After years of heated debate and political wrangling, the new Live Nation-owned venue in the Central Eastside—the multinational entertainment giant’s first in Portland—is taking shape.
Last month, Live Nation released renderings of the 3,500-seat venue expected to open next year. It also released a name: the venue will be called Steelhead, a nod to the trout who populate the rivers of northwest Oregon.
Per Live Nation, the name is a nod to “a species known for its toughness and instinct to move upstream, mirroring the venue’s connection to Portland’s independent spirit.”
Live Nation has, from its inception, pitched the venue as filling a gap in Portland’s music scene—attracting national touring acts who are too popular for a number of the city’s existing venues like the Roseland Theater and Crystal Ballroom, but can’t fill the Moda Center or Providence Park.
“At the end of the day, our goal is for Steelhead to be additive to Portland’s already thriving venue ecosystem,” Mary Clare Bourjaily, Live Nation’s market president for Oregon, told the Mercury. “There’s a gap here for artists who are growing into larger rooms, but who still want to play Portland.
But plenty of people remain unconvinced that a Live Nation-operated venue will fit so seamlessly into the city’s redoubtable independent music scene.
Portland was the last major city in the country without a Live Nation-operated venue, and since construction began on Steelhead, the company’s reputation has taken a beating: A federal jury found in April that Live Nation violated federal and state antitrust laws by operating as a monopoly, a lawsuit in which the state of Oregon was a plaintiff. Days later, the city council in Portland, Maine voted to block a Live Nation project.
“We’ve got a huge amount of action and creativity and passionate people,” Cheri Jamison, co-chair of MusicOregon’s music advocacy council, said of Portland’s music scene. “So it is vibrant on its own, and it has functioned without a big, corporate-owned promoter controlling a major room. That’s what we are wanting to ensure is protected.”
MusicOregon, a nonprofit trade organization for the state’s independent music scene that merged with MusicPortland this year, has been among the chief skeptics of Live Nation’s arrival in Portland.
Now, however, with Live Nation’s venue set to open in just more than a year, and an AEG-backed venue inside the Lloyd Center footprint under construction as well, Jamison said the organization has to take a wait-and-see approach.
“I think the best we can do is listen, notice the trends, track data, and then bring that information to the people in power who could potentially put guardrails out there,” Jamison said.
Jamison said MusicOregon “has always been pro-venue” and wants to have a “collegial” relationship with Live Nation—a corporation that, she noted, has booked shows at independent venues across Portland for years.
Still, there are a few markers MusicOregon will be paying particular attention to after Steelhead opens next year that may signal the approach Live Nation is taking to its Portland operations.
Jamison wants to see, for instance, whether Steelhead will limit capacity for any shows—a move that could put the venue into direct competition with the smaller, independent venues it has ostensibly been built to supplement.
That possibility remains very much on the table. Bourjaily told the Mercury that the company is “focused on booking shows that fully utilize [the] venue’s capacity,” but did not rule out the possibility of limiting or subdividing the venue’s capacity as it sees fit.
Jamison also wants to see whether Live Nation will be content with operating just one venue in Portland. She said MusicOregon has been opposed to Live Nation purchasing or opening a second venue in Portland for at least a decade, but Live Nation’s plans on that front remain similarly unclear.
Bourjaily said the company is “focused on operating Steelhead and booking artists and tours that are looking for a venue of this size in Portland,” but did not rule out further expansion in the city.
Aside from concerns about the particulars of where Steelhead is located, independent music advocates in Portland have warned that Live Nation’s arrival in the city represents a slippery slope: that, once here, the corporation will begin to expand and use its vast resources to gobble up venues and bookings across the city.
That, to some extent, is what has happened in Austin—another midsize city renowned for its independent music scene where Live Nation operates or has exclusive ticketing partnerships for a wide array of venues.
“They have a lock on everything that is above a certain capacity and ticket price in the city, for sure,” said Jack Wilson, the co-owner of Radio Coffee & Beer, which operates a 2,000-plus capacity outdoor venue in East Austin.
Wilson said that Live Nation’s booking reach goes beyond the venues they control.
“We’re just fighting for whatever we can, really, because it’s not even just the money they offer—they’re the main booker for Austin City Limits and Lollapalooza, and all of these other festivals, and they’ll dangle the whole tour,” Wilson said. “So we’re not just competing for one show, we’re competing against 10 shows.”
Matt Sever, an Austin-based singer-songwriter who performs as Matt the Electrician, said that while Live Nation’s presence in Austin hasn’t been a death knell for the city’s independent venues or scene, the number of venues the corporation controls has made it more difficult for those venues—particularly midsize venues—to compete.
“Maybe they come in with [one] venue, but eventually they start affecting the ticketing around town,” Sever said. “It seeps in, it gets in all the crevices and cracks.”
One concern Wilson has about the state of the music scene in Austin is “show fatigue”—the idea that, with so many Live Nation venues booking major national touring acts, music fans have less time and less money to support the independent venues and up-and-coming artists they otherwise might. That can affect local musