By Warren Reid
Holly Clausius’ set followed the familiar cadence of a video call: a brief smiling silence, a nod to some unseen cue and a greeting.
“We’re here from my bedroom where I write most of my songs,” she said, gesturing back to a bed, a mirror, a print of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” pinned to a pale-yellow wall. “I thought it was an appropriate place to start the tour.”
It’s hardly the tour the Toronto singer-songwriter imagined. To promote her debut EP, Sunflower, she was scheduled to play a string of dates across the country, before turning down the coast to Los Angeles.
When it was cancelled due to Covid-19, Clausius got creative. She decided to live-stream an “apartment-wide tour” over Facebook in June of last year.
“We did five nights. Bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, living room, patio,” she said months later. “I have a pretty big network of musicians here. So, I reached out to people and asked if they wanted to open for me.”
Openers tuned in from similar settings, playing in front of different arrangements of pots and pans, pillows and porcelain tiles. Some, looking to capture those one-of-a-kind shower acoustics, performed ballads from their bathtubs. Tying the footage together was a frame of animated sunflowers, known for their ability to turn and face the sun.
“It was fun,” Clausius said of the tour. “Just being active in the Toronto music scene.”
Any such activity was welcome at the time, with the city’s live music venues shuttered for months. Subsequent waves of Covid-19 infections and renewed restrictions kept the stage lights off in Ontario’s capital for the better part of a year.
“It’s really scary. Before, when I was gigging, you would just go down College Street and Queen Street, and everything would be booming. You wouldn’t really know where you’d end up,” Clausius said. “We don’t know if that scene going to remain after this or how it’s going to be built back up.”
The streets of Toronto are quieter now, but the summer has brought a few hopeful whispers.
On July 16, the province moved into Step Three of its reopening plan, which allows for live shows to be held at 50 per cent capacity. Aside from a few weeks last summer, this marks the first time the city’s venues have been able to open since the initial lockdown. Twenty-four of them closed permanently in that period.
Clausius has seen some of her favourite venues vanish or on the brink. The B-Side Lounge — a space on College Street that regularly hosts open mics — is particularly important to her. Having closed up shop early last spring, its future is still uncertain.
“I’m releasing an album later this year. The last song is dedicated to all these places closing down,” Clausius said. “I have like ten musicians I met from the B-Side on that song.”
“It’s a really special place and it will definitely always be a part of my career.”
While the pandemic dealt a devastating blow to small businesses across the country, live music venues have been hit especially hard. The reason is rather simple.
“The business itself is one hundred per cent incompatible with the idea of social distancing,” said Evan Georgiades, owner of the Monarch Tavern in Little Italy. “It’s all about getting together in a crowded room with other like-minded, appreciative music lovers. Obviously, we can’t do that under the pandemic restrictions we’ve had to deal with.”
Wrapped around the corner of Clinton and Henderson Avenue, the Monarch is a natural meeting place. The two-story building hosts both a conventional bar upstairs and a live music venue at street level, boasting a yellow brick façade from a bygone era. Founded in 1927, it is one of Toronto’s oldest licensed establishments.
The building has seen its fair share of crises. Maybe that’s why Georgiades assumed the best when things closed down last March.
Maybe it was the yellow brick.
“Everyone was hoping it was gonna be a couple of weeks,” he recalled. “If we can just coordinate and shut this down, maybe we can avoid what’s going on in Italy and other countries in Europe.”
“We obviously didn’t do that.”
Things have been pretty quiet at the Monarch since.
While the latest loosening of restrictions is a welcome development, live music will likely be among the last things to return in full.
“We’re nowhere near going back to normal business,” Georgiades said in early June, close to two months before the province moved into Step Three of reopening. Since the initial shutdown, the industry has lost 92 per cent of its annual revenue, according to research conducted by the Canadian Live Music Association (CLMA).
And in Toronto — Canada’s largest music market — the situation has become particularly dire.
“Today, the very survival of Toronto’s live music ecosystem is at stake,” a CLMA report published last October states. “The COVID-19 pandemic has brought live music to a standstill, with no immediate prospect of a return to the way things were.”
That said, the way things were may not be worth returning to. Rapid development in the city’s downtown core has threatened live music venues for years, forced to contend with increasing property taxes and commercial rent. Nine venues closed in 2016, the year the city adopted an official strategy to protect the local music industry. Seven more — including the Central, the Hoxton, Soybomb HQ and Holy Oak — folded in the first three months of 2017. The closures coincided with a condo boom in the city, driving up the speculative price of downtown space, as reflected in a 2016 property value assessment that ushered in major tax increases across the province. Under the current system, taxes are calculated based on a property’s “highest and best use,” or its maximum profit potential. As condominiums set a new commercial standard, neighboring businesses are taxed based on what they could be, with changes phased in over a four-year period.
In 2017, approximately 65 per cent of commercial properties in the city saw tax hikes of at least 10 per cent, according to a report from the City of Toronto, while property tax doubled for buildings in more popular areas like downtown Yonge Street. With the increasing cost of urban space, many club owners saw their buildings sold to developers or their rents hiked to unsustainable heights, closing at a speed that got the city’s attention.
