A Very Special Christmas Blog Post: The Award for the Stupidest Piece of Advice I’ve Been Given in 2011

In the course of the last year I’ve encountered a great many people, wandered around a number of empty buildings and received a lot of advice. For the most part, these things have all been immensely enjoyable. I have met and worked with some of the finest human beings in the state, for which I am eternally grateful.

But, as I’m reliably informed, people don’t read this blog to hear me wax lyrical about the beauty in the world. Apparently most of you read it because I have a great deal of bile at the immense volume of inept policy, poor decision making, brainless strategies, petty careerism and total disregard for social justice currently on display in my home town of Adelaide.

And because I know a lot of you share my frustration, I want to share a special Christmas gift in the form of a special award. It’s the Award for the Stupidest Piece of Advice I’ve been given in 2011.

There’s been a lot of steep competition in this field. Keep in mind I work with people who think it’s possible for the side of a car park to host a ‘jazz bar’, it was once suggested to me that I arrange for an opera to take place in a public park and I routinely encounter people with job titles related to economic development who don’t know what globalisation is.

But there were two real contenders for the title. And so I present:

Runner Up: Award for the Stupidest Piece of Advice I’ve Been Given in 2011:

“Don’t worry about the Youth Exodus! They’ll all move back when they want to have kids!”

This wins because of its utter disregard for the decline in the mortgage/stable career based social contract laid down through New Deal politics in the face of Globalisation and Economic Rationalism, it’s successful bypass of the cultural factors behind the youth exodus and, most of all, that it’s one of those things you can keep saying without ever seeing a result.

If you really want to argue the point and keep falling back on this truism, then I’m going to suggest you either read Mike Rann’s introduction to the Thirty Year Plan for Greater Adelaide and the corresponding sections which outline the need to attract and retain more skilled labour of ‘working age’. Or, if you want it straight from the Mouth of Youth, Jane Howard’s wonderful diatribe on the topic at No Plain Jane.

Regardless, defeating that very noble runner-up there’s one piece of advice I get routinely that reveals a depth of crippling stupidity behind an otherwise meek exterior. And, thus, the winner of is…

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Award for the Stupidest Piece of Advice I’ve Been Given in 2011:

“You should run a series of for-profit bars and entertainment venues to fund Renew Adelaide! Get a liquor license and you can make heaps of money!”

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Let’s rephrase this so it reads like I hear it:

Renew Adelaide is a project designed to counteract the degree to which it has become economically unviable to run cultural enterprises in Adelaide. Renew Adelaide should fund itself by running a cultural enterprise.

Genius!

So all I need is a liquor license and I can make a live music or arts venue into a cash cow!?! Why didn’t I think of that!?! I could have kept running Format and become a millionaire!!

Let me show a picture which further proves why this is the award winner for Dumbest Piece of Advice I’ve Received in 2011.

This is the Producers Hotel. It was a major, major live music venue for decades, right up until the mid-2000s when, thanks to some particularly skilled planning decisions, housing was built behind it.

It is now vacant.

The Producers is Class 9B compliant and has an existing liquor license. There isn’t a specific regulatory issue why it can’t be used. Unfortunately, because of the close proximity to housing, the beer garden, which used to house local bands and did so for decades, can no longer do so. This limits the venue’s capacity to attract an audience and, liquor license or not, the place isn’t viable.

There are most likely further issues regarding the lease price. The comment I’ve heard on this place is to make it financially viable it’d need to be turned into a pokies bar. By building it’s economic base around gambling addiction and binge drinking, rather than cultural activity, you could simultaneously circumvent the need to deal with the noise restrictions posed by the housing and still make money off of it. But if you wanted to make a living out of it without pokies, you’d need to host cultural activity (particularly live music) three or four times a week.

Personally I don’t like the idea of funding Renew Adelaide by taking advantage of people’s gambling addiction. But that’s the only way you could make this venue pay.

Given this venue, along with the Tivoli, used to provide a major cultural venue for decades, it’s inability to do so now pretty clearly indicates that the market conditions for culturally focused venues is at a low point.

Let’s consider this further. I’ve got a diligent volunteer laboriously plotting back through live music guides from about 1997 through to 2006, which is the time period in which the majority of live music venues seem to have suffered.

