'You're not strangers if you like the same band': small venues, music scenes, and the live music ecology
Creators: name: Whiting, Samuel
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 360306
subject: Musicology and ethnomusicology
classificationCode: 440107
subject: Social and cultural anthropology
classificationCode: 470299
subject: Cultural studies not elsewhere classified

description: Small live music venues are essential components of the live music ecology. They serve as entry-level performance spaces for musicians, providing opportunities for up-and-coming bands, as well as sites of socialisation for music scene participants. Small venues are fundamental to the sustainability of local music scenes yet their social and cultural value is often overlooked in popular music studies.<br><br>This thesis analyses the intersection between local music scenes and the live music ecology in Melbourne, Australia, through case studies of two small venues: The Old Bar and The Tote. It responds to the research question: what is the social and cultural value of The Old Bar and The Tote in the live music ecology of Melbourne's inner-north? The study uses data gleaned from approximately 30 face-to-face interviews with participants actively involved in the music scene, in conjunction with participant observation and historical research on each venue and the surrounding suburbs.<br><br>Small live music venues rely on complex systems of cultural and social capital in order to bring revenue into each venue space. Throughout this thesis I account for and illustrate the non-economic value of small venues through an analysis of how social, cultural, and symbolic capital are mobilised by individuals and the venues themselves. This positions these venues in the broader live music ecology of Melbourne's inner-north and influences their role as social hubs and performance spaces for music scene participants.<br><br>This thesis makes specific use of Pierre Bourdieu's theories of capital, habitus, and field to explicate the role of small live music venues within the live music ecology. Bourdieu's theoretical apparatus is utilised to illustrate how these venues mobilise and convert non-economic forms of value into revenue, and to unpack the power relations demonstrated in interactions between scene participants, small venue workers, and the venue spaces themselves. This utilisation of Bourdieu and his theoretical apparatus is an ongoing subsidiary project of the thesis, as I assert that much of the `work' that small live music venues `do' as niche spaces of cultural production is intangible, and thus difficult to measure in quantitative terms. Therefore, Bourdieu's alternative forms of capital are most useful in illustrating the social and cultural value of The Old Bar and The Tote in the live music ecology of Melbourne's inner-north, articulating this value in its most effective form.<br><br>This thesis is presented in six chapters. Chapter One introduces my topic and outlines my research question, case studies, methodology, data collection and analysis methods, limitations, contribution to the field, and thesis structure. Following this introduction the key concepts of `scene', the `live music ecology', `place', `space', `the everyday', and various Bourdieusian forms of capital (cultural, social, symbolic etc.) are defined, along with a discussion of gentrification and its effect on Melbourne's night-time economy (Chapter Two). My data analysis spans three distinct chapters. A discussion of `place' (Chapter Three) grounds my research in materiality and a discernible setting, while a discussion of social, cultural and other Bourdieusian forms of capital demonstrates how such intangibles are regularly converted into economic capital by venue booking agents and other social actors in the live music ecology (Chapter Four).<br><br>Both `scene' and the `live music ecology' are useful descriptors of musical practice that complement each other, and both are utilised throughout this thesis to contextualise the social and cultural value of small venues and to explain how this value is operationalised in their role as the foundation of a city's live music ecology. This live music ecology includes the institutions, organisations, events, and venue spaces that form the materiality of local music scenes, whereas `scene' encompasses the everyday social practices that make up engagement with music, outlined via a discussion of scene participants and the various roles they perform throughout the local music scene of Melbourne¿s inner-north (Chapter Five). Chapter Five also presents case studies of two Melbourne bands, Gold Class and Camp Cope, which demonstrate the value of small live music venues as social hubs and performance sites for emerging musicians. This opens up small live music venues to forms of value beyond the purely financial, positioning them as producers of grassroots culture and the building blocks of a sustainable live music ecology, as summarised in my conclusion (Chapter Six).<br><br>This thesis analyses the small venues of Melbourne's inner-north, gauging the value of these venues as sites of social exchange, discourse, and the generation of multiple forms of capital, mobilised in exchange for the revenue that contributes to the sustainability of Melbourne's live music culture. The social and cultural value of participation in music scenes is therefore one of their most valuable aspects, and one that small live music venues play an essential role in facilitating. As a contribution to the literature on Australian music scenes and ethnographies of small live music venues this thesis determines the substantial effect small venues have on local music scenes and the live music ecology, their greater social and cultural value, and their significance within the realms of cultural production. Finally, a multi- sited investigation of this kind, focusing on the intersection of music scenes and the live music ecology is novel, and serves as a unique contribution to the study of live music in Australia.