“Toronto’s music community lost a number of live venues in 2016, and sadly, that trend has continued during the first month of this year,” wrote Mayor John Tory and Councillor Josh Colle in a 2017 joint statement. “We understand that it has become more difficult for music venues to find and hold onto affordable, accessible spaces, especially in Toronto’s downtown neighborhoods.”
Affordability is still a major concern for the city’s music community. In a survey conducted by the CLMA, 69 per cent of respondent venue owners cited property tax and rising rent as the foremost threats to their business leading up to the pandemic. Covid-19 has served as a stress test of sorts, exposing the precarity of a music scene already struggling against the pressures of urban development. For that reason, some see this as the perfect time to address these challenges, redirecting the glare of a public health emergency onto deeper threats to live music’s place in the city.
Long before becoming the Chief Operating Officer of the Downtown Yonge Business Improvement Association, Mark Garner was a music-loving teenager.
A Scarborough kid, he would often take the train downtown on weekends, drawn to some marquee attraction at the Horseshoe Tavern or the El Macambo. Otherwise, he and his friends would wander aimlessly down Yonge Street, seeing where the night took them. Then choked with bars, live music venues and theatres, the downtown corridor of Canada’s longest road always had something to offer.
“We would normally get off the train at Bloor and start walking,” Garner said. “And you would say ‘Hey, the Guess Who is playing! Look who it is! Its Rush! It’s Max Webster!’ All of these different bands that were iconic back in the day.”
In Garner’s youth, downtown was where the action was, drawing suburbanites in for a night of live entertainment. But a squeeze on the city’s scene now tells a much different story, one with a stark conclusion.
“At some point, to see live music, we’re going to have to go to Hamilton because there’s nothing left in Toronto,” Garner said.
The Hamilton threat is not necessarily new. It has circulated for years in a residential context, with Toronto’s escalating rental prices driving struggling artists out to its satellite cities. But it also applies to the places where these artists operate, similarly edged out of the downtown core by the pressures of development.
In 2017, Garner conducted an analysis of property values along Yonge Street, between Queen and Bloor. The study concluded that buildings appraised at $2.6 million in 2012 were valued at $12.2 million five years later. According to the city’s count, 424 commercial properties experienced tax hikes greater than 50 per cent that year alone, while 118 properties saw increases of 100 per cent or more. The municipal government introduced temporary tax caps in response to major increases, but the assessment process all but guarantees steepening annual costs, adding up over a four-year period.
“You are seeing taxation increases in excess of 500 per cent,” Garner said. “You might be able to survive the first year. But how do you survive the second, the third and the fourth paying taxes on 12.2-million versus 2.6?”
While that might be a question for property owners directly affected by the levy, commercial tenants are also implicated through rent hikes, as landlords try to absorb the new cost of their space.
Most live music venues belong to this latter category. The City of Toronto estimates that less than 10 per cent of small and medium-sized venues own their buildings.
Garner’s analysis provides partial context to that string of closures from five years back. While noise complaints and alleged safety code violations closed popular DIY spots like Soy Bomb HQ and Double Double Land, conventional venues both big and small faced exorbitant rent hikes.
Holy Oak, a queer-friendly, indie venue on Bloor Street West, folded in early 2017 after their monthly rent increased by $1,200.
“Our focus has always been on building and serving our community first and turning a profit second,” the venue’s owners wrote in a statement posted to Facebook. “A rent increase like that makes it untenable for us to continue here.”
The legendary Hard Rock Café would meet a similar fate, albeit on a different scale. Their rent doubled to about $2 million per year, according to Retail Insider.
Photo: booledozer.
The Hard Rock’s legacy was twofold. It was the second location to open in the world, a relic from a time before the chain found its trademark kitsch. Archival photos from the late 1970s show no giant guitar hanging over the sidewalk, just an understated checkerboard sign, bordered in pale neon.
Photo: City of Toronto Archives.
It inherited the corner in Dundas Square from the Friar’s Tavern, one of Yonge Street’s most popular nightclubs from 1964 to 1976, where a young Bob Dylan would audition a local group to back him for his 1966 world tour. The run was a follow-up to the singer songwriter’s infamous electric set at the Newport Folk Festival. For their part in that tour — and Dylan’s renunciation of his folk hero status — that group would gain a new name: The Band.
As the site of this union, the Friar’s Tavern was the birthplace of what Time Magazine referred to as “the most decisive moment in rock history.”
Photo: City of Toronto Archives.
It’s now a Shoppers Drug Mart.
Photo: Fran Reid.
That history is not totally lost, though. Through the BIA, Garner pushed for the establishment of the Friar’s Music Museum on the drugstore’s upper floor, a small gallery dedicated to the building’s storied past.
As customers wander the aisles downstairs, missed marketing opportunities abound.
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While the costs of operating in the city have increased exponentially in recent years, the fate of historic venues also depends on larger market changes.
Le Coq d’Or — another Yonge Street landmark where Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins would hold a residency for well over a decade — was replaced by Canada’s flagship HMV in 1991. The record store would carry on the tradition of live music, regularly hosting shows before the corporation ceased operations here in 2017, supplanted by the rise of online music consumption.