This survey is fuelled partly because I played in live bands for years and I think they have a colossal and incredibly positive impact on sense of community and cultural engagement, particularly for those in their teens and early twenties.

But on top of that, I’ve reading the Deloitte Access Economics report for Arts Victoria entitled “The Economic, Social and Cultural Contribution of Venue-Based Live Music In Victoria”, released in June of 2011. If we ignore the cultural and social benefits of live music, which has certainly proved a popular approach up until now, and focus purely on the economic element, the report notes:

…it is estimated that live music in venues generated an additional $501 million in gross state product (GSP) to the Victorian economy in 2009/10, and increased full-time equivalent (FTE) employment by approximately 17,200 persons. The direct economic contribution component was $301 million in GSP and approximately 14,900 FTE positions.

Applying the average expenditure per patron attendance to the estimated increase in direct expenditure suggests there were approximately 5.4 million attendances at live performances in Victorian venues in 2009/10. This compares with approximately 4.3 million attendances to Australian Football League matches in Victoria in the home and away seasons, and 4.7 million ticketed attendances to other live performances in Victoria in 2009 (ii).

What does this mean exactly? It means the 3000 live music performances Deloittes identified as happening in Victoria per week (or 156,000 per year) are worth about $3211.53 in gross state product each week, attracting a total weekly crowd of about 103,800, or about 170 per venue. Note that this doesn’t include major festivals. It’s purely the kind of music that happens at “hotels, bars, nightclubs, cafes and restaurants” (ii).

The report noted around 600 venues in Victoria hosting live music, with 370 of them in Melbourne itself – the greatest concentration of live music venues of any city in Australia. Someone check my maths on this, but I think that means the city of Melbourne hosts about 1,850 performances a week, bringing somewhere near $1,188,000 into the city weekly or 62,900 visitors to the Melbourne city area.

Essentially what we’re looking at here is a sector fragmented into a wide array of small venues that, on their own, are fairly low profit but collectively produce an economic impact and a greater volume of engagement than, as Deloittes notes, the AFL and the wider ticketed cultural sector.

Keep in mind that this is economic impact centred on the activity within the venues: job creation, food and beverage sales and tickets. It doesn’t include the outflow of economic worth that results in attracting higher portions of people into the area around the venue, for example things like coming into the city to see a band but going somewhere else for dinner first, or going to a movie after work to kill time before going to a show or the cost spent on taxis or whatever else.

The other interesting report here is from APRA, who did an Economic Contribution of the Venue-Based Live Music Industry in Australia.

Thanks to Helen at the Adelaide West End Association for pointing out these reports.

If you apply the APRA figures, it’s a bit higher, at $3680 per performance. The APRA survey is focused on venues with APRA membership, which are likely to be a bit larger. Their inclusion of NSW and QLD, which have lesser capital city music scenes but much larger regional touring circuits, makes a city by city analysis a little harder.

And now here’s the bad bit. In wading back through the old gig guides and following from an earlier blog post about the loss of local music venues in the East End, I’ve been trying to do a sort of tentative retrospective economic impact measurement to see how much the collapse of the local music scene has cost us.

Of the nine venues in the East quarter of the city I listed in my former blog post on this topic, six had closed or ceased to have live music. If we consider that, like their Melbourne counterparts, they used to average about 5 performances a week (which, from my reading of the old gig guides, is pretty fair), there’s maybe 30 performances per week less than there was in the late nineties and early 2000s. I’d argue that’s a reasonable figure given the Tivoli, Austral and Producers might have had two or three band bills on at least three nights a week.

Thirty performances at $3211.53 is $96,345. Thirty performances at APRA’s rate of $3680 is $110,400. That’s about $5 million in lost income, lost jobs, lost food and drink sales per year, and about 53,000 lost city visitors, averaging about $94 each a year. Deloittes has that figure at about $95, so I can’t be too far off.

Again, I’m not much good at maths and I don’t have the sociology background to do solid analysis of quantitative data. If that’s your skill set, I’d absolutely love your help going through this stuff.

The hypothesis I’d like to offer here is, if we accept the Deloittes and APRA reports as guidelines on the impact of a local music scene, the decline of our venue based music scene had a direct and negative impact on other cultural activity in the city and, from there, on the city’s early evening economy. This decline could realistically, in the city area, be measured in the millions.

