Key Changes: The Tough Economics of Live Music in the Cities

Minneapolis singer and multi-instrumentalist Taylor Carik has a question. Really, it’s a lament: Do people give a $%&! about local music anymore?

He remembers a Thursday night at St. Paul’s divey Turf Club about a year and a half ago. Carik was playing with Parishes, his pandemic project—a journey through ’90s electro-dance, funk, and blues.

He lost money on the gig. He paid his band out of pocket, he recalls, because they’d earned just $65 from ticket sales. That would’ve been after the facility fee, the sales tax, the venue/artist split, and the divvy among acts on the bill. In a bittersweet turn, he got a great review. Local blog Girl at the Rock Shows raved, “Parishes is one of those bands that doesn’t play out often, but, when they do and if you catch them, it will change your life. I know that sounds dramatic, but it’s true.”

“It is no longer in the character of Minneapolis-St. Paul to care about its local music scene,” Carik declares. He’s days out from his older band, Whiskey Rock ’n’ Roll Club Mpls, playing the last show of its residency at Mortimer’s, the half-dive, half-venue at the intersection of Franklin and Lyndale, where Prince is said to have roamed.

Carik has also worked as a show promoter and journalist. He started Whiskey Rock ’n’ Roll Club about 10 years ago, playing smaller venues like the legendary, now-closed Palmer’s in Minneapolis’ West Bank, once a neighborhood hub for local bands. He launched the short-lived publication Dispatch after City Pages folded, to fulfill the alt-weekly promise of sticky-soled local-music coverage.

“Great music lived here,” Carik says—“not lives here.” The last time Twin Citians cared about local music, he estimates, was 2005-2010, around the time social media picked up. Young people today discover artists on TikTok, not at neighborhood bars where local bands play, he says. Dayna Frank, president and CEO of downtown Minneapolis’ iconic First Avenue, might agree: “With social media, everything is really fatty these days,” she says. “Everyone wants to go to the same shows.”

Covid-19 accelerated local music’s downfall, Carik says. “I think we’re really seeing the expansion of the bigger venues”—and the rise of major live-entertainment corporations like Live Nation.

All of that sounds dramatic. But is it true?

On one level, he’s describing national trends. Rising costs and changing audience behaviors have dealt the last blow to some venues while paring the already-thin margins of others down to translucence.

Most independent venues aren’t making money. The National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) released this news last year, in what it called the first national economic research study of the independent live-performance sector. (Independent venues are basically those clubs, theaters, and arenas locally operated without major corporate ownership.) NIVA found that 64% of independent venues, promoters, and festivals nationwide were not profitable in 2024.

The most common challenge vexing venues was “marketing and bringing in an audience.” So, yes. Turnout’s tough.

Young people haven’t made it easier. A 2025 Gallup poll found that a record-low number of U.S. adults drink alcohol, and adults ages 34 and younger lead the trend, with just 50% of them drinking—down from 59% in 2023. This matters because venues often make their margin on bar sales while paying for show expenses using admissions revenue. Today, even if teetotaling Gen Zers opt for THC drinks, that’s likely just one beverage in lieu of several beers.

Post-pandemic, venue owners say they’re competing with couches more than ever. Surveys show that young Americans are partying less and spending more time at home. Life is more expensive, so it may be that people choose to sit on their disposable incomes. “People are like, ‘If I’m going to go out, I’m going to go do one big thing,’” says Carl Atiya Swanson, a local consultant who works with independent venues, “which is why you can have stories about Taylor Swift and Beyoncé literally shifting national economies and GDPs.” People aren’t going out to the $15 local band bill for a couple beers on Tuesday night, he says. “They’re going to sit at home and watch KPop Demon Hunters again.”

It reminds Carik of the last day of Palmer’s, which shuttered in 2025 after 119 years. A line wrapped around the block. “We had a picture of the day before it was announced that they were closing, and there was nobody in there,” he says, “because people just weren’t going.”

“People are like, ‘If I’m going to go out, I’m going to go do one big thing.’”

—Carl Atiya Swanson, Cast Consulting

Performance Anxiety

With inflation, venues are paying more for rent, insurance, materials, and touring artists, who are paying more for gear, gas, food, and lodging.

Diane Miller gets to know local artists as host of The Local Show on The Current radio station. “Unless you have a really large following on Instagram, on TikTok, and you have a song that hits or goes viral, you won’t really have success on the road,” she says. “You’re just going to lose a lot of money.”