Both former tenants of 333 Yonge Street — whether peddlers of blues riffs or compact discs — were victims of broader shifts in the music industry.
It’s now home to a marijuana dispensary in a 13-floor retail complex, lending a bit of polish to the street’s seedy reputation. That polish speaks to the age-old tale of gentrification, one of the inevitable growing pains of urban development and, as Toronto Music Sector Development Officer Mike Tanner suggests, an unintended consequence of a thriving arts scene.
“Art always ennobles and enhances and elevates and animates the districts in which it lands, bit by bit by bit,” Tanner said. “It makes them cool. It makes them chic. It makes them desirable. And then, inevitably, property values begin to rise. The pressures of development come to bear in the area and art has to move on.”
Tanner essentially serves as a liaison between Toronto’s music industry and the municipal government, ensuring the value of a vibrant scene is recognized in City Hall, and helping business owners navigate a web of permits and programs, rules and regulations.
For the past 17 months, much of this work has involved directing venue owners and musicians to pandemic-related relief, but gentrification has been a growing concern since he took the post in 2014.
Tanner uses Yorkville as a local example, a former folk hub where a couple of big names got their start in the 1960s.
“This is where Joni Mitchell and Neil Young and people were playing. The whole neighbourhood was made up of little coffee houses where a lot of the Canadian folk and roots music scene germinated,” he said. “It’s about as far from that now as you can imagine.”
Yorkville is currently one of the city’s most expensive shopping and restaurant districts. The famed “Mink Mile” — a string of high-end retail stores running along the neighborhood’s southern edge — boasts Canada’s highest retail lease rates, averaging $285 per square foot in 2019.
It’s far from the inexpensive enclave that attracted artists there half a century ago.
They paved paradise to put up a… Prada shop?
These changes typically exclude the pioneers — whether people or places — that developed the scene in the first place.
“Subcultures are particularly vulnerable in the context of city redevelopment projects that target ‘authentic’ or ‘hip’ spaces for their exchange-value potential to the detriment of use-value,” writes Sara Ross, a professor of law at Dalhousie University, in an article published in the Journal of Law and Social Policy.
“Here, the originate subcultural occupiers might either be no longer able to afford the rent necessary to operate a sub-culturally-oriented venue, or the owner of the space may sell it out from under them for a greater profit.”
Ross references dual definitions of spatial value here: use-value and exchange-value.
The former refers to the intangible benefits associated with how a space is used. The use-value of a small music venue, for instance, might be measured in the opportunities it provides to local acts or the sense of community formed within the audience.
Measuring a space’s profit potential, exchange value is more easily defined, at least to the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC), a provincial agency that appraises property value based on its “highest and best use.” While the terms of this valuation may seem utterly subjective, “highest” is typically taken literally — the sky is the limit for developers looking to stake their claim on vertical space — while “best” refers to maximum profitability.
The MPAC envisions a property at its most productive, projecting a holographic blueprint atop existing structures, along with a hefty hypothetical price tag. For some property owners, it’s a great opportunity to cash in on heightened demand. But their price then sets a precedent, a new valuation of neighboring buildings based on what they could be.
“The little guy next door that only has a three-storey building is now going to get taxed at what they think is ‘highest and best value,’ based on what they build next door to them,” Garner said. “That is what’s decimating small independent businesses.”
Setting off neighborhood-wide tax increases, a single sale then gives developers greater leverage in securing other properties.
“That’s when the big guys come along and say ‘You’re going to be taxed at $20 million. Why don’t you sell the building for $5 million?’ What they do is accumulate multiple properties on that block and make a huge development,” Garner said.
This practice has accelerated over the past decade. Between 2010 and 2018, 165,828 condominium units were constructed in the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area (CMA), according to a report from Toronto City Planning. Seventy-two per cent of development projects were concentrated in the Downtown and Central Waterfront Area. But greater supply did little to bring down costs, with the average sales price increasing by $259,000 — or 77 per cent — driving the average monthly rent up 31 per cent.
Commercial prices have followed a similar trend. Between 2012 and 2021, the average price for mid-sized retail space in downtown Toronto increased by approximately 52 per cent, from $20.27 to $30.79 per square foot, according to data from the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board.
While condo developments are known to drive land value up, they are necessary in accommodating Toronto’s rapidly growing population.
In 2019, Toronto was the fastest growing city in Canada and the United States, according to a study conducted by Ryerson’s Centre for Urban Research and Land Development, with metropolitan Toronto welcoming 127, 575 newcomers that year alone. It’s since been overtaken by Phoenix, AZ, but the city’s population is expected to reach 3.95 million — increasing by 32 per cent — by 2046, according to provincial projections.
Condominiums effectively manage that type of growth within a limited space, but the rippling costs of their construction threaten the businesses that draw people to the city in the first place, whether it be local mom-and-pop shops, restaurants or independent music venues. Garner says that while residential development is necessary, it needs to be tempered by preservation, protecting certain spaces from being priced out. With the continued conflation of value with profit, spaces that serve creative communities are particularly vulnerable, not only jeopardizing Toronto’s musical history, but its musical future too.
“If you live in a three-storey neighborhood somewhere in Toronto, odds are you’re hearing music. You’re hearing that student practicing for their band recital. You’re hearing a musician that lives in your neighborhood practicing for their gig next week,” Garner said. “Are you telling me there’s no musicians in those vertical neighborhoods, in that 62-storey tower at the corner of Yonge and Gerrard? No, they’re still there. But where do they go to practice? Where is that performance space?”
Business owners vying for space in Toronto’s downtown core are forced to adjust some of their most basic calculations. As an anecdote, Garner recalls the story of a Yonge Street restaurateur whose monthly rent rose 30 per cent — from $9,600 to $12,500 — following the 2016 tax assessment.
“How many more burgers does he need to sell?” Garner said. “That’s the reality of taxation. You either have to change the price on a product or you’re going to have to sell more product.”
He adds that the equation is not easily applied to live music venues, hobbled by the space that they occupy.
“How can you fit more people in a space when your capacity is maybe 200?”
In July 2020, after the first wave of infections, Ontario moved into Stage Three of reopening. The cap on indoor gatherings was 50, bringing the friction between live music and public health restrictions into sharp focus.
And it’s not just in Toronto.
Jon Evenchick, co-owner of Live! On Elgin in Ottawa, took advantage of the window of opportunity last summer. He put on eight shows in the intimate venue, located on the second floor of a diner on Elgin Street, half of which sold out. Operating at 30 per cent capacity, that meant about 27 people a night. Tickets were sold to tables rather than individuals, set up in a loose array around the room.
For Evenchick, it’s an example of the disproportionate impact that the pandemic has had on the live music industry.
“I can sell 25 tickets where I used to be able to sell 75,” he said, adding that government supports like rent and wage subsidies and the Canada Emergency Business Account (CEBA) have helped cover the loss. But these programs are generally inflexible, bringing anxieties of their own.
“You’re still incurring debt just to pay your rent through this. I’d love to see CEBA increase the percentage forgivable based on how much a business has lost,” he said. “Our only business is music and theatre, so if we can’t get people in seats, we’re not making money to pay our bills.
“You’ve got to look at how much some businesses have lost compared to others.”
While these programs were originally set to expire in July, they have since been extended into the fall, with $12 billion set aside in the 2021-22 federal budget to supplement rent and wage subsidies. It’s a welcome development for a variety of businesses in Canada’s hospitality industries, 60 per cent of which were expected to go under if federal supports were cut off early, according to the Coalition of Hardest Hit Businesses. The group was formed to advocate for sectors that rely explicitly on travel or public gatherings, with member organizations ranging from hotels to opera companies.
Evenchick sees the need for continued support in bridging through to the other side of the pandemic, but repaying these debts requires getting back to business in full, which involves more than just easing restrictions.
“The first goal needs to be finding a way to convince your average show-goer that it's safe to come back out to see live music in person. Because there are a lot of people who won't show up after,” he said. “It might end up being two years by the time people are allowed to have full capacity venues again. There's a little bit of anxiety that builds up over the course of two years sitting in your living room.”
The living room is where “live” music has taken place for the past 17 months, yet another experience relegated to a computer screen. While far from a perfect substitute, many venue owners have relied on livestreams to continue selling something, either broadcasting shows live from their stages or releasing pre-recorded segments. But a renewed stay-at-home order issued on April 3, 2021, prohibited venues from hosting virtual concerts.
While the order permitted certain non-essential retail to continue operating at limited capacity, along with other media industries like film and television production, music venues were excluded from the list.
In an email sent to members of the Canadian Live Music Association, President and CEO Erin Benjamin broke down the double logic of these new measures.
“This is the spirit of the legislation… film yes, live-streaming music from venues, no,” she wrote. “Can a film/production crew film live music for future broadcast in a closed live music venue? Yes. Can you do the same in your own venue based on the legislation? No.”
Many owners saw this as an oversight of an industry-wide shift brought on by the pandemic, presenting yet another roadblock in their efforts to navigate ever evolving public health restrictions.
“The moment we try to do something proactive… we’re just getting hit on the head with a rubber mallet,” Jeff Cohen, owner of the Horseshoe Tavern, told the Canadian Press following the announcement. “I’m a prudent guy, so I’m like, ‘OK, we can’t livestream.’ But you can stand in line at a retail store that’s non-essential to buy a skirt? Like, that makes no sense at all.”
Covid-19 has posed unique challenges to the live music industry, but margins have always been tight for independent club owners, most of whom are quick to admit that their line of work is hardly lucrative. The business pays off in other ways, though, with the cultural service that they provide to the community taking precedent over profit. But while keeping the lights on over a beloved artform is reward enough for most, even the noblest of intentions run up the utilities bill.
“It’s just such a low profit margin business model when your main focus is on the art,” Jon Evenchick said. “You’ve got a product that really hasn’t inflated much over the past five years. The show I would sell a $10 ticket for when we first opened still sells for a $10 ticket. But property tax goes up every year, rent goes up.”
