After some aesthetic discussions around the design of the poster the night before, the show was ready to be announced. Shows for small artists are fewer and far between, so it was exciting to be able to announce a show, play with friends and foster some sort of scene. However, just as I was about to announce the show to start promotion, my partner called to let me know the show was cancelled. The venue had closed. There is something painfully efficient about losing a show before anybody has even been told it exists: there are no tickets to refund and no public disappointment to manage. Nothing dramatic happened, it was just an opportunity erased. In an artist's life, these modest dates are how a body of work becomes a career, in a city's life, they are how a scene learns what it sounds like.
At first, it just felt like the kind of mundane misfortune that frequents musicians: plans change, rooms fall through, the conditions are rarely ideal unless you’re riding high. However, the closure of this venue was not falling in isolation, it’s another in the pandemic of venue closures. Across Sydney, the list of rooms lost – or about to be lost – had begun to read less like an ordinary hospitality shift, but rather as a cultural evacuation as we lose Lazy Thinking, Mary's Underground, Divine Playhouse and Bar 185 (to name but a few).
According to SydneyMusic.net co-founder Joe Hardy, these spaces hosted more than 690 live music events in the twelve months between July 2025 and June 2026. Lazy Thinking alone accounted for 283 original music events and Mary's Underground 102. The ridiculously unjust closure of Divine Playhouse had months of programming cancelled before it could even begin. The number does not describe a collection of rooms that occasionally permitted a band to set up in the corner, it describes an entire layer of Sydney's musical infrastructure disappearing in plain sight.
In the same way we romanticise and honour the dead, venues are often spoken about infinitely more sentimentally once they close. Stories are shared of the charm of the sticky floors, terrible bathrooms and a mythologised night somebody saw a future festival headliner play to 80 people. However, a small room is not just a place dropped into conversation when you want to seem more into music than others. It is also a workplace, a testing ground, a meeting place and, at its best, a form of public culture and community. It is where artists learn how to hold an audience, where a promoter can curate challenging programming, where scenes recognise themselves and where musicians who have not yet been validated by playlists, algorithms or industry gatekeepers can begin to build a career.
"In the same way we romanticise and honour the dead, venues are often spoken about infinitely more sentimentally once they close. Stories are shared of the charm of the sticky floors, terrible bathrooms and a mythologised night somebody saw a future festival headliner play to 80 people."
This is why the threatened rooms of lower capacity and below matter so much, and why I’m sure the TikTok entertainment centre will be just fine. Over seven years, Mary's Underground presented more than 1,000 shows, hosted 3,000 artists and sold 150,000 tickets from its room beneath Macquarie Place. Its operators worked predominantly in the 300-to-450-capacity market: precisely the stages now under greatest pressure and, arguably, those of greatest developmental importance.
"Every industry and career needs stepping stones; landmark moments of success and momentum that provide the energy to continue to ascend," Kenny Graham, Mary’s co-founder tells me. "The first time an artist sells out a 300-capacity room will live with them forever. Or the fan who gleefully retells the story of seeing a now-festival headliner in front of 300 people 'back in the day'." There were innumerable local launches, all-ages shows and visits from international artists. There was also the night Lorde appeared at a Lorde-themed club night and danced among her most devoted fans. It is the kind of event that cannot be reproduced at scale because its force comes from proximity: the collapse, for a few hours, of the distance between artist and audience.
View this post on Instagram
"The energy in that room, during a moment like that, is hard to beat," says Graham. "The emotional connections found at intimate live shows nurture the scene and help provide a soundtrack to how your city is feeling right now."
Mary's Underground announced its closure in May 2026 after what its owners described as declining bar sales, increasing costs, and "sky-high Sydney land values", all of which made the under-500-capacity model unsustainable. It is tempting to classify this as a story about a hospitality business that no longer worked. But that description reveals the trap. For decades, live music has existed inside an old handshake agreement: artists take most or all of the door while the venue survives by selling alcohol. The art is expected to pay for itself indirectly, one beer at a time.
Jim Flanagan, founder of Dulwich Hill's not-for-profit venue Lazy Thinking, believes that contract has broken down. People are drinking significantly less than they did even ten years ago, a change he sees as socially positive. Younger people also have dramatically less spending power than previous generations, while rent, insurance, staffing, stock and virtually every other cost of opening a room have climbed. The smaller the venue, the more brutally those elements combined are felt.
View this post on Instagram
Lazy Thinking hosted more than 850 shows in three years. It charged artists no venue hire, supplied technical and non-technical staff without charge, and did not turn away people who could not afford a ticket. This made the room unusually safe in the most practical sense: playing there did not require a new artist to accept a financial risk they could scarcely afford. "Every week there are artists playing among their first, if not their first-ever, shows," Flanagan says. "Those artists feel comfortable knowing that this is part of the fabric of what the venue and its community caters for and supports."
The room lost money each month, sustained through donors, grants, one-off contributions and, increasingly, a membership model. Then its landlord gave notice that Lazy Thinking would need to vacate. Rather than spend four more months fundraising to subsidise a building it already knew it would lose, the organisation brought its closing date forward to 29 August 2026. Lazy Thinking itself will continue through its record label, artist residency, sync and education programs while it searches for a permanent home. Its room, however, is gone for now.
Divine Playhouse, a new queer arts space in a deconsecrated CBD church, was forced to close within days of opening after Christian protests and action from its landlord over allegedly "offensive trade”, despite their compromises to please the community and the incredibly contribution Heaps Gay has made to Sydney culture (especially those at their recent protest sing along). The loss was not simply economic; it exposed how quickly a space for queer expression could be silenced when cultural tenancy was insecure. Elsewhere, insurance, leases, noise controls and the precarity of borrowed or rented buildings have each played their part.