That’s because venues risk a lot betting on unknowns. First Avenue can gauge how much riskier the live-music business is today by how it runs its 250-capacity 7th Street Entry. “We used to be able to say in our business, ‘You don’t have to worry too much about the 7th Street Entry. It’ll take care of itself. These are pretty small numbers,’” says general manager Nate Kranz, who has worked at First Avenue since 1998. “But now one loss can erase three, four, five successful shows. Maybe it used to be a 1-to-1 [ratio] or a 1-to-2. Now, you really have to be more risk averse in the shows you’re committing to.”

That means small, incubator-size stages become all the more vital to local artists. Live performance is their most significant income source as musicians, according to the Minneapolis Music Census, a 2024 survey of more than 2,200 local industry professionals. Artists worry primarily about stagnant pay, and they want more chances to play—and more stages.

Venues come and go, and several have closed in the past five or so years, including The Garage in Burnsville, The Treasury in St. Paul, and Part Wolf, formerly the Nomad World Pub, on the West Bank in Minneapolis.

Many of the West Bank’s beloved venues are gone, but that’s its own story, with the demise of the Triple Rock, Grumpy’s, and the 400 Bar not strictly representative of national trends. The West Bank saw “almost a 15-year shift in [owners] cashing out for their own reasons,” Swanson says. “That neighborhood has been an immigrant neighborhood for a long time, and the current Somali population has less interest in being at bars.” Communities change. Real estate transforms.

And new venues are opening metrowide. Especially tough to miss: two new amphitheaters.

The Goliath of the two, with 19,000 capacity, is Mystic Lake Amphitheater, set to open in Shakopee this coming summer. Swervo Development, among the metro’s most prominent developers, is building it. Swervo renovated the long-vacant Minneapolis Armory and reopened it in late 2017 as an 8,400-capacity EDM haven. Swervo also redeveloped the Uptown Theater, outfitting it for musicians and comics on tour. Live Nation Entertainment, the public, Los Angeles-based industry giant, programs shows at both, and it will operate Mystic Lake. (Swervo didn’t respond to outreach for this story.)

First Avenue is also getting into the amphitheater business. It will share operations of the 8,000-capacity Community Performing Arts Center with the Minnesota Orchestra. The venue is set to open in 2027 as a riverfront revenue generator for First Avenue, the orchestra, and the North Side community.

So, the high end expands. But without starter venues—bars, theaters, clubs—there are no amphitheaters. “Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan played The Garage in Burnsville” in 2016 and 2018, respectively, Swanson notes. “Geese played the Amsterdam [in 2025], and I don’t think they’re going back there anytime soon.” That show sold out.

As longtime clubs have closed, many small and midsize clubs have opened. There’s Berlin in the North Loop—eclectic, stylish, and cozy at 85 seats. Cloudland, 150 cap, goes hard on Lake Street. White Squirrel, 55 cap, has a large patio and no cover in St. Paul’s West Seventh neighborhood. Pilllar Forum triples as a Northeast bar, cafe, and venue. Zhora Darling quadruples as a Northeast bar, restaurant, karaoke room, and venue. Chef Jon Wipfli recently opened a brick-and-mortar for Animales Barbeque Co. with a stage (no cover), inspired by Tennessee and Texas restaurants that meld barbecue and live music.

The scene “can’t just be people buying a $400 Billie Eilish ticket at Grand Casino Arena,” says Ben Johnson, director of the Minneapolis Arts & Cultural Affairs Department. Live music “should just be everywhere, especially if you’re going to be taxed on it.” Minneapolis has a 3% entertainment tax. This is imposed on admissions for live music and on services during live music. Downtown, it adds to 3% liquor and restaurant taxes.

New Orleans and Miami could be model cities, Johnson says, where live music feels ubiquitous. But that setup isn’t easy, at least in the Twin Cities. “It’s a tough battle to fight, from a [profit-and-loss] standpoint,” Wipfli says, speaking two months after Animales opened. “Our goal with music, to keep it free, is to drive enough traffic here” after the dinner rush slows post-7 p.m. Wipfli pays the musicians, the daily sound techs, a full-time booking agent, and the entertainment tax. He’d like to tap sponsors for events, shows, or onstage ads. “We’ll layer in a catering program and things like that to increase the revenue, to just stay afloat here.”

Icehouse, the 400-cap venue in South Minneapolis, cut the restaurant side of its business after Covid-19. Co-owner and general manager Brian Liebeck, who founded the venue in 2012, says people were coming mostly for shows. They also seemed to want earlier evenings, so he cut hours. Needing less space for dining, they put in a second, smaller stage.

In mid-2024, Icehouse nearly went under. The rent was going up by $8,000 per month, Liebeck says—“market rate for the North Loop maybe.” To save Icehouse, Liebeck, who also works full-time as an IT consultant, brought in partners to hold majority ownership. Icehouse isn’t profitable, he notes.

