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Yup, that tracks.

“Nashville is not happy, it doesn’t want to give up its stranglehold on country music.”

“When books and thoughts and people are suppressed, we all lose. Keep fighting the good fight, friends. It’s worth it.”

The death of TV news is a self-serving prophecy told by those who don’t know how to save it

The shame here is that after the House of Blues crew took over what became Live Nation, those venues were run better than ever. It’s the handcuffs for artists—you want to play the venue we control in Town X, you better play our venue in Town Y, Town Z, and Town A—that have them on the ropes here. What will that do to the smaller promoters and venue owners who’ve adoped the same strategy?

Some of us have been talking about this since the 00s.

This whole episode is so aggressively sad.

I worked at and consulted for WXPN through the period where Hal and the original team were planning this venue. I walked through this space when it was just a shell. I have had so many positively wonderful experiences in this building. Seeing it end like this is just tragic.

The handoff after Hal’s retirement to a team of folks with zero experience in running a venue threw kerosene on a fire. This is one of the nightmare scenarios my former colleagues worried about.

Flipping the venue from for-profit to non-profit a few years ago should have opened up a track to keep the place solvent. But I’m not entirely sure that anyone realizes this is an organization that LICENSES its name from XPN and Penn. Most folks I talk to assume that “Penn will just pay the bill.”

And they probably will, but only as part of taking over the venue entirely. (Which, at this point, is not a terrible idea. There were so many concerns in the 90s and 2000s about how direct ownership of a venue would raise business and political issue. After all of this, I’m not sure how you would do it otherwise.)