Ticket pricing strategies typically call for a balance between accessibility and profitability, keeping tickets cheap enough to draw audiences in while upholding the perceived value of the show. Price tickets too highly and you risk alienating potential patrons.
For independent venues, $10 seems to be the golden number. But even that’s a little steep for certain show-goers.
“You see people turning around and walking away because there’s a $10 cover. It should be $30,” said Jay Swinn, a roots musician who has gigged around the city for the past decade. “Especially in a city like Toronto, where everything's so expensive and rent is crazy. That should match the music and how much people pay for entertainment. It’s absolutely not valued enough.”
It’s no mystery that the perceived value of entertainment has changed in recent years, with the rise of social media and internet streaming opening a floodgate of online content. Not only have these changes decimated the value of recorded music — with per-stream payout models doling out fractions of a cent for every play — but they’ve also intensified the competition for audiences’ attention.
Alongside the loss of adequate venues and difficulties accessing public funding, Music Canada cited a general shift in the entertainment landscape as a major threat to the live music sector in its comprehensive 2015 report, Live Music Measures Up.
“The live music industry in Ontario is also facing the challenge of increased competition – not only from other live music events, but from other forms of live and digital forms of leisure and entertainment,” the report states.
“Audiences now have access to a wide variety of options for spending their increasingly limited leisure time. Those same audiences also find themselves with less and less disposable income. As a result, audiences are becoming more selective with their choices for entertainment.”
In terms of music, internet streaming has served to eradicate many of the middlemen associated with the traditional industry, collapsing the distance between artists and their audiences. Could music venues be among that wreckage, yet another analog artifact discarded in the digital era?
Most musicians would say no, insisting that small stages remain a vital part of the gig. A recent Abacus Data poll revealed that 85 per cent of artists would struggle to make a living if they couldn’t perform live.
Yet, for some patrons, that $10 cover charge remains a sticking point, something Swinn says marks a misunderstanding of what it means to be a musician today.
“I play a number of places where you pass the hat. And you see it all the time, people are hesitant to throw anything in,” he said. “People don't understand the value of supporting live music, and that this is how people make a living.”
For Swinn, that support also applies to where local artists make a living, the barrooms and theatres where audiences are ultimately built. After all, those on stage are only half of the equation, a fact made abundantly clear over the past year-and-a-half.
“There’s nothing like being in the room, knowing you have something to do with what’s going on there,” said Evan Georgiades of the Monarch Tavern. “It’s just this beautiful magical night of music. It’s palpable. You can feel that people are going to go home with a memory that they might hold on to for the rest of their lives.”
“That’s really something only live music can deliver on.”
It’s an apt description of the intangible value of independent venues, sparking instant, hyper-local communities across the city. These moments might look (or sound) different based on the show — dictated by the space, the artist, the audience — but they’re all part of a bigger song, one that some fear is falling on deaf ears.
“The two things in my mind are community and culture,” Swinn said. “Those are the most important things in a city that should be prioritized above all else. The prices in Toronto have gone so crazy like they did in New York or London years ago.”
Between 2007 and 2015, London lost 35 per cent of its live music venues to gentrification, rising property taxes and strict noise by-laws. Alarmed at the rate of the closures, the municipal government developed a preservation strategy, which included the extension of tax incentives to independent venues and the adoption of the “agent of change” principle, requiring residential developers to foot the bill for soundproofing if they build next to an existing venue.
After more than a decade in decline, the number of independent venues in London ticked upward in 2019, with six new spaces added to the city’s official register.
For some, the situation in London — along with other major metropolises — was a harbinger of things to come in Canada’s music capital, prompting similar calls for action.
“The City of Toronto continues to experience massive amounts of redevelopment, especially in the downtown core,” wrote Councillor Josh Colle in a 2016 notice of motion urging the adoption of a coordinated strategy to preserve the city’s live scene. “This development not only drives up property values and commercial rents, but also creates new residential neighbourhoods that often conflict with the business operations of live music venues.”
Recommendations included greater collaboration between City Hall and members of the live music community, changing regulations to encourage the establishment of new venues and reviewing successful strategies from other jurisdictions.
Cities around the world “have explored the use of tax incentives, heritage designations, zoning changes, noise mitigation measures, reducing red tape, and many other strategies to preserve and encourage robust music scenes,” Colle wrote.
Heritage designations have long been put to use in Toronto. Three-story brick facades still line stretches of Yonge Street, many dating back to the Victorian era. But they now house much different tenants.
A 116-year-old post office on Charles Street now provides a stately brownstone shell for a McDonald’s and a Starbucks.
Kitty corner to that is the former home of Barron Groceries, a sturdy structure in red Victorian brick originally built in 1889.
It’s now a Shopper’s Drug Mart.
While designations have been central to the preservation of a certain historical aesthetic, Mike Tanner, Toronto’s Music Sector Development Officer, says they ultimately miss the mark in terms of protecting live music venues.
“You’ll get beautiful buildings which have been preserved around a Banana Republic,” he said. “That’s fine. It’s better than the wrecking ball coming in and destroying the architecture of a bygone era, but it’s not quite what we’re looking for here.”