Post-pandemic, Liebeck determined Icehouse would rely less on local acts. He registered a lull in the music scene, plus an opportunity to book national acts other venues were missing. That decision drove its 2022 remodel, including a roughly $100,000 sound system.

In the past year, Liebeck says the lull has picked up somewhat, and industry insiders say the caliber of local talent, at least, has never wavered. At Northeast’s 331 Club on a random Tuesday, for no cover, the fiddle-and-guitar duo Daniels & Baker is sublime, as virtuosic as the Southside Aces jazz band who played the venerable Dakota the night before. At the new Berlin, too, brilliant young jazz pianist Kavyesh Kaviraj invites colleagues onstage, describing a scene that punches above its weight.

Those insiders also agree there’s an exposure problem: The Twin Cities lacks robust local-music journalism. “We don’t have any concise, good database of everything that’s going on,” Liebeck says.

Still, Icehouse has been seeing better traffic. August was dead, he says, but from September through the holidays, it stayed busy. And word seems to be spreading among agents of touring acts: Icehouse’s programming director and staff are great to work with; the sound system may be paying off. “Inertia is starting to push us forward,” Liebeck says—a consistency with bookings like what Bunker’s seems to have in the North Loop, hosting Dr. Mambo’s Combo every weekend since 1987, or what the Dakota seems to have downtown, celebrating 40 years.

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Biggest Year Yet

Scale up to where wind machines blow Beyoncé’s hair and Bad Bunny struts in his white suit, and we’re in an incredible era for live music.

Live Nation hailed 2024 and 2025 as live music’s biggest years yet. Indeed, although the company’s annual report comes out after press time, Live Nation was on track in 2025’s third quarter to secure its own biggest year, with $8.5 billion in quarterly revenues, up 11% year over year and driven by stadium shows and fan spending on site.

Live Nation does business in concert promotion, artist management, and venue operations. In 2010, it merged with Ticketmaster, the globally dominant ticketing platform. If you don’t know it from the antitrust lawsuits (with the Department of Justice’s trial to begin this year), you probably do from the artists it has worked with—Bad Bunny, Morgan Wallen, Doja Cat.

The key difference between Live Nation and independent venues, Swanson explains, is its vertical integration. “Because of the way [Live Nation] controls ticketing, because of the way it owns venues, and then because of its artists’ contracts and the exclusivity around those—it can essentially slot artists into all of their Live Nation venues in one fell swoop,” he says.

Live Nation is promoting Grammy-nominated artist Raye’s tour, set for the downtown State Theatre in April. The State is independent, owned and managed by the Hennepin Arts performing-arts nonprofit. Live Nation is renting the State because it’s the right fit, says Hennepin Arts vice president of programming Rick Hansen. (Live Nation doesn’t have a seated theater in its local roster.) Live Nation will take ticket sales, he says; Hennepin Arts will take concessions sales.

Hennepin theaters stage national tours, and Hansen says nearly 90% of shows hit or exceed their break-even point. “It’s literally about keeping a pulse on everything,” he says. “I am consistently—weekly, daily—talking with some of my peers that have comparable areas, demographics, and theater sizes,” asking who’s getting big and how much they’re paying whom.

Even when Live Nation isn’t promoting the show, operating the venue, or supplying the ticketing platform, it seems to wiggle its fingers into more pies. “They have a percentage of water sales,” First Avenue’s Frank says, referring to how Live Nation became an equity investor in Liquid Death canned water in 2021. “You try to operate as a stand-alone business against all that, and it’s incredibly challenging.”

Another headache for First Avenue is the secondary market. During the pandemic, Frank noticed middlemen accessing tickets. These third parties, like StubHub and Vivid Seats, resell the tickets at much higher prices—say, up to $200 from $40—with venues and artists seeing none of the extra cash. Tanner Montague, chair of NIVA’s Minnesota chapter, says NIVA is “constantly in D.C. … trying to combat this and find ways to make it a little more fair for everyone involved.”

Until then, First Avenue is trying to keep money within state lines. Since 2013, it has acquired four variously sized Twin Cities venues. They form a pipeline, with the yet-to-open amphitheater at its widest end. If First Avenue hadn’t bought some of them—such as the Fitzgerald or the Fine Line—“my guess is, either [Live Nation] would have it, or [those venues] would be closed,” general manager Kranz says.

“That’s absolutely Live Nation’s strategy in other markets,” Swanson says—“to buy up any number of venues at any bunch of different sizes, so that Live Nation controls essentially the entire ecosystem in a place.”

“You try to operate as a stand-alone business against [Live Nation], and it’s incredibly challenging.”

