Small Venues: Precarity, Vibrancy and Live Music

Throughout the history of popular music, the careers of many culturally significant artists and groups began on the small stages of local bars clubs, pubs, and discotheques. When the stories of The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and the New York punk hardcore and post punk scenes are told, iconic venues such as The Cavern, The Marquee and CBGB’s serve as the settings of their early chapters Small live music venues such as these are pivotal in the narratives and history of popular music. However, very few of them survive.

This book focusses on the role of small live music venues as incubators for emerging talent and social hubs for music scene participants. Such venues are grassroots spaces of cultural labor and production that often struggle with issues of financial precarity yet are fundamental to the live music ecology of a city, acting both as platforms for emergent performers and spaces of sociality for local music scenes.

Sam Whiting is a Lecturer in Creative Industries at the University of South Australia. His research is primarily focused on issues of capital, labour, and value as they relate to music scenes, the creative industries, and the cultural economy more broadly. Dr. Whiting’s published work explores issues of access, identity, gender, heritage, live music, cultural policy, and music scenes through the interdisciplinary lens of cultural studies, sociology, and popular music studies.