As I’ve said before, once the music venues shut down, the cinemas all shut down. After the cinemas shut down, Hindley Street entered into its real decline. This makes sense as it’s the area that had traditionally hosted the bulk of the early evening economy. And, notably, the youth exodus cemented itself.

If we extend the measurement of economic impact to a more ambiguous attempt to measure cultural factors in the decision making process regarding where people spend their money, things get a bit more complicated. In between 1998 and 2005, people’s cultural consumption habits changed massively, into the ‘Long Tail’ pattern described in this blog in the past. Melbourne successfully captured this by using the Postcode 3000 reforms to retain a high degree of diversity and grow its ‘Laneways’ culture – characterised by a lot of small, owner operated businesses. Notably the healthiest sections of Adelaide (to my eye) follow the same pattern: Ebenezer Place, Leigh Street and, most of all, the Central Markets feature a high density of small, owner operated businesses: a classic spatial rendition of a long tail market.

Other streets do not. They feature single buildings with large foot prints and car parks or larger, more generic enterprise built around the old ‘Anchor tenant’ mentality. The degree of diversity in the city has been undermined by the removal of our ‘fine grain’. We’ve removed that fine grain at the same time as our cultural and spatial consumption habits have shifted increasingly to a long tail pattern. If you see my point.

Think about that for a second. Our city is like Warner Brothers and Sony Music in 2002. It’s still trying to pump out block buster albums when the market is moving to buying a much more diverse array of singles by smaller acts. Major labels lost millions until they adapted their business models to better handle the division between major and minor cultural products because most of the money was coming through the smaller releases, which attracted fewer individual sales but collectively amounted to a much, much larger slice of the pie. They had to adapt their strategy to suit a significant shift in cultural consumption behaviour. Adelaide has done the exact opposite. It does a terrible job of attracting diverse and small cultural enterprise, over relies and over invests on flagships and thus continues to lose millions because it has failed to keep its strategies in synch with existing cultural markets and audiences.

This isn’t a ‘laneways’ issue or a booze issue. Anyone can stand on Rosina Street and look at the matchbox cars stuck on the wall of the car park, and they can go down Solomon Street and look at the graffiti murals from a now long forgotten public art laneways reactivation. Anyone can go to Red Square and get plastered. The problem is that, in between doing those things, and (a) staying home with Facebook and Youtube (b) going to Marion or (c) moving to Melbourne, they’re not choosing Adelaide.

Which brings us back to The Producers. This venue used to thrive on an audience primarily made of up people in their twenties and thirties who came into the city to watch live music. This audience has now been dissolved. On top of that conditions have been put in place to make it impossible to rebuild it because the necessary volume of live music required to attract and retain a commercially viable volume of customers cannot be achieved through poor planning decisions and the location of housing right behind the venue.

Thus, my choice in Stupid Advice Award to those who’ve told me I should fund Renew Adelaide by running for-profit culture venues. It is virtually impossible to run a for profit venue focused on cultural activity, and, again, I have no interest in running a pokies bar. It is impossible to make cultural ventures pay because of a lack of audience and an inability to access resources such as suitable buildings, start-up capital or regulatory concessions to start said venues. Additionally, as Adelaide still hasn’t addressed the shift in market, and still keeps its economic development, its cultural policy and its planning policy in distinct silos, it lacks the capacity to address that market shift. Unfortunately, there are other cities far more aggressively addressing these problems. Hence we’re now in the ludicrous situation of having a regional council in Queensland offering larger sums of money to one of our independent cultural managers for a couple of weeks work than they’ve received for five years activity in Adelaide.

Hence my winning award for stupid advice. It’s not just that it’s impossible to fund Renew Adelaide by running cultural enterprises. It’s that Renew Adelaide exists because this city has resolutely gone about destroying not only its venues but also its audiences and the skilled labour required to attract them to our city.

The degree to which I get this advice from people in senior government administrative positions is alarming in that it indicates a degree to which senior decision makers have yet to grasp what seem, to many of us, rudimentary elements of contemporary economic development, cultural and planning policy. They seem either unwilling or unable to grasp these facts despite both the general community, interstate research and many of their own colleagues saying, in varying degrees, almost exactly what I’ve written above.

And with that, I wish you all a good festive season. And to celebrate, here’s a lo-fi classic from Adelaide ex-patriots Hit the Jackpot now based in the US. Enjoy!

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