(They're not your) steppin' stone

It being Independent Venue Week, the Quietus drew renewed attention to this 2024 piece by the site's co-founder Luke Turner, which takes issue with perhaps the most popular argument in favour of supporting such venues: that they're a starting point or staging post on the journey upwards to bigger and better things.

Turner is careful to preface his comments by expressing his admiration for the Music Venue Trust and recognising that the #ItStartedHere campaign is "well-intentioned", without explicitly acknowledging why this argument is seen as one worth pushing.

Put simply, it's a powerful way of getting people to give a shit. Who among us can honestly say they're able to resist an "I saw X in a tiny venue with about 30 others" brag?

Perhaps more significantly, it's a means of encouraging the moneybags echelon of the music industry to put its hands in its pockets - whether out of shame or (more likely) out of self-interest. Without the grassroots venues of today, the story goes, there would be no stadium-filling superstars of tomorrow. That this strategy seems to be working means it's not to be easily dismissed.

And yet in his article Turner makes three very valid counterpoints.

First, the pipeline narrative is too simplistic. The conveyor belt that supposedly starts with small venues is broken, its functioning warped and compromised by a whole host of factors including privilege, algorithms (streaming and social media) and economics. When even long-established mid-sized bands with sizeable and devoted followings are unable to make touring economically viable, the idea that simply "putting in the hours at the coalface will eventually lead to fame and fortune" seems increasingly naive.

Second, what about artists who are uninterested in climbing the greasy pole? Those who - to use Turner's own metaphor - see grassroots venues not as "mere rungs on a ladder" but as home? They shouldn't be sneered at for modest ambition and being satisfied at a certain level, or for refusing to play the game or to define "success" purely in terms of "ticket sales and streaming numbers". Turner puts it plainly: "To focus on music venues as steps to be conquered on the way to a typical career is everything that is wrong with the commodification of art, especially in a time when that route is a slippery illusion."

Which brings him to his third point. In asserting the importance of grassroots venues within the wider ecosystem, the pipeline argument paradoxically devalues them. Rather than prizing such venues only as breeding grounds for arena headliners, we should be celebrating them for their own sake, on their own terms - as "vital, beloved rooms where those onstage create an energy that, even if it's only witnessed by ten, twenty people, lets us touch the electricity of music, and find a little joy". Very little compares to the thrill of live music, and the magic is all the more intense and wonderful when you're up close and personal.