Liz Tallent was one of many venue owners convened on a Zoom call as the Save Our Stages Act was officially signed into law on Dec. 27 as part of the $900 billion second federal COVID stimulus package.
“We were on the call until at least one in the morning watching live, and there were tears,” said Tallent, owner of the Orange Peel in Asheville, N.C. “We were all really relieved, really optimistic, but there are still so many questions about how this will all work.”
Save Our Stages, commonly referred to as the SOS Act, guarantees up to $16.25 billion in federal stimulus to independent concert venues across the country, the industry that’s arguably been hit the hardest by the coronavirus pandemic. When the SOS Act was finally signed into law, it was renamed the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG).
The bill’s passing promised much-needed relief, but it’s taken two and a half months for the SBA to announce when venue owners will be able start applying for funding. On Friday, March 19, the SBA announced that it will begin accepting SVOG applications on April 8. This announcement came just three days after the Senate confirmed Isabella Casillas Guzman as the SBA’s new administrator.
“The SBA has worked diligently to build the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program from the ground up to assist and address the diverse eligibility requirements of each type of applicant,” Guzman said in a statement.
Information about the SVOG program has trickled out slowly: In late February, the SBA released a 20-page document with a host of answers to frequently asked questions from potential recipients of the act’s funding. Today, the SBA announced it will host an informational webinar for potential applicants on March 30, and in a release instructed venue operators to register in the federal government’s System for Award Management (SAM.gov) in advance of April 8.
“It’s been bleak. We’ve essentially been in hibernation for the last 10, 11 months,” said Evan Johnson, a talent booker at Neumos, a venue in Seattle’s downtown Capitol Hill district. “But Save Our Stages was tailor made for us, so there’s a ton of hope, a ton of optimism.”
The funding is earmarked to cover everything from six months of payroll to operational costs such as rent, utilities, and maintenance. To apply, applicants must have lost at least 25% of their annual revenue.
When applications open, venues that lost more than 90% of their annual revenue will be able to apply within the first two weeks. Other venues with varying degrees of revenue loss will be able to apply over the next several weeks.
Securing the funding took nearly 10 months of dedicated work, led by the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA), formed in April 2020—including hundreds of thousands of hours of organizing and over 2 million letters sent to all 535 members of Congress. Many venue owners say the SOS Act’s passing signaled an end to the months of constant fear that their venues would never recover from pandemic losses.
Waiting is nothing new for venue owners. The SOS Act—first introduced to Congress in July—sat for almost six months before it was passed in December. And now, as bills continue to pile up, it’s unclear how long after the application window opens it will take the government to distribute funds to qualifying recipients. Fortune has reached out to the SBA for comment and will update this story if it receives a response.
For already shuttered venues, SOS’s passing was too late. While it’s unclear just how many independent venues have closed in the past year, the number is growing as time goes on and owners are still fumbling for cash.
But for those still on life support, more good news came last week. In the most recent stimulus package, signed by President Biden on March 11, an amendment to the SOS Act allows eligible venues to apply for Paycheck Protection Plan (PPP) grants while they wait for the SBA to release SVOG funding. The previous iteration of the bill forbade venues from applying for both PPP and SVOG funding.
The new amendment also added $1.25 billion to the SVOG fund (bringing the total to $16.25 billion) and earmarked $840,000 for SBA staff to facilitate COVID-related programs, according to a NIVA press release.
“This change can save countless venues from bankruptcy, as the immediate PPP2 money will help them hold on until the SVOG funds flow,” said Dayna Frank, NIVA board president and CEO of First Avenue Productions in Minneapolis in the release.
Barely holding on
Jesse Malin owns five live music venues in Lower Manhattan, all but two of which have remained closed since lockdowns began last March. Malin says SOS’s passing was a good sign, but his venues are still “barely holding on.”
“The federal government finally acknowledged us, acknowledged the music,” Malin said. “But we still don’t have any money…Landlords can only do so much. They’re flipping out like the rest of us.”
Likewise, Tallent’s Asheville venue, the Orange Peel, one of the largest independently owned venues in western North Carolina, has been completely shuttered since March 11, 2020.
“Our coined expression is that we were among the first to close, but we will be the absolute last to reopen,” said Robert Gomez, owner of Subterranean, an independent venue in Chicago and a key member of NIVA.
NIVA was founded in early April as owners began to realize the toll the pandemic would have on the live music industry. In June 2020, NIVA conducted a survey of nearly 2,000 independent venue owners, promoters, and bookers on the status of their businesses. Ninety percent of them said that without targeted government funding, they would have no choice but to close their doors for good.
“I think live music was always kind of deemed to be recession proof, but this has shown that being recession proof does not mean being pandemic proof,” said Stephanie Boriskin, a talent buyer at the Bowery Electric in Manhattan, one of Malin’s clubs. “It’s been shocking to see something that everyone thought was too big to fail, in a good way, just sort of dissolving in front of them.”
And while NIVA has operated largely at the national level, many cities and states are facilitating their own aid programs. The SOS Act is the largest of a patchwork of relief efforts across state and local levels dedicated to saving independent venues.
