It's going to be a long time before traditional indoor venues can successfully, consistently, reopen. Drive-through venues seem to be the new option, which is literally a return to stadium rock, but might be the only way outdoors as winter comes. They offer the big crowds and poor sound quality of old-fashioned outdoor concerts with none of the sense of being part of something bigger, but it's much harder to forget where you parked. Potato-Potato.
A lot of indoor venues will likely go out of business; but many of them started as scrappy little invaders at a time when older nightclubs had collapsed. This is not to say it's good that these places might not survive, but new clubs for a new world are more likely than the permanent death of clubs. In many cities in the 1950s, the live music tax rules changed to adjust to the new era of recorded music, which led to the end of big bands except in larger venues and created loopholes that opened the smaller stages up to rock and roll; the survival, the rebirth of indoor clubs (next year?) might require a similar re-thinking of regulations. There might be new architectural requirements, not for the first time in history. The damage to our current world, however, is not worth the price, and it's increasingly clear it could have been avoided.
Coronavirus and the indie venue crisis: How long can Philly music clubs last?
Dan DeLuca, Posted: August 29, 2020, The Philadelphia Inquirer
'Three people in a car, and we still lost money': was live music broken before Covid-19?
Jenessa Williams Thu 20 Aug 2020 09.00 EDT, The Guardian
Here Are All the Livestreams & Virtual Concerts to Watch During Coronavirus Crisis
Billboard
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