Over the past 15 or so years, Nashville’s ecosystem of music venues has provided a variety of robust paths for an artist to hone their skills and build up their fan base. After you sold out a crowd of 150 to 300 a time or two at Springwater, The End, The Basement or The 5 Spot (or a little later, The High Watt or The East Room), the folks at venues with capacities of 500 to 800 — like Exit/In or 3rd and Lindsley — might start taking a chance on booking you. Later, you’d move up to 1,000-plus rooms like Marathon Music Works or Cannery Ballroom. The heavy-psych band All Them Witches, who I first saw at The High Watt in 2012, played most of those venues on its way to becoming an international touring sensation. Among other achievements, the band sold out the Ryman — which has space for exactly 2,362 fans — on Halloween 2021.
But as this interminable and infernal pandemic continues, those paths are becoming less clear and secure, and potentially less plentiful. The continuing upward trend in Nashville real estate prices has precipitated some nerve-wracking consequences for independent venues. The property home to Exit/In sold; proprietors Chris and Telisha Cobb continue their fundraising campaign to bolster a potential bid to buy out new owners AJ Capital Partners. Meanwhile, the operators of the three-venue complex on Cannery Row — which consists of The High Watt, Mercy Lounge and Cannery Ballroom — announced that they aren’t signing a new lease with their new landlord and will be closing up shop in May, with hopes of reopening elsewhere.
These potential shifts leave more room for major players like international ticketing and touring giant Live Nation to influence our club scene of small and midsize venues. The Beverly Hills-based company had established some inroads by the end of 2019 through various partnerships. Though they went into the same uncomfortable limbo as the rest of the live-music economy in March 2020, Live Nation co-owns the new 1,200-capacity Brooklyn Bowl and has an exclusive booking contract with 500-cap The Basement East.
Exit/In’s Chris Cobb also heads an independent concert promotions firm called Bonafide Live and is president of the 15-member indie-club trade group Music Venue Alliance Nashville. Reached by email, he points out that venues like his have to consider things a bit differently than major players.
“Smaller local venues are different from an arena, right?” Cobb says. “Not just in size, but in the way you feel about them, which is indicative of their role. They are an active member of your community, reflecting important aspects of life in your town and scene. Who performs on those stages must be decided locally, with the wants and needs of the community top of mind. This is required to nurture the young artists and musicians who will be the next arena-sized acts, the next artists to perform at the Super Bowl. … Some dude in Dallas starts deciding who’s playing at Exit/In, and guess what: The next great band to come out of East Nashville has one less chance to make it. It’s fragile — our music can’t afford one less chance, or worse yet, two to three less chances, which is what’s likely to happen here in Music City U.S.A. in the next 18 months.”
Fully independent midsize venues that don’t appear to be undergoing big changes anytime soon have many fine qualities, but there are caveats. Eastside Bowl is out in Madison, far from the center of town, and 3rd and Lindsley’s sit-down setup isn’t ideal for all kinds of shows. Likewise, the aforementioned Brooklyn Bowl and The Basement East are genuinely great venues that aren’t unfriendly to Nashville-residing artists. Still, it’s more likely that the locals you’ll see at either spot are making a stop at home during a national tour.
None of the possible changes on the venue landscape are imminent, but depending on what happens in the year to come, the picture may be very different. One thing that for sure hasn’t changed in the past two years: It would be a shame to lose the cultural and economic engine that we’ve built, which is part of why people come to visit and move here in the first place.