Considering heritage designations are tied to property, they are generally effective in preserving physical structures, which explains some of the unlikely occupancies. That’s not to say, however, that these protections can only be applied to singular buildings.
Under Part V of the Ontario Heritage Act, entire neighborhoods can be classified as valuable historical sites, or Heritage Conservation Districts (HCDs). All properties within these zones are protected, requiring owners to apply for permits to perform any alteration or demolition.
These districts can also stipulate what can be built within its borders. An HCD along Queen Street, for example, limits the height of new buildings to six stories in a bid to maintain its historical character.
“It’s a little bit of a deterrent for developers looking to maximize their investment by going up as high as they can and building as many residential units as possible,” Tanner said.
According to the city’s heritage designation register, a stretch of Yonge Street between College and Bloor is currently under appeal as a potential HCD. The designation would slow the rate of development in the area, protecting certain buildings while ensuring new projects lend to the district’s historical look.
Heritage designation — whether granted to a single property or a neighborhood — is one way to keep development at bay, but it is far from a perfect answer. For one, owners of designated sites can challenge the rules applied to their property by applying for a permit to alter or demolish the structure. City Council and the Preservation Board then have 90 days to deliberate, weighing the costs and benefits of any such development. In some cases, these applications are approved, on the condition that some vestige of the property’s original character is preserved.
The Silver Dollar Room, a live music venue on College Street, is one such case.
Originally constructed in 1957 as an extension to the Hotel Waverley, the Silver Dollar’s legacy spanned generations and genres, hosting anything from blues to punk rock, with hip hop and EDM bleeding up through the floorboards (the downstairs section was home to the Comfort Zone, an after-hours club).
A landmark of Toronto’s live music scene, the venue gained official Heritage Designation Status in 2015.
But, after being sold to the Fitzrovia Real Estate group three years later, the building was demolished to make way for a new residential complex called “The Waverley.”
The hotel’s original title, however, wasn’t the only thing that developers would hold on to.
As a condition attached to the Silver Dollar Room’s heritage designation, the city demanded the developers reconstruct the venue at the base of the new building. Blueprints had to accommodate the room’s exact dimensions to replicate its original acoustics and feel. Meanwhile, the bar’s interior elements — the terrazzo flooring, the painted murals on the wall, and the signature circular sign — were also rescued from the wrecking ball, carefully removed to be reassembled upon the project’s completion.
It presents a potential middle ground for the city, committing to historical preservation all while respecting the developer’s claim to coveted urban space.
There is one problem, though. There is no guarantee that the Silver Dollar Room will continue to operate as a live music venue.
While the city might be able to step in to preserve the space itself, under the current Provincial Planning Act, they cannot enforce how the space is used. The powers of preservation only apply to the physical structure.
It’s led some to consider a broader definition of historical significance and the legislation drafted to protect it, as outlined in Music Canada’s 2015 report, The Mastering of a Music City.
“For centuries it was the tangible that drove preservation – the bricks and the mortar. But today there is an ongoing international conversation about the intangible. In Toronto, music landmarks have generated the greatest public response,” the report states. “While this intangible element of music landmarks may drive the bid for designation, the tangible elements – the building, interior and exterior architectural details – continue to be what is designated.
“Still, the greatest challenge with heritage designation is that while you can designate a building, and perhaps interior elements, you cannot prescribe how the property is used. You can only encourage it.”
Despite the city’s assurances, The Silver Dollar Room will continue to operate as a live music venue only if the new owners decide to do so.
For music lovers, the greatest measure of a live show’s value might lie in its most intangible elements; its ephemerality, a single, fleeting moment immediately magnified in memory; its reciprocity, the role the listener plays in that moment; its energy, an audience awash in a shared sensory experience.
Its intoxicating, Dionysian even, and far from the language spoken in a place like City Hall.
“It can’t just be the warm and fuzzies,” Mark Garner said of efforts to advocate for Toronto’s live music scene. “If you’re not showing them numbers, then the government doesn’t know the repercussions of their investment. They just want to know if they spend one dollar that they’ll be getting two bucks back.”
It’s led advocates from across the country to change their approach, framing the value of live music in terms municipal governments will understand.
In October 2020, the CLMA published a report called Re:Venues — A Case and Path Forward for Toronto’s Live Music Industry. The report found that live music in Toronto generates approximately $850 million per year, along with about 10,500 full-time jobs.
A similar report from Sound Diplomacy states that live music in Calgary and Edmonton collectively generated $2.9 billion and around 21,000 jobs in 2017.
Erin Benjamin, President and CEO of the Canadian Live Music Association, is just one advocate treating these figures as a bullhorn to bend the ears of policy makers.
“When we tell our story to government, we have to start with our economic foot forward because numbers talk,” Benjamin said.
Much of that story centres around the benefits of diverse local economies, a symbiotic relationship between clusters of independent businesses. Multiple studies show that for every $100 spent locally, an estimated $68 remains in the community, as local business owners are more likely to support their neighbours than multinational chains. Within this system, Benjamin says that live music venues provide a marquee attraction, setting off a flurry of economic activity.
