INDIE PERFORMERS, VENUE STAFFS SEE LIVELIHOODS HURT
Small Colorado bands, indie musicians are seeing their livelihoods devastated
Earlier this month, when coronavirus was still a distant threat in the mind of most, Denver rock band Tennis thought it might have to postpone its upcoming shows in Seattle and San Francisco, two cities affected earliest in the United States.
Then, last week, Tennis announced the postponement of the remaining 27 dates of its tour — a move that will cost the band tens of thousands of dollars in lost marketing and revenue.
That whiplash — months of wages gone in days — has rocked the entertainment industry. The highly transmissible coronavirus has uniquely affected the country’s music industry, and Denver is no exception.
In an effort to stem the spread of the coronavirus, the CDC recom
mended a measure called social distancing, a form of self-quarantine that recommends avoiding large gatherings. From national acts like Tennis down to local bands playing bars down the street, those measures have compelled bands to cancel practices, concerts and entire tours in the interest of public safety.
Still, last week, some artists were mulling over whether to try to salvage the few immediate shows they had scheduled. But over the weekend, city and state government recommendations against public gatherings — first limiting groups to 250 and then to 50 — forced their hand. Then, on Monday, the White House suggested dropping that number to just 10.
For full-time musicians like the members of Tennis, who rely on touring to pay the bills, the toll is inestimable.
Nathaniel Rateliff called off tour dates through the end of March; regional artists like Kiltro, Down Time and Rob Drabkin watched as entire hardfought tours fell apart before their eyes.
“Poof. Just like that nine gigs canceled on me in one day,” Drabkin wrote. “I just started looking into a disaster relief small business loans.”
“This is devastating,” Alaina Moore, Tennis’ frontwoman, wrote in an email last week. “About 80% of our income comes from touring, and we aren’t the only ones relying on it. Our bandmates and crew members (not to mention venue staff, bartenders, sound engineers!!!) depend on this income.”
Professional musicians tend to live on thin margins already, which means that missing even one show puts a notable ding in the bottom line. For Moore and her husband, who self-released their new album “Swimmer” last month, it’s even more precarious.
“We have no label support, nothing to fall back on,” Moore said. “Everything depended on this tour.”
Bands carefully plot their tours around album releases, spending thousands on marketing to ensure they sell as many tickets as possible. These performances — and the merchandise sold there — are bands’ primary source of income. Without a tour, an album release can feel like a wasted opportunity at best, and at worst a sunk cost.
Anna Morsett, frontwoman of The Still Tide, also saw a canceled string of tour dates and festival appearances scheduled around a recent album release. Like many others, she spent Thursday assessing the damage with her band.
“Not having shows was one thing, but the awareness that we couldn’t replace them with other shows was another,” she wrote in an email. “With the news of school closures, we jokingly wondered aloud today if we should become child care providers both as a means to survive but also to help. I mean, who doesn’t love a singing/guitarplaying babysitter?! We all laughed at first but then privately considered it.”
Smaller local bands may seem like they have less to lose. But to a burgeoning band, less means more. Fort Collins’ Slow Caves spent six months and thousands of dollars planning an eight-date tour of the West Coast. After seeing a state of emergency declared in Seattle and Los Angeles, two of their stops, they called the tour off last Friday.
“We put countless hours into it that’s gone down the drain, and we still paid our booking agent, even though he didn’t ask us to,” said bassist David Dugan, 27. “We’ve been looking forward to
for the past six months. Health is our number one priority, but it will have an impact on our income.”
That goes double for Dugan, who’s the general manager at East Colfax’s 200-person rock club Lost Lake Lounge. On Tuesday, five days after speaking to Dugan, Lost Lake announced it’d shutter its doors for eight weeks.
Other acts had already set out on tour before the shutdowns started in earnest. That was the case for the Denver-via-Ecuador pop singer Neoma, who had based her entire tour around two festivals affected by the virus: Boise, Idaho’s Treefort, which was postponed until September, and the massive South By Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas.
The band has already lost a few thousand dollars in non-refundable accommodations — a hard hit for the “100% independent and self-funded” band, according to Kleber Pauta, the band’s manager.
But for an artist like Neoma, who moved to the United States two years ago, the loss of exposure hurts nearly as much as the financial one. “Music careers are boosted and kickstarted at SXSW,” Pauta said. “It will be next to impossible to replicate that exposure anywhere else.”
Last Thursday, AEG Live and Live Nation announced they would be canceling or postponing all of their large events through the end of April.
Small clubs — a designation for rooms at about 200 capacity in Denver — experienced a steady trickle of cancellations last week before shutting abruptly following the city’s recommendation.
Speaking last Friday, Hiit
Dive owner Matt Clark braced for the iconic Denver venue’s closure, underscoring how it’d spell disaster for employees.
“Most of the people who work for us don’t have savings,” Matt Clark said. “It’s 25-year-old rockand-rollers. If we don’t have shows or have slow business for a month, it’s going to really hurt all of us.”
That fragile ecosystem — promoters, bartenders, managers and more — is, of course, balanced on the head of the artists.
“Almost no one will escape the financial impact of this pandemic, but my heart goes out to musicians right now who are watching their work slip away before their very eyes,” Tennis’ Moore said. “For some artists, this will be career-ending.”