Last month, the San Francisco city council passed the San Francisco Music and Entertainment Recovery Fund, setting aside $1.5 million for the city’s small venues. In Nashville, the city’s Metro Council allocated $2 million in CARES Act funding for music venues back in September.
At the state level, a bill was recently introduced in the Indiana Statehouse that, if passed, would allow eligible venues to receive grants of up to 20% of their 2019 revenue, on top of the funding provided by the federal government through the SVOG program.
But the $16.25 billion set aside at the federal level is by far the largest and most targeted stimulus venue owners across the country will receive, and the clock is ticking.
Preserving the “lifeblood” of America’s cities
For venue owners across the country, saving their venues is about more than just their own personal business. It’s about preserving the cultural identity of their cities.
“I consider musicians to be essential workers,” Malin said. “Mental health and sanity comes from having happiness and entertainment and connecting with others, and that happens in our clubs. Music serves as a lifeblood for this city, and people come here for it.”
And live music is a key economic driver throughout the country. Before the pandemic, the performing arts industry accounted for 4.5% of the country’s GDP, according to a January analysis from FEMA and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Live music is also integral to city economies. Concert patrons eat at nearby restaurants, drink at nearby bars, park in nearby lots, and more. A 2019 study from the Chicago Loop Alliance found that for every dollar spent on arts in the city, another $12 goes to the local economy.
Elected officials have recognized the role live music plays, said Audrey Fix Schaefer, communications director for NIVA. “I think a lot of them stopped and realized, ‘Oh, wait, this does affect my constituents and my neighborhood,’” she said. “They understood that if they let us go under, so much of the economic renewal potential goes away, too.”
Fix Schaefer said that’s where Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) came in. The two cosponsored the SOS Act in July, making it a bipartisan effort and propelling the bill onto the floor of Congress.
“We had absolutely no right to hope that we could be successful,” Fix Schaefer said. “But we also knew that we would not stop until we were.”
Moving forward together
Venue owners across the board say that while the past year has been the most stressful of their careers, the pandemic galvanized an industry that historically has been fiercely independent.
“Independent venue operators have never come together on anything. They own their own businesses, they make their own decisions, and they’ve always been able to figure it out, even in the most challenging times,” Fix Schaefer said. “But we shared a fear for our survival. There’s no amount of business acumen or creativity that can help you climb out of this crisis.”
To date, NIVA represents over 3,000 independent music venues across all 50 states and Washington, D.C. And in various cities, smaller organizations have been created following NIVA’s success to unite venues in their common goal of survival.
The Chicago Independent Venue League (CIVL) was created in 2018 when there were fears that Live Nation would open five new venues in the city’s Lincoln Yards, posing a direct threat to the independent venues operating nearby. When the pandemic happened, CIVL took on new life, providing a blueprint for NIVA to replicate the Chicago organization at a national scale.
“It was absolutely critical having CIVL in place when the pandemic struck,” Gomez said. “It was crucial for our city’s venues to collectively deal with this unbelievable, unanticipated issue, and it allowed us to be able to help launch into the national level [through NIVA].”
In Washington State, Keep Music Live Washington, a nonprofit composed of Washington venue owners, musicians, and fans, was created early on in the pandemic. The organization launched a billboard campaign to raise public awareness of the danger clubs were facing.
At Seattle’s Neumos, a Notice of Proposed Land Use Action sign was placed on the venue’s doors in October 2020, suggesting that without funding, Neumos would go out of business for good and likely be replaced. Other venues in Seattle donned “Missing: Live Music” signs, which owners say was a “call to action” for the state’s public about the daunting future the state’s venues face.
Since then, NIVA has looked to replicate Washington’s billboard campaign on the national level. On March 13, NIVA launched the “One Year Dark” marquee campaign, in which independent venues across the country and on social media displayed messages marking a full calendar year without live music.
Washington and Chicago aren’t alone. In New York, the New York Independent Venue Association (NYIVA) launched in August. For the past several months, NYIVA has been spotlighting different struggling New York venues through its YouTube channel.
Brooklyn’s Our Wicked Lady, coowned by Keith Hamilton and Zach Glass, is one of those venues. Hamilton says if there’s any good that’s come out of this past year, it’s a new sense of camaraderie among venue owners he once viewed as Our Wicked Lady’s competition.
“Before, all these businesses were kind of on their own island,” Hamilton said. “We weren’t really communicating with each other very much, but now we’re on a couple different sort of email chains with other local Brooklyn businesses, and we’re communicating all the time, sharing ideas.”
In January, along with 12 other local bars and venues, Our Wicked Lady published a calendar featuring bartenders across Brooklyn, titled Bushwick Bar Babes of 2021. Money from the calendar was distributed to the participating bars to help with rent and bills.
“It’s a drop in the bucket,” Hamilton said. “But anything helps.”
With a third vaccine approved and guaranteed funding inching closer, owners are hopeful a return to normal is on the horizon. When live music can safely return, owners are confident fans will return, too, and that music will live on at the small venues that helped so many artists get their start.
“These are the laboratories. From Lady Gaga to Madonna to the Ramones, these are the places where artists build up their chops, develop fans, and truly get started,” Malin said. “We need this.”
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