“Everything from restaurants to Ubers to corner stores. When you’re going out for the night to that concert, you are interacting economically with a variety of stakeholders that would not otherwise see your dollar,” she said.
“So many lightbulbs go off with politicians and bureaucrats when you start to paint that picture for them.”
But, as with anything else, that picture gets darker with Covid-19 in the mix. Alongside the economic potential outlined in the Re:Venues report are the losses incurred during the pandemic.
If numbers talk, negative numbers scream.
Between March and October 2020, the closure of live music venues cost Toronto’s economy an estimated $99 million in Gross Provincial Product, the measure of all goods and services produced in Ontario. At the time of the report’s publication, 11 venues had closed permanently. That figure has since climbed to 24.
While it was the pandemic that ultimately brought business to a grinding halt, the report also addresses the hardships preceding it, reframing Covid-19 as an opportunity to address long term challenges to the live music sector.
“Venues have been threatened by exponentially rising rents, taxes, and insurance rates; development pressures; and a shifting entertainment landscape,” the report states. “There’s never been a better time to highlight the economic and cultural contributions of Toronto’s live music venues, or to turn our collective attention to how we might help them survive.”
That type of attention marks a shift in an industry that has historically been reluctant to organize.
Working together “is not something that the live music industry, until recently, has been any good at or had any interest in,” Benjamin said, adding that the CLMA — the country’s foremost live music lobbyist group — was only formed in 2014. It’s new to the negotiation table, compared to other established trade organizations long vying for government support.
“They’ve been arms-out, competitive, territorial entrepreneurs who don’t trust each other. They haven’t historically seen the advantages of working together,” Benjamin said, adding that this has “changed fundamentally” over the past year.
Independent venue owners have since banded together to back the broader efforts of the CLMA, voicing their specific needs and concerns. The Canadian Independent Venue Coalition, for example, was established to represent the interests of bricks and mortar music venues in negotiations with government. Love You Live — a collective of 30 Toronto venue owners — was formed to address issues unique to the city.
United in crisis, their collective voice has found new resonance. Urgency, after all, is said to be the uncle of change.
“A bit of a silver lining with Covid is, as music venues get organized, we’ve probably done more in the last eight months than the last five years,” said Shaun Bowring, owner of the Baby G and the Garrison, in a December Toronto Music Advisory Committee meeting.
Bowring, who is an outspoken member of both coalitions, added that while this level of collaboration was born out of the pandemic, it has shed light on shared challenges previously assumed to be personal plights.
“We found a lot of common ground. We found out about insurance. We found out about other issues that we were all dealing with. On our own we didn’t know,” he said. “We had very frank discussions about financing and who was stable and who wasn’t, and we really opened doors that were not open before.”
Aside from increasing tax pressure, securing commercial insurance has been a consistent challenge for Toronto venue owners, who find themselves lumped into a high-risk hospitality class alongside adult entertainment and nightclubs. The live music industry has seen the pool of willing insurers dwindle, sending premiums skyward.
“Commercial insurance rates for live music venues have risen between 200-400 per cent over the last 10 years,” Bowring wrote in a Love You Live press release. “Now, the unregulated insurance industry in Ontario has presented predatory practices making it near impossible for many in our industry to continue operating our businesses.”
Its yet another thorn in the side of an already beleaguered industry, one that finds itself on the losing end of an important calculation for insurance companies.
“The bar business is not an easy one to make money at, and insurance has gone through the roof,” Evan Georgiades said, explaining that premiums are generally calculated based on the proportion of sales from alcohol versus food. “If you don’t sell very much food, they will ring you for an inordinately high premium.”
While there is a clear correlation between alcohol and risk, the metric presents a difficult standard for businesses that rely on crowds.
“If people go to a standing room to watch a band, you’re lucky if you sell them a couple of drinks,” Georgiades said. “They’re not there for the food.”
The rapid increase in rates can be attributed to a longer trend of insurers pulling out of riskier businesses, but it has accelerated over the past year, as insurance companies seek to mitigate their own risk in paying out pandemic-related claims. As a result, certain venues have been denied commercial liability coverage or renewals of expired policies. Considering insurance is a condition on most commercial leases — and thus their claim to space — it poses an existential threat to live music across Ontario.
In response, advocacy groups have pressed government for lasting solutions, and they’ve covered some ground.
In March, the City of Toronto announced plans to create a group insurance program specifically tailored to live music venues, granting them access to discounted premium rates. The city also intends to cover the cost of a one-time quarterly instalment should a venue come up short on its payment.
The move marks a new level of responsiveness on the part of the municipal government, potentially turning a corner on the often-fraught relationship between the arts and political administrations.
“We’re hoping to use this kind of reset as an opportunity to work more closely with cultural event producers, cultural infrastructure and entrepreneurs in different parts of the city and in new ways,” Mike Tanner said.
Part of that involves taking stock of what the municipality has the power to change.
“The city doesn’t have mechanism to get in between a landlord and a tenant and say, ‘you can only charge X if you’re renting to a music venue, but you’re allowed to charge Y if you’re renting to a Taco Bell.’ We shouldn’t have that ability to meddle in the private sector,” Tanner said. “But what we do have some purview over is the property taxes.”
