DC's music venues ask for government support

According to the WTOP story "DC music scene rocked by pandemic appeals to city leaders":

Using the hashtag #SaveDCVenues, the campaign by DC Music Stakeholders is hoping to convince D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and the D.C. Council to adopt legislation that would help local clubs and restaurants that rely on live music for their income.

DC Music Stakeholders is a coalition of venue owners, area musicians, activists and other nonprofit leaders that have been working together since the coronavirus pandemic began, trying to find financial support for the hard-hit local music scene. ...

Under the proposed act, dedicated music venues would be eligible to receive up to $15,000 a month in support. Smaller restaurants and bars who hosted live music will be eligible to receive up to $7,500 a month.

The coalition is now gathering signatures from the public online, asking people to sign on to an open letter supporting the relief act, so it can deliver the signatures with the letter to the D.C. Council, which is set to reconvene this week.

Culture planning is pretty weak and tends to not produce discipline-specific plans.  In the first version of "Arts, culture districts, and revitalization" (updated 2019) published in 2009, I wrote that artistic disciplines need to produce discipline-specific plans, including recommendations concerning space, facilities, and venues and cultural history.

I've written a lot about this as it relates to music and radio:

-- "Ground up (guerrilla) art #2: community halls and music (among other things)" (2011)
-- "Song remains the same" (2016)
-- "Under threat: Austin's music industry as an element of the city's cultural ecosystem and economy," 2016
-- "Leveraging music for cultural and economic development: part one, opera" (2017)
-- "Leveraging music as cultural heritage for economic development: part two, popular music" (2017)
-- "Revisiting community radio" (2020)

(Arlington County Library started a punk music archive.  DC Public Library followed. The Seattle Public Library maintains a collection of locally-produced music called Playback.  Some libraries have music practice rooms.)

But even in the more recent "What would be a "Transformational Projects Action Plan" for DC's cultural ecosystem" (2019) I didn't state overtly that this planning needs to include for profit entities, since they are part of the whole.

This is important to state because government planning processes typically only extend to the facilities that the entity controls, meaning that many elements of the functional area as a whole are missed.

For parking and curbspace management that means that privately owned facilities are often ignored--just parking on the street and government owned facilities are part of the planning process.

In a place like NYC, where there are three different public library systems (Brooklyn and Queens have separate systems from "the New York City Public Library" which covers Manhattan, Staten Island and the Bronx) it means that overall planning objectives may be missed.  And this is especially true with other libraries--university, trade association, private, etc., that may exist within a jurisdiction.

In DC, it means that city library planning doesn't acknowledge the libraries of universities, trade associations, private groups, and the federal government, especially the Smithsonian Institution, Library of Congress and the National Archives.

This is also an issue with museums and cultural facilities more generally.

For parks planning it means that a city plan is likely to ignore county, state, federal, and other facilities within the jurisdiction.  But also, for profit facilities that offer fitness and other recreational services, and independent practitioners.

For the music discipline, plans need to drill down for different genres and include privately owned facilities and retail stores selling instruments and scores ("Revisiting cultural plans having elements for retail: music instrument stores"), radio stations featuring locally produced music, etc.," 2020).

Ideally, a functional plan would include the other entities, if only to provide guidance and to be prepared when circumstances warrant.  Especially when facilities face threat of closure or lost of significant funding streams.


Music venues.  Such is the case with music venues and festivals (and theaters, cinemas, and museums) in the time of the coronavirus, when the facilities are shuttered as a result of bans on group activities ("Music festivals face 'catastrophe' under social distancing rules," Telegraph; "First To Close, Last To Open: Will Chicago’s Independent Music Venues Survive The Coronavirus?," Chicago Block Club; "Financially Vulnerable, Independent Music Venues Worry Of Having To Sell," NPR; "Independent music venues face extinction amid virus shutdown" CNN).

Performance facilities in the music ecosystem are usually privately owned and managed.  And without them, the ability of performers to make a living is severely constrained.

Conclusion.  It's reasonable for community cultural funding to be tapped to support for profit players within the cultural ecosystem. But it would have been easier to do this, had more community cultural plans acknowledged the existence of for profit entities heretofore, and/or created discipline-specific plans as part of overall planning processes.