ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the landscape of performance venues and how the Internet and social media have impacted these places of performance. While many segments of the music industry are less profitable in an era of rapidly changing technology, live music entertainment remains robust and an important source of income for artists. As live performances involve face-to-face contact between the artists and the audience, they are, paradoxically, both more immune to, and enhanced by, technological changes taking place elsewhere in the music industry. The scant academic literature on venues contextualizes their role in cultural, economic, and urban development. However, the implications of the digital age on live music, and specifically the operation of venues, has so far only been addressed in music industry publications. The drawback of this literature is that the spatial elements of the live music industry are often given short shrift.
