Venue closures highlight fragility of the city’s live music scene 

UPDATE: Celebrity Etc. announced overnight that all of the shows it planned to host at the Athenaeum in September have now been moved. The Waterboys concert scheduled for Friday, Sept. 12, will now take place at the Bluestone, as will the James McMurtry concert on Saturday, Sept 13, and the Geordie Greep concert on Thursday, Sept. 19. The Weight Band will now play a seated show at Skully’s on Friday, Sept. 19, and a new venue for Afrobeats to the World will be announced shortly. All previously purchased tickets are valid for the new venues, and Celebrity Etc. is still working on keeping future scheduled shows at the Athenaeum.

When the concert promotion company TempleLive abruptly went out of business earlier this month, it sent artists, promoters, and concertgoers in multiple states scrambling. 

Here in Columbus, where TempleLive has operated the Athenaeum since it acquired the downtown property in 2024, ticket buyers have been hit with a mix of cancellations (comedian Dusty Slay posted on social media that his October show at the venue had been called off and would not be rescheduled), site changes (Sparks will now perform at Kemba Live on Sunday, Sept. 13), and a smattering of shows that for the time being will move forward as planned, including a pair of concerts this weekend from the Waterboys and James McMurtry & Band, which are scheduled headline the venue on Friday and Saturday, respectively. 

“We’ve been given permission to host all of our shows for the rest of this month, and it looks like we’re going to be able to continue with all the shows we’ve already booked for the rest of the year,” said Timothy Eddings of the concert promotion company Celebrity Etc., which currently has bookings at the Athenaeum that extend through late November – the only shows still remaining on the venue’s event calendar. (TempleLive did not respond to an email requesting comment.) 

Eddings described the situation around the Athenaeum as murky, with questions remaining around everything from the potential that bookings could continue in the space beyond November – “We just don’t know yet,” he said – to its future as a concert venue. “I don’t know what’s happening next with the building,” Eddings said. “I just hope the space continues to allow music to happen there.”

The drama surrounding the Athenaeum arrives at a particularly fraught time in the local concert scene, landing in the wake of the announcement that beloved Old North concert venue Rambling House will close on Oct. 1, with the owners moving to sell the building. “At the end of the day, we hoped to stay operational through the sale of the property, but it isn’t feasible right now for many reasons,” Rambling House content and productions manager Adam Himmel wrote in reply to an interview request. Himmel also added that the venue’s current owners “are very interested in offering a favorable deal” to anyone who would reopen the space to live music.

Additionally, WitchLab and WitchLab Lounge, the Franklinton occult shop and performance room that in recent times has emerged as a cornerstone within the local metal and hardcore scenes, posted on social media that it would be relocating to new, yet-to-be determined digs after being served an eviction notice earlier this month.

In a phone interview last week, owner Tiffany Boggins said that WitchLab had already located a new building that would allow it to maintain all the facets of the current business – the shop, lounge, space for concerts, and an art gallery included – but that a deal had not yet been finalized. She was also preparing for an eviction hearing scheduled for tomorrow (Wednesday, Sept. 10) that she said would determine the immediate future for WitchLab. “If the eviction does happen and they win the hearing, then we’ll be down for months,” said Boggins, whose eviction was triggered when a member of the band Daikaiju used lighter fluid to set the drummer’s cymbals on fire, images of which were posted online and viewed by the landlord, who then cited breach of lease in serving the eviction. “The ideal situation is that we’ll only be down a couple of weeks, and not being evicted [on Sept. 10] would really help that.”

“We’ve lost several venues, and I don’t see it stopping, so I’m just heartbroken for the music businesses and the musicians that have no choice but to pick up and start over,” said Lisa Cave, a music manager and one of the talent buyers for Natalie’s Grandview. “We just keep losing things. We lost one of the biggest independent radio stations in the country (CD102.5 ceased operations last year), we’ve lost artists, and we’ve lost so many venues. And I don’t know how to stop it.”

Both Cave and Eddings, who also owns and operates the Old North venue Rumba Cafe, pointed to the economic realities plaguing many small businesses in this moment as a driving factor in venue struggles – the impact of a stalled economy hitting especially hard in an industry where profit margins are already notoriously slim. “And especially in a time of recession people just don’t go out as much,” Cave said. “So, we’ve started to see attendance dropping at a lot of shows, and I think that’s true across the board.”

This decline is further fueled by the departure of CD102.5 from the airwaves, in addition to federal cuts made to local station WCBE, which lost 10 percent of its funding when in July Congress approved President Donald Trump’s rescission request to strip the Corporation for Public Broadcasting of funding. Collectively, Cave said, these developments have helped to create a growing vacuum, with bands less likely to perform in Columbus absent radio support or invite. “There’s really no one driving that sort of artist outreach right now,” she said.

These recent developments coincide with a report released by Music Columbus and covered in a late August article by Columbus Business First, which proposed a series of policy initiatives aimed at growing the local music scene, including investment in marketing, the creation of a music and entertainment district, and investment “in non-profit organizations like Music Columbus to support artist development and infrastructure.” (On Facebook, Ace of Cups co-owner Conor Stratton replied in one comment thread to correctly note that the city already has a music district in Old North, where venues such as Ace of Cups, Spacebar, Dirty Dungarees and Bossy Grrl’s exist within a short stretch of High Street.)

“What was really frustrating about the report, to me, is it didn’t really acknowledge and respect the fact that we already have this ecosystem that we’ve built on our own, and that we’re struggling to keep alive,” said Cave, who would like to see organizations such as GCAC and the Columbus foundation establish operational grants aimed at supporting independent venues. “We’ve got a grant [application] we’re filling out for Natalie’s right now from the Live Music Society, and it’s a toolbox grant, which they offer every year and it helps if you need to buy new sound equipment, or your lighting needs upgraded, or you need a new point of sales system – things that help keep the venue up and running.”

Boggins said she didn’t initially found WitchLab Lounge with the aim of creating a space for live music but rather evolved into a venue over time – a development she attributed to the combined needs of the business (the mix of concerts and drag show have helped to attract customers to the lounge) and the local music community. “We were initially going to have music sometimes,” Boggins said. “And then there were so many people who were like, ‘There’s no metal shows. There’s no punk. There’s no hardcore.’ And that’s what we’ve been doing. … And with that, this has become a real place, where I see a lot of the same people returning, which has been really nice.”

In the weeks since WitchLab froze its bookings pending a relocation, Boggins said she had already seen the impact, noting that she’s been forced to turn away “two or three bookings a week.” And the alternate venues she would recommend – Bossy Grrl’s, Dirty Dungarees and Cafe Bourbon Street included – tend to have packed calendars in an environment where there aren’t exactly a surplus of venues. One local musician who had a release show set for late October at Rambling House, for example, had to reschedule in the wake of the closure and said they couldn’t find an open date earlier than next year. (The show is now set to take place at Natalie’s Grandview in February.)

“A lot of people talk about this gap we have [among local venues], where we don’t have the 500 seaters and we don’t have these 20,000 seaters,” Cave said. “But they don’t talk about how essential the 100 seaters are, the 50 seaters. Those are the venues that are really essential to helping emerging artists come up through the scene. You don’t go from playing in your bedroom to selling out Natalie’s. You have to have a little bit of a support system along the way to see artists through the entirety of their careers.”