In May 2020, the Toronto Music Advisory Council unanimously approved a motion to permanently include music venues in the Creative Co-Location Facilities Property Tax Subclass Designation, a special tax class designed to protect the city’s creative spaces. Certain live music venues now qualify for a 50 per cent property tax reduction.
“When Covid hit, we understood very quickly what pressure music venues were under,” Tanner said. “We were able to shift the discussion inside City Hall into a higher gear, and have it really focused on being a property tax reduction for landlords renting to music venues.”
Forty-five venues in Toronto were deemed eligible for the program in 2020, all meeting a specific set of criteria. For one, they have to look like a music venue. A fixed stage, a sound booth, and stage lighting are all among the requirements. Live music must have been presented on the premises for a minimum of 144 days of the previous year, and artists must have been compensated for performances.
The program is geared toward smaller venues, with a maximum capacity no greater than 1,500 persons.
The Monarch fit the bill, but its unique layout demonstrates the program’s precise parameters. Since its venue portion is located on the ground floor, the tax relief only applies to half of the building, shaving off a quarter the total cost.
“It would have been nice if we could have applied it to the whole building, because it’s one liquor license and it is technically one business,” Georgiades said. “But we’re taking what we can get, and we’re certainly pleased that those steps were taken because it does make a huge difference.”
The tax designation is the first of its kind in the world, and Tanner considers it a “game changer” for the venues that survive the pandemic. After all, that is the ultimate objective.
“You hear all this talk about building back better, reimagining what things could be after the pandemic, and that really revolves around looking at things with an equity lens,” he said. “We don’t want to help the music scene just build back to the status quo of what it was before the pandemic. We want to encourage new things to happen.”
While Covid-19 would ultimately accelerate the process, the legislation was passed with that long future in mind, bolstering Toronto’s live scene against the weight of the city’s growth.
For Mark Garner, who has tracked the steady rise of property tax rates for years, it’s a step in the right direction. But slashing costs only goes so far under highest and best use taxation policies, a system that promises to deliver us squarely back to the status quo.
“If your building is $12.6 [million] this year, and you reduce it by 50 per cent, you’re going to pay tax on half of that,” he said. “But then if the building goes up to 20 million next year, you're going back up to that number again.”
Garner said he would like to see greater exemptions for performance spaces, taxed not on the value of the buildings they occupy, but on the revenue they generate. If not, the current designation will need to be flexible to match the inevitable climb of property value.
“Otherwise, what you’re doing is delaying the issue,” he said.
For venue owners like Georgiades, any concrete action is a marked improvement, providing much needed relief now.
“I’m not raking it in as an owner. I’m just trying to pay my bills and make some kind of living,” he said. “So, every dollar that goes out of the business is one dollar that I can’t spend on my kids’ education.”
“Anything that comes along that can save us any kind of money is a welcome change.”
These changes — whether plans for a group insurance program or property tax relief — are local responses to global challenges, addressing the puzzle of preserving a city’s unique cultural flavour while promoting growth and development.
It’s a battle fought primarily at the municipal level, but other branches of government have pledged similar support.
On April 19, 2021, the federal government announced that their upcoming budget would include significant support for the recovery of the country’s music industry, earmarking $50 million to help “the live music sector, including music venues, weather the pandemic.” It’s a healthy slice of a $300 million recovery fund directed to all Heritage, Arts, Culture and Sports sectors.
“Today, our collective voice, which we all worked so hard to raise, has been heard,” Erin Benjamin said in a press release following the announcement. “This support will help safeguard our nation’s critical cultural infrastructure — and the incredible people, artists and community whose passion and livelihood is live music.”
While the wellbeing of bars, clubs and pubs might seem low on the list of parliamentary priorities, Covid-19 has brought these two worlds closer together, blurring lines arbitrarily drawn between art and administration, entertainment and enterprise. As Benjamin sees it, those lines have historically classified art as leisure, some unnecessary beauty that springs from stable society, only to be stripped at the first sign of crisis.
“We still believe that the arts are a luxury. We believe that artists are always looking for handouts. It’s something we’ve mythologized in a ridiculous way,” she said. “When you ask people how they spent their time during the pandemic, so many of them will say consuming live music online.”
In 2020, global music streaming revenues rose by 18.5 per cent, accruing 443 million paid subscribers, according to a year-end report from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).
Two Torontonians — Drake and the Weeknd — were among the list of top-streamed artists. For Benjamin, these stars are the final products of a real machinery, manned by real people in pursuit of real professions.
“The people that work in live music are our neighbours. They're our community. If we lose live music, those who we love will lose their livelihoods,” Benjamin said. “I don't think Canadians really understand what is happening here in the hardest hit sectors. We're working on putting a more personal face on this because these aren't just the Drakes and the Celines and the Alanises. These are people that we know and love and whose company we have enjoyed in the past. And certainly, whose music has moved us and changed our lives.”
That might lend to the value of local venues, insisting that the path to the world stage inevitably starts on a much smaller one. But underpinning all practical arguments is one that is ever more vital.
“We need music to feel better, full stop,” Benjamin said.