Few sectors were as shaken to their core by COVID as the live music industry. When the lifeblood of your enterprise involves cramming people into a room together for a concert, social distancing wasn't in the cards in a safe, realistic manner. It was a brutal period for the Spokane music scene, but there were lessons learned over the bizarre stretch when venues went silent — ones that are still shaping how we interact with live music today.
Early in the lockdown when it seemed like things might be back to normal within weeks or months, the first trend to emerge was artists doing isolated livestream performances on Instagram or Facebook Live. (Personally, I got through plenty of days watching livestreams by Washingtonian artists like Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard, Pedro the Lion's David Bazan and Seattle rock band Deep Sea Diver.) The fad soon spread to Spokane as local singer-songwriters like Lucas Brookbank Brown, Just Plain Darin and Jenny Anne Mannan began crooning to their camera lenses for digital audiences.
But as the months passed and the concert cancellations started coming in droves, people's appetite for livestreamed concerts waned, as it began to feel like a bummer reminder that real concerts weren't happening anytime soon. Later in 2020, some Spokane entities like Lucky You, Neato Burrito, Hoffman Music and the new local video series Live From Somewhere started delivering more professional digital concert options.
It wasn't easy for institutions to keep the lights on during these times, but the restraints did breed creativity. Spokane Symphony Music Director James Lowe had barely begun the post he took over in summer 2019 when COVID hit and forced him to improvise a digital season on the fly, including mapping out how many musicians could fit distanced on The Fox's stage.
"I think it's probably the work I'm most proud of than anything I've ever done," Lowe says. "What struck me was that COVID was kind of a catalyst. It fast forwarded us about a decade. Classical music is always kind of struggling to maintain relevancy. But I think the fact [was] that suddenly everybody was used to an online life, so it encouraged me to be a little bit more innovative in programming and take a few more kind of calculated risks, which are now paying off."
The pandemic was a bleak time for shuttered venues, but Spokane did surprisingly well surviving the lockdown compared to many places. The major casualty during that stretch came with the closure of The Pin, the eclectic all-ages downtown music spot that had only been going a few years before shuttering its doors.
As the proverb goes, absence makes the heart grow fonder. And that was certainly the case when live music eventually returned. Concert attendance boomed to new heights after returning, as each of the past few years have shattered industry records for ticket sales.
"I try to be a glass-half-full kind of guy," says Ryan Leavy, who was booking concerts with Monumental Shows when COVID arrived and who took charge of The Big Dipper in 2023. "I think a lot of showgoers realized what they're missing out on. And so coming back from the pandemic, it's been an upswing, and it's been great. So in terms of shows, new artists, new bands... I mean, to me? It's all been positive."
"I think what COVID did was allow the industry to reset," says Matt Meyer, director of entertainment for the Spokane Public Facilities District, which manages the Spokane Arena and First Interstate Center for the Arts. The PFD spent the shutdown developing a series of safety protocols with the State of Washington they called "Rock the Reopening" and was ready to go when Inslee announced the music could start again on June 30, 2021. Meyer cites changes like venues going cashless and gaining a better understanding of the secondary market as positives for large venues.
But have you wondered why concert ticket prices — especially for bigger touring acts — have skyrocketed way faster than inflation in the past couple years? Basically, venues and artists saw how much people were willing to pay for tickets on secondary market resale websites, and they realized they could raise things to those prices. The positive spin is that more of those dollars are going to the artists, but the industry hasn't done much of anything to combat resale — so now the base tickets are way pricier and scalped ticket costs have jumped up alongside those rates. Couple that with dynamic ticket pricing — where costs go up for major shows based on demand and only go down for unpopular ones — and we've arrived at the post-COVID concert sticker shock era.
The truth is that even as things become more expensive, people are going to pay, largely because COVID helped recontextualize the communal importance of live music. When you are stuck in forced silence for so long, sound becomes a cherished treasure. ♦
