LA’s small indie music venues are proud to provide the people of LA with independent artists who are yet to be discovered. They often support underground and niche genres people haven’t heard of before.
These small venues are essential places for up-and-coming bands to play for an audience. Without such locations, these bands often wouldn’t get discovered otherwise. Many of these independently-owned music venues are struggling to stay afloat against competition from corporate-owned venues.
The Mission of Independent Venues
The owner of Zebulon, Jef Soubiran, says his place “gives access to some people who never listen [to] some free jazz or some avant-garde or some experimental, some minimal, some punk rock,” he said. They can experience a kind of music they wouldn’t have heard anywhere else.
These small spaces give a stage to bands that are lesser-known, experimental, or that don’t conform to the norms of music. Non-mainstream musicians need a place to be staged, too, and indie venues are the place for them to get their foot in the industry’s door.
Challenges Faced By Indie Venues
As inflation rises and rent prices go up, independently owned venues are struggling to stay open. They are also in competition with major music conglomerates that own venues in the area. AEG runs El Rey, the Shrine, and The Roxy. Live Nation runs The Echo, the Hollywood Palladium, and The Wiltern.
It’s not easy to stay open when these larger venues have a significant source of income for marketing and constant traffic to even their smaller music hubs.
Financial Strategies Indie Venues Are Adopting
Independently-run music venues are taking up two major financial strategies to stay open. The first is a focus on ticket sales. The Lodge Room in Highland Park heavily relies on entry tickets at the door. “We’re not making that much money at the bar,” says the owner, Dalton Gerlach. “We have to survive on ticket sales, so it’s really just a volume thing for us,” he says. In the case of the Lodge Room, the number of people they can get to attend is more important than anything else.
The other strategy is a focus on bar sales, as seen by Gold Diggers in East Hollywood. “The door is a break-even for us. We’re making money off the bar. We want to sell drinks, and that’s what it comes down to,” says the owner, Dave Neupert. However, even with bar sales, the venues are struggling as younger generations are buying fewer drinks.
Hybrid and Nonprofit Venues
On the other hand, Permanent Records, an independent venue and record store combined, gives all of the ticket sales to the artist. The owner, Lance Barresi, says, “We only take revenue from our shows from the sales we do at the bar and whatever sales we do in the record store. Generally speaking, 60% of our revenue comes from bar sales, 40% from record sales.”
Places like Flow Sanctuary, which operate without a bar or any alcohol, rely solely on donations to stay afloat. “We’re hoping we can do fundraisers and other things that other nonprofits do,” says the owner, “Magick” Mike Milane.
Rewards Beyond Financial Gains
Although money is vital for staying open, the owners of indie venues find it inherently rewarding to run a place where new artists can get discovered. Jef Soubiran of Zebulon is exposing people to music they’ve never heard before and finds that very rewarding. “You need to have the love of what you do,” he adds.
Gerlach from the Lodge Room says, “The financial reward of it is not really quite there,” but instead, “the social and relational reward of it is there. . . Just being at shows and the community, and there’s so many intangible things around what I get to do that [are] really special.”
Losing indie venues in LA would be losing a piece of the heart of music. Without experimenters and avant-garde artists, LA music risks becoming too homogenous and lackluster. “It’s nice to have [a] different flavor,” says Soubiran.
Preserving these diverse scenes is what maintains LA’s vibrant and eclectic music culture.