—Dayna Frank, First Avenue

Bar peanuts

On Jan. 7, in Icehouse’s main room, a young local artist named Noamz plays a “flute incantation.” It’s different every time, she says—it’s like flute beatboxing. This one is about Renee Nicole Good, whom an ICE agent killed only hours before. “Let’s hold that in our heart.”

At Green Room in Uptown the next day, there’s still energy to channel in ways a touring artist probably couldn’t. The no-cover Snapped Open Mic Night happens every Thursday. By 9:30 p.m., the place feels full and loose. Body heat stews in the balconies. People dance wherever; two friends bounce in the elevator lobby. Parlour burgers slide out from the kitchen. A smitten somebody steps up and dedicates an original, SZA-esque tune to a couple friends offstage. Every artist is pretty decent. A few are amazing.

Tanner Montague opened Green Room in early 2023. He moved to Minnesota from Seattle to attend the now-closed McNally Smith College of Music in St. Paul. He drummed in several bands, played some R&B and neo-soul.

His hope was to open a venue and book local bands he thinks are cool. Incubation is still the guiding principle, but now Montague absolutely also books the Taylor Swift rave from New York to keep the calendar full and diverse. “People show up for those, and people drink for those.” He still does a New Band Night every other week. Is Green Room profitable? After almost three years, yes, it’s financially stable, although still on thin margins. “Some weeks it can be, like, $1,000 in profit or $200 in profit.”

Montague has answered Carik’s lament, kind of. Do people care about local music anymore? At the very least, they could. Maybe they don’t gravitate to watering holes after work anymore. And there isn’t a free weekly publication like City Pages generating interest. Montague gets that. He used to pop into Icehouse randomly. Post-Covid, he’s keener to check the calendar.

His approach to Green Room is, in a way, millennial: Make it a destination. Make it “experiential.” Casual foot traffic hasn’t arrived in Uptown yet, he says, so it helps to have a hook, like the open mic and new-band nights.

Montague is also chair of the Minnesota chapter of NIVA, which this year hosts its national conference in Minneapolis June 7-10. The event should bring in booking agents from big coastal cities. “That conference is about getting those folks to come out and see this scene and remind them, yes, Prince isn’t here right now, but we’re all inspired.”

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Next onstage

Adapting to the market is good, but it doesn’t fix structural challenges. The Minneapolis Music Census reported that venues face significant regulatory headwinds, including tight limits on noise at later hours, high permit costs, as well as sheer confusion and inefficiency.

Frank, of First Avenue, issues a complaint familiar to Minnesota small businesses: Local government could hardly do more to hurt the live-music business.

“Something most people don’t know is our sales tax at First Avenue during a show is 17.525%,” she says. Add to that “the population decrease and the brutality of the winters and the road construction. There are just no breaks, anywhere. … We have to compete against national conglomerates that don’t have the high overhead of [being based] in Minnesota.”

The census also found the metro could use more young talent. Almost 90% of respondents reported having 10-plus years of experience. An “expertise cliff” looms, says Johnson of the Arts & Cultural Affairs Department. “We don’t have a natural migration of people who do tech and production and sound and lighting and venues.”

Two schools have closed—McNally Smith in 2017 and the Institute of Production and Recording (IPR) in 2023. Neither Montague nor Green Room would be here without McNally.

Johnson has ideas for change. To start, he questions Minneapolis’ lack of funding for a big music festival. “The Downtown Improvement District used to support these kinds of festivals, but they don’t have enough money to do it.” He says the Fortune 500 companies have mostly stopped sponsoring. Regarding the entertainment tax, “the case could be made to shave off some of it to help support the musical ecosystem.” This year, Minneapolis is hiring a consultant to devise next steps.

For now, a portion of the North Loop’s former IPR building is transforming. Sound engineer Christian Murphy has set up a 4,200-square-foot studio there, called Evergreen Audio. Local artists are already trickling in. Murphy says Your Smith rehearsed there before her last tour, and he recalls Lucien Parker producing music there before he extended his expertise to some 20-somethings interested in making a beat.

“We’ve got to make enough money to keep the lights on and all that, but I really wanted to be about community,” he says. Murphy is mainly a touring sound engineer. Most recently, he toured for eight years with Tyler, the Creator. Since he moved back in 2014, he also does shows with First Avenue and the Palace Theatre. Evergreen is partially funded with a Vibrant Storefronts grant, through Johnson’s department. “Artists can come and record, or rehearse, or write music, or jam, for low or no cost or whatever they can pay.”

The goal is to fill the void, he says, “and really get those walls humming with music and having those songs being created again.” With that, he implies a question: Where will the next great Twin Cities music scene find its home?