Save Independent Venues

  SUNDAY JUNE 28TH 5PM PST 

LIVE STREAMED FROM LIGHT RAIL STUDIOS (via YouTube & Facebook)

FEATURING CONTRIBUTIONS FROM:

 ISABELLA ROSSELLINI, YO LA TENGO, CHRIS ROBINSON, MARK EITZEL, CON BRIO, JONATHAN RICHMAN, JON LANGFORD (MEKONS), BRIGID DAWSON, JOHN DWYER, CHUCK PROPHET, JOEL ROBINOW (Once & Future Band), THE SESHEN, CARLETTA SUE KAY, TOM HUNTING (Exodus), KELLEY STOLTZ, ALLYSON BAKER, THE BELLRAYS, HILLARY RONEN, SHAMAR ALLEN, AJ HAYNES, and MANY MORE!!!

A very special socially distanced webathon by the IVA, in an effort to save Bay Area independent nightlife.

• On Sunday June 28th 5PM PST the IVA is hosting a live streaming webathon featuring artists, cultural representatives, city officials, voices from the independent venue community and some reprobates, to discuss, perform and hopefully entertain, whilst raising awareness around the dire situations faced by the entire community of independently operated music venues in the Bay Area (and beyond).

      Independent venues are a cornerstone of the Bay Area culture stretching back over many decades, generations and movements, they are the fertile ground of street culture, originality and dissent and their extinction would be devastating.

The unexpected scenarios surrounding the COVID-19 virus have had devastating consequences for live entertainment across all sectors. It has also exposed the vulnerability of one of the most important parts of American culture, its independent venues. Venues owned by larger multinational corporations, who are in turn owned by even larger corporations, are often adept at receiving assistance bailouts and funding at all times, but especially in times of crisis. In many cases they may have surplus funds that can tide them over and boards of directors presiding over publicly traded funds to help ease their situations.

In contrast many independent venues only recourse has been asking for generosity from their fans and patrons to assist them in this time of crisis.

It is obviously imperative that all venues of any kind band together during this time to help aid each other during this pandemic, but it is important that for all Independent venues particularly to stand side by side in this process as they are vastly outnumbered by the numbers of venues that together represent only a couple of companies, and independent venues have on occasion been left out of wider city entertainment conversations in the past

The Independent Venue Alliance has been formed simply to give a unified voice to independent venues in each city and potentially nationwide. It is not a union. It is not a chamber of commerce. It is not a business organization of any kind. It is an alliance. By coming together we can hopefully amplify our shared cause, not only through this current crisis but beyond to the crisis that was already decimating independent venues across the nation and the world.

Although each of us may have their own taste, their own style, audience and history, we all share something in common, independent venues are a hub for their community / culture / sub-culture and function in a way that is always going to be vastly different from the corporate model and cannot be replicated or done away with..

• Give a unified voice to the Independent venues and ability to collaborate on ideas, ways and means to help each other.

• Give a clear and distinct unified place for donations, artist contributions, public interest. Sometimes one artist may not want to particularly single out one venue over another, or people may be more clearly receptive to the idea of supporting independent venues in general, and all venues can benefit from that, while continuing to individually fundraise and go about their business.

• The IVA symbol can be a clear marker for the general public that a venue is independent. Most corporate owned venues hide their corporate affiliations as much as possible, and present as independently operated entities, and in many cases the general public is none the wiser, this distinction gives good and valuable information to the live music fan that may want to support independent venues but is unclear who owns what. 

• There have been several high profile damaging stories related to entertainment corporations being involved in colluded corruption in the secondary markets, this leads to customer distrust and questions that constantly come up even at our level, and paints all venues with the same brush, an alliance could possibly help us be clearly distant from the fall out from such high profile confidence damaging stories.

• An alliance can allow us to come together to produce higher profile fundraising in this particularly pressing time that goes straight to independents, and beyond this current situation could hopefully lead to us pooling together for festivals, events, all manner of activities that highlight the important of independent music venues and directly benefit them. The public has a great affinity for the ideal and role that independent music venues play in their culture and given the opportunity to focus that affinity, we may see a great symbiosis develop once again between the people and the independent venues, in alliance together, our differences aside and our shared intentions joined.