). It’s a ghost town.”
After my conversation with the phone operator of the Whisky, whose name I unfortunately did not gather, I began to explore the statistics of unemployment within the context of the music industry, only to find that the primary root cause dealt less with numerical revenue and more with scheduling. Based on a bevy of investigative assessments made by NPR, refunds were not the crippling impediment for the industry, though they did not help. Rather, it was rooted in the influx of various profitable and notable artists vying for the real estate of tentatively scheduled arena date postponements. This, in essence, was something devastating to those large venues, and left local independent clubs and theatres with even lower odds of survivability.
With the infamous Sunset Strip on life support and effectively unreachable, the question remains: What are artists, whose revenues are largely shaped by physical album sales and merchandise, doing to adapt and combat the inevitably vast and damaging effects of the pandemic? To look towards the future, I went and followed up with Avakian, who had the unique experience of releasing music during the pandemic lockdown itself.
“I think the future of music, and where it’s heading, is what we’ve been seeing for the past few months.” Avakian remarked. “Look at all these artists playing in empty venues, live-streaming their concerts, releasing limited merch. It’s a change in the industry that I’ve seen as inevitable, but was… precipitated by the pandemic. It just accelerated it.”
Shaunt pointed me to a strong example of this live-streaming business model, a digital concert media startup called Moment House, whose team has consistently booked notable artists like YUNGBLUD, Danny Brown and Halsey, and have done so with a remarkably swift rise in appeal in popularity, which is largely due, in part to its limited business model.
In order to emulate the singular moment of a concert experience, the platform has hosted ticketed concerts that, upon completion, are deleted from the website forever, which may serve as a harbinger for the evolution of music performances, especially in the wake of other venues and websites adopting similar approaches as the status of live concerts reaches terminal illness, with one such notable example being the Whisky itself. Now as for the fate of small venues and theatres as a whole, there hangs an undeniable sense of foreboding for both concertgoers and the venue employees altogether, whose fates remain most uncertain as the pandemic persists through time.
Only time will truly reveal the proper extent of damage dealt to the local music scene of Hollywood and Los Angeles, and with no financial safety net tentatively built as a precaution, these venues absolutely run the ultimate risk of disappearing altogether. Lest it occur, we may have to hit a societal reset button and erase our conceptual understandings of live music altogether; something that, I hope, does not manifest into reality as an outcome. Only time will truly reveal.
