In 2024, independent music venues, festivals, and promoters across the United States generated $153.1 billion in total economic output and sold tickets to 183.7 million fans. Sixty-four percent of them lost money doing it. Those findings come from the National Independent Venue Association’s first State of Live report, and the picture has only sharpened since. A Chicago study released this February found that nearly three in four of that city’s independent venues weren’t profitable, squeezed by artist fees, taxes, and labor costs that keep climbing.
Seth Hurwitz has spent 46 years in that business without selling. His company, I.M.P., runs the 9:30 Club, The Anthem, the Lincoln Theatre, and The Atlantis in Washington, D.C., plus Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland. It’s come through recessions, the 2020 shutdown that closed every room it operates, and two decades of consolidation in which much of the concert business was pulled under Live Nation. Its record doesn’t make the sector’s math any kinder. It does show what tends to separate the venues that last from the ones that don’t.
Start with the buildings, because everything follows from them.
In 1986, Hurwitz and his partner Rich Heinecke bought the 9:30 Club from founders who were losing money on it. In 2004, I.M.P. was brought in to run Merriweather after its owner had offered to shrink it into a small enclosed theater, and the company now holds a lease there through 2057. The Anthem was opened on the Southwest Waterfront in 2017. The Atlantis was built for $10 million in 2023. A venue that rents month-to-month is always one landlord decision away from closing. A venue that controls its room can renovate, plan ten years out, and absorb a bad season without losing the lease.
Control of the rooms also gives I.M.P. range. Its capacities run from 450 at The Atlantis to about 19,000 at Merriweather, with the 9:30 Club, the Lincoln, and The Anthem in between. An artist can play a first Washington show at The Atlantis and headline Merriweather a decade later without working with another promoter in the market. Continuity like that is a real advantage at a moment when NIVA found 60 percent of independent venues expected artist fees to keep rising. Agents remember who booked their client when the client couldn’t sell 500 tickets.
Hurwitz has also made a habit of saying no. He’s declined acquisition offers and never expanded beyond the Washington region, even as competitors went national and then sold. When The Atlantis opened, he said: “We have no calendar to fill. We will curate like no other venue.” A club that needs a show every night takes what it can get, and its reputation drifts with its calendar. A club that can go dark on a Tuesday keeps its name worth something. Over time, the name is what sells tickets.
Pricing works the same way, and fans notice it. According to NIVA, tickets and cover charges account for about 46 percent of independent venue revenue, while alcohol and other drinks bring in roughly 25 percent. A venue built on those numbers needs fans who come back often and still have money to spend once they’re through the door. “The more people pay for tickets, the less shows they’re going to go to,” Hurwitz has said. His long opposition to dynamic pricing and unlimited resale is usually described as consumer protection, and it is. It’s also how a venue keeps its regulars.
Some of the work happens outside the venue entirely. I.M.P. is a founding member of NIVA, which was organized during the 2020 shutdown and led the Save Our Stages campaign that produced the $16.25 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program. Audrey Fix Schaefer, I.M.P.’s director of communications, was named NIVA’s board president in 2025. This July, after a campaign I.M.P. helped lead, the D.C. Council unanimously passed the RESALE Act, which caps ticket resale at 10 percent above face value starting in January. An independent operator competing against a company that owns the dominant ticketing platform has to help write the rules.
None of this is easy to copy. It takes decades, sometimes longer. That is the hard part. Artist loyalty is earned one booking at a time. A building is usually bought when it’s cheap and unloved, which means when most people think buying it is a mistake. Policy wins are won by showing up for years. The pattern in Hurwitz’s career suggests the 64 percent figure describes conditions an operator can push against. The independents that endure tend to control their rooms, give artists a reason to stay, protect their reputation, keep fans coming back, and stay in the room when the rules of their market are being written.
Seth Hurwitz has always put it more simply. “We sell escapism,” he said years ago.
Doing that for 46 years has required a long string of decisions with nothing escapist about them.
