On Thursday, November 29, a group of music venue owners who’d just organized themselves as the Chicago Independent Venue League (CIVL) held a press conference to announce their opposition to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s fast-tracking of Lincoln Yards, a hugely ambitious mixed-use development along the North Branch of the Chicago River. The members of CIVL say the project won’t just make the city’s homegrown music economy less competitive—it also has the potential to sink it completely.
No matter what the city and Sterling Bay ultimately decide to do, Live Nation will remain a threat to Chicago’s independent music economy—no one expects the company to cease angling for advantage here. This is a big reason critics of Lincoln Yards have targeted Emanuel. Despite his publicly professed love for Wilco and his habit of stopping by the WXRT studios to promote his agenda, the mayor has a thin record when it comes to creating policies that strengthen the local music scene. Instead of taking a cue from cities such as London, Toronto, Seattle, and Austin, which have created government commissions or partnered with nonprofits to bake in policies that protect and promote their homegrown independent venues, he appears singularly focused on providing a seat at the table to just one player—Live Nation, which already dominates several major silos in the live entertainment industry. The company owns or operates 222 venues internationally, and presents concerts at many more; it represents more than 500 artists via its management division; and in 2010 it merged with the similarly powerful Ticketmaster. Since 2014 Live Nation has also owned a controlling interest in C3 Presents, the producer of Lollapalooza. Ari Emanuel, the mayor’s brother, is a Live Nation board member and a significant shareholder in the company.
These failures of transparency may give Chicagoans flashbacks to December 2008, when Mayor Richard M. Daley privatized the city’s parking meter system for $1.16 billion in a 75-year deal with Morgan Stanley. The move was almost universally unpopular, and matters only got worse when the public later learned that the meters had likely been undervalued by nearly $4 billion.
The Music Venue Trust has played an important role in giving venues a coherent voice. Now representing 500 venues across the UK, it not only intercedes with government officials to advocate for venues but also serves as an information resource for both sides. Because the organization acts independently of the venues themselves, it has an air of neutrality, says CEO and founder Mark Davyd. Its message is cultural as well as economic: Davyd frequently makes the point that current British pop stars such as Ed Sheeran learned their craft in small rooms. By the MVT’s reckoning, Sheeran played 366 venues in the UK with a capacity of fewer than 300 before he became a household name. Of those venues, only 216 remain open today.
One reason cities don’t often think of music venues as economically valuable is that they’re micro businesses—any one venue is too small to stand out from the pack, and they rarely work together as a bloc to force the city to think of their industry as a sector unto itself. “The majority of clubs operate under the radar,” says Amy Terrill, executive vice president of Music Canada, a nonprofit trade association formed in 1964. “That’s one of the first challenges that we have as an industry, and that’s why educating people is so important—because it’s just not obvious to someone on the outside.”
Having an advocate at City Hall who understands the music business is critical, says Terrill. “Politicians want to understand what you can do to provide good jobs and tax income, so you have to tell the story in those terms,” she says. “We were very fortunate, because we had a councillor who really cared about our issues and who became our internal champion, and we had two successive mayors who were really supportive. Once we framed it into the kind of language that would appeal to them, they got on board.”