View this post on Instagram
Different causes do not mean unrelated failures. They reveal the many ways a city can lose a room when it has no durable system for protecting one. Grants may buy a better PA or install an accessible bathroom, and those are worthy investments. But a grant cannot make a landlord renew a lease. It cannot lower the market value of inner-city land, guarantee affordable insurance, or turn dwindling alcohol sales due to ever-higher taxes, into a sustainable cultural economy. Public investment remains attached to a building only for as long as its private owner allows the culture to remain there.
Artists absorb the consequences first. When the smallest stages disappear, larger rooms inherit more approaches and can afford to become more selective. A local act is asked to make the increasingly improbable leap from a DIY debut to a 500- or 1,200-capacity venue without the rungs between. The risk moves away from property owners and institutions and lands on the people with the least capital: emerging musicians, independent promoters, technicians and small audiences.
"Losing small rooms and important stages plain and simply narrows the opportunity for artists to find their audiences," Graham explains. "A fertile music scene would have rooms for certain genres; currently we are rapidly running out of rooms to house any genre. When art is silenced, our world becomes less exciting, less inspiring and more easily homogenised." As a music editor myself, the homogenised shift is apparent. The artists that fill my inbox are starting to become a lot less diverse in sound, whilst my taste is specific, it is pretty broad and I’m having to find alternative means to find new artists.
The homogenisation is aesthetic, but it is also social and geographic. Flanagan worries about the "donutification" of Sydney: cultural infrastructure concentrating within a small, affluent inner-city ring while affordable, local and strange spaces vanish elsewhere. Larger venues cannot regularly program noise, improvisation or uncompromising experimental work on commercial terms. Artists who can already sell tickets remain visible; those without money, connections or immediate algorithmic appeal are squeezed out. Audiences lose the chance to encounter work they did not already know to search for. "Making music has never been more democratic, while the process of actually finding an audience becomes less democratic," Flanagan says.
"Different causes do not mean unrelated failures. They reveal the many ways a city can lose a room when it has no durable system for protecting one. Grants may buy a better PA or install an accessible bathroom, and those are worthy investments. But a grant cannot make a landlord renew a lease."
That contradiction should trouble us. A musician can now make professional-sounding work in a bedroom with comparatively little money, then release it instantly to the world, see bedroom pop. Yet, to play live is a larger leap of faith, live performance is one of the few remaining democratic methods to form genuine connection and to develop. An artist does not need to be selected by ‘New Music Friday’, to hone their craft, they need a room, an audience and the opportunity to become better in public.
It is also one of the few places where music can still generate meaningful income. Streaming pays artists vanishingly little; touring, travel and production cost more; rehearsal and recording space is disappearing too (R.I.P to my beloved Zen Studios, who even gave the band a bottle of Prosecco for Christmas!). The venue crisis and the crisis facing independent artists are not separate stories rather, they are the same broken ecosystem viewed from opposite sides of the stage. There is, Flanagan insists, "zero demand problem". People are attending shows in extraordinary numbers. Great music is being made. What no longer works reliably is everything constructed between those two facts.
Flanagan argues that independent music has much to learn from theatre, opera and classical music, where not-for-profit structures, donors and sophisticated philanthropic programs are unremarkable. There are people with the resources and inclination to give back to the culture that formed them; increasingly, as he puts it, they grew up listening to Public Enemy and the Saints, not only Rachmaninoff. Australia's independent music sector has barely begun to invite that support.
There are other practical interventions already within reach. Arena and streaming levies could direct a fraction of the wealth generated at the most profitable end of music towards its grassroots. Secure cultural tenancies, rate and tax relief, insurance reform and community acquisition could give venues control over the ground beneath them. Councils could open underused town halls, libraries and civic buildings to artists rather than leaving publicly maintained spaces dormant for most of the week. Special entertainment precincts can offer longer trading hours and greater protection from noise complaints, although they cannot solve rent or insecure tenure alone.
View this post on Instagram
Most importantly, cultural policy must stop treating a venue only as a private operator in a private building. When a room presents hundreds of artists a year, trains workers, creates safe gathering places and gives a suburb a cultural identity, it is performing a public function. We understand that galleries, libraries and theatres require protection because a city without them would be intellectually and emotionally diminished. A 200-capacity band room is no less capable of changing a life simply because it has a bar and a stickier floor.
Lazy Thinking's next room is intended to reflect a different social contract: a community that believes the space is important helps sustain it, while the performance rather than the sale of alcohol becomes the primary reason for gathering. That optimism is not naive as it began with an accurate diagnosis. We do not need to persuade people to make music, and we do not need to persuade people to see it. We need to build and protect the places where those impulses can meet.
Bands are accustomed to improvising, artists are practised in making something from what remains and I have no doubt we will see a rise of guerilla shows in whatever spaces artists can break into. Yet, it is exhausting, so often the arts community is praised for its resilience in the face of adversity when we would rather be supported quite frankly. It is the neglect from the powers that be, that force artists to find new ways to be creative and to survive. Each time an artist finds another room, another temporary solution or another way to work for almost nothing, the city congratulates itself on the persistence of its culture while allowing the conditions that sustain it to deteriorate.
When a venue closes on the day a show is meant to be announced, the absence is initially almost invisible. There is no crowd outside a locked door because the crowd never knew to arrive. Multiply that absence by 690 nights, however, and the silence becomes impossible to mistake, and only Depeche Mode can ‘enjoy the silence’. A city that wants artists must give them the rooms that allow them to become artists. Otherwise, sooner or later, there will be nothing left to announce.
