Chris Cobb at Exit/In, 2020
Cloud Control is a collaboration between the Nashville Scene and music news, events and promotions platform 2 L’s on a Cloud.
If you have lived in Nashville longer than 10 years, you’ve taken note of the many changes to the landscape of the live music scene. Independent music venues have been crucial to helping independent musicians, promoters and more develop and thrive, maintaining our reputation as Music City, USA. Some, like the Station Inn and Springwater, have been in place for decades, while others like The Cobra and The East Room are newer. They vary in size from intimate spaces like The 5 Spot and The End to capacious rooms like 3rd and Lindsley and The Wash at Eastside Bowl.
At the best of times, having a career as an independent artist and running an independent venue are both extremely difficult ventures. The span of months and months when the pandemic kept venues closed and made touring impossible put a spotlight on a variety of systemic issues that make these businesses so challenging. In Nashville, more and more musicians are speaking up about the strains of trying to stay afloat amid rising real estate prices and other issues; some have even left town. Meanwhile, some venues have closed. One of the most recent: The expansive Mercy Lounge complex shut down in May after the business owners and the property owner couldn’t agree on new lease terms; a new suite of venues called Cannery Hall will open on the site next year.
One of the many pressures in this business comes from major corporate players in international concert promotion like Live Nation and AEG. Over the past 10 to 12 years, they have increased their activity in and involvement with the small and midsize venues that are vital to music scenes everywhere. In March, a coalition of independent concert promoters and venue managers launched D Tour, a nationwide network that offers an indie alternative for artists trying to tour nationally. Chris Cobb, proprietor of historic Nashville venue Exit/In, owner of concert promotions company Bona Fide Live and a co-founder of D Tour, explains that the group’s biggest asset is its collective knowledge of local markets for concerts. If you want expert advice on how to book a show in a city you’ve never played before and have everyone involved walk away happy, who better to ask than the people who have been there for a long time?
“Through D Tour, we’ve created a decentralized yet formalized network that will put artists in better touring scenarios and create better fan experiences,” Cobb tells the Scene. “D Tour leverages the collective strength of the independents, allowing us to all do what we do respectively very well, but do it together. This is new and so needed as we reimagine what touring can and should look like — and navigate higher costs and an extremely disrupted consumer base.”
In the past, local venue operators and promoters focused on running their own businesses. The innovation of D Tour is connecting those hyperlocal stores of knowledge to one another, providing a resource for booking shows across the country. In mid-September, D Tour announced a significant expansion of its affiliate network. The group now boasts 30 concert promotion firms, festival producers and venues, including historic spaces like Minneapolis’ First Avenue and Washington, D.C.’s 9:30 Club.
Cobb has been deeply involved in Nashville music for more than two decades, learning some hard firsthand lessons about putting on shows in his early days. “I’m talking losing 90-plus percent of all the money I had to my name,” he says. “Ultimately though, as close as it got, the finances would always work out, and I’d experience an incredible live performance that would recharge me to keep going. Live music is in my soul.”
By 2004, he was working full time at Exit/In, and a few years later, he joined Josh Billue in running the operation; Cobb and Billue also co-founded Marathon Music Works. Following an amicable split with Billue in 2019, Cobb and his wife Telisha Cobb became Exit/In’s proprietors. As the pandemic took hold in 2020, Cobb became a charter member of the National Independent Venue Association, the national trade group that lobbied successfully for federal funds to save indie venues, and co-founded its local analog Music Venue Alliance Nashville. Last year, the property home to Exit/In was purchased by real estate developer AJ Capital Partners; though the firm has applied for some historic protections for the site, the future of the business remains unclear, and Exit/In is currently not booking shows after Thanksgiving.
“I honestly don’t really know where this city is heading, where Exit/In is heading, or where I’m heading at the moment,” Cobb says. “I’ve been fortunate to serve under and with incredible people and leaders through NIVA and have and continue to learn so much from that group of people. As unstable as this city often feels to me, there are great people here doing great work every day. I’ve tried to stay in alignment with my values and work towards a better Nashville for all of us who call it home.”
