Thank you so much. I appreciate that.
Yes, the venue ladder is a really interesting concept, in that we often see more media visibility for the top end of the venue ladder—Rogers Stadium, Rogers Centre and other places named after telecoms. The major arenas, which are really important, are the end goal for some, but not all, artists. Not all artists are going to rise up the venue ladder.
At Wavelength, we specialize in the lower rungs of the ladder, mostly the small or middle venues that have a capacity of 500 and under. These are the spaces in which you've seen, historically, music scenes develop—the small stages that might be your neighbourhood café, the neighbourhood bar or a small to mid-sized concert theatre. These spaces were the kinds of places that, traditionally, if you were an emerging band, a garage band, you could book at no cost. That element has really gone away.
In the music scene that I came up in, during the 1990s and into the 2000s, the accessibility of these spaces for emerging artists was key to unbridled creativity in the music scene. If you could get a Tuesday night at a bar like Sneaky Dee's in Toronto, you could put on a show with three other bands; you could charge a modest ticket price, and your friends would come. That's how scenes developed across all genres.
Avril Lavigne, The Weeknd and Drake all started out in these small rooms, and then some of them climbed the venue ladder. Other artists who put out music that is just as amazing might reach a lower level on the ladder, but that's still important.
Now, postpandemic, we've seen that these spaces, even these small venues, can no longer afford to allow emerging artists or presenters to book space at no cost. Now we're seeing facility fees. As those cost barriers increase, ticket prices get passed on to the consumer—that's why you see rising ticket prices—and of course, that starts to create a negative feedback loop in which people go out less. You then see less viability and less support for these concerts, especially when, at the higher end of the venue ladder, you see more corporate consolidation going on. When there is one multinational promoter that also owns one of the biggest ticketing companies in the world, that's what causes ticket prices for the bigger concerts to increase; that eats up people's entertainment dollars, and they have less money to go out to support smaller artists.