Marauder’s Rev. Moose & Cecilie Nielsen On 2021’s Independent Venue Week, Starting NIVA, The Comeback

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Band of Marauders: Kodi McKinney, Carson Vickrey, Cecilie Nielsen, Rev. Moose, Bobby Nicholas and Evan Mester.

Independent Venue Week just wrapped Sunday (July 18) after some 450 shows across 367 venues in all 50 states with a number of prominent artists including Snoop Dogg, Steve Earle, George Porter Jr., and Beach Bunny, among many others. Originating in the UK, IVW came to the U.S. in 2018 and was led by Marauder, a music marketing and promotion firm working with international acts co-founded by Rev. Moose.

While this year’s Independent Venue Week took on greater meaning with the ramping up of the live industry after a year and a half of few live performances, that’s only the half of it. There’s a good chance that without IVW, the National Independent Venue Association – which this year successfully advocated for indie venues landing the largest arts funding in U.S. history at $16 billion – would look very different. In fact, the advocacy organization was borne out of a IVW call during 2020’s South by Southwest.

“We already had this network built, this growing community across the country,” says Rev. Moose, who is also NIVA’s Executive Director. “That community came together, activated, identified a need and found a solution. It was all of us working hand in hand. If that community hadn’t existed. who knows what it would look like now, but we’re all better off for it.”

Pollstar caught up with Moose and Cecilie Nielsen, Marauder’s Director of Special Projects, to get their take on the week that was, the formation of NIVA and the current state of the independent clubs.

– Cecilie Nielson

Pollstar: So how did [Independent Venue Week] go?

Nielsen: We just wrapped. We had over 350 venues across more than 200 cities in all 50 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico participating, which means we officially outgrew our UK originating counterpart. So, it’s been a hectic but a really good week.

Were the shows in real life or livestreamed?

Nielsen: By far, most of the shows were in person, which we were really excited about. We saw this year’s Independent Venue Week as a reopening moment. It’s the celebration we’ve been waiting for a long time. It’s really hard to reopen when touring hasn’t really restarted yet, but overall there were a lot of fans and venues over the past week, which we’re really excited about.

What are the goals of Independent Venue week?

Nielsen: The mission is to celebrate and highlight the independent venues and promoters and help them tell their story. It’s about creating consumer awareness about what it means when you spend your money with a locally owned and run operation. It’s an occasion for them to wave the flag and say, “Hey, we’re an independent room, we’re your neighbors, we’re your friends.” Independent venues are the ecosystem that gives us tomorrow’s superstars and make great music careers behind the scenes.

How does it work financially?

Nielsen: The venues and promoters run and operate their own nights, so it’s really business as usual. We try to amplify what they’re already doing. There’s no cost to the venues in being involved. We do state in our code of conduct that artists are appropriately compensated to play during Independent Venue week. Last year we ran a fundraiser, a charitable auction as part of Independent Venue Week to help address some of the dire need and raised $21,000 for the NIVA emergency relief fund.

How would you gauge its success this year?

Moose: I think the success can be judged by others rather than us. It’s whether or not the individual venues have seen more press coverage, more attention, more ticket buyers, more traffic. That’s what we’re ultimately trying to do. We’re trying to put people into these rooms and events. It’s a little bit too early for us to have relevant numbers, but in a pre-pandemic world, our feedback was like 74% of the participating venues thought they saw more press around that week than they otherwise would have gotten. And that to me is a win.

So you are something of the prime mover of NIVA, which grew out of a Independent Venue Week meeting during SXSW 2020, how did that happen?

Moose: We did it without a road map, but we knew we had to do something. Us bringing the community together and providing that forum where different owner-operators were able to converse and learn from each other and ultimately grow into what would be the National Independent Venue Association, that to us was a service-minded effort.

When you had that meeting, what was the spark that led to NIVA?

Independent Venue Week was the de facto voice of independent venues and promoters for a couple of years, there was no one else really shining the same light and attention on it in a way that we were. And it was still a very new and fledgling initiative. So when COVID shut everything down, we had the base community that was in some way or another already joined, but IVW from its beginning, was supposed to be community driven with a marketing focus and draw attention to the venues, it was never intended to be a political force.

And in those early conversations when it was clear that there needed to be political action taken, that the venues and the promoters needed a voice in D.C. I remember Cecilie and I having that conversation and being like, “It’s just not what we’re built to do. There needs to be another way to be able to tackle this.”

What we saw this year was unbelievable. Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on how to tie their shoes but independent venues, that’s the one thing everyone loves and I don’t think that was widely known before.

Moose: I absolutely think the reason we had bipartisan support was because our argument was economic. Our argument was strictly these are financial anchors in these neighborhoods. This is not like losing some general employer. It’s not just about the number of jobs that would potentially be lost. It is a devastating blow to lose this kind of economic multiplier in any town, any city, any suburb, so our conversation from the beginning is “you have to save this.”

Tell me about this year’s Independent Venue Week artist ambassador?

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Ambassador Strange: Bartees Strange is this year’s IVW artist advocate.

Moose: Bartees Strange has been amazing to work with. It’s sincere, he’s been excited from day one, the message he puts out there and the pride he shows for the independent live sector is unmatched. We’ve been very fortunate to have such strong artist ambassadors, not just in the U.S., where we worked with Chuck D, Fantastic Negrito and Alison Mosshart.

You had 450 shows and more than 350 venues, where would you put the state of the transition for independent venues with SVOG starting to happen?

Moose: There’s a lot of excitement to be back at work, but there’s still a lot of ground to be covered. A lot of that has to be covered retroactively. The delays in rolling out SVOG, it was intended to be an emergency relief program, we’re almost a year and a half past the start of this emergency, and many people haven’t even necessarily been notified yet, much less received their funds, and that’s a very real problem.

The fact that people have been able to hold on this long, that they are opening up their doors, or those that can have, is great.

It feels good to be busy, as many of them have said to us, but how do you effectively compete if you’re not able to do advance guarantees, if you’re not able to rent properties, if you’re not able to put deposits down? And that’s a serious issue the independent side is wrestling with right now in having all of the expenses of having to operate like it’s business as usual while they’re still trying to make up for lost ground. It’s a tough reality.

Hopefully, the SVOG funding comes faster and to more people and this is a temporary pain point, but right now that process of opening for many of these owners or operators is happening through gritted teeth, if you will.

Everybody’s happy that it’s coming back, but there’s still a lot that still needs to be addressed.

What’s the future for Independent Venue Week?

Nielsen: Next year is going to be our fifth anniversary in the U.S., so we’re excited about coming back with something that’s going to be even bigger and better. We’re hoping to come back with something that’s going to include more venues and definitely more shows, because this year, we saw a lower average shows per venue rate. It’s very clear that people are still reeling and still trying to figure it out in the communities. So we’re hoping next year, for the fifth anniversary, will be even bigger—a bigger calendar, a bigger splash, more butts in seats, more dancing shoes and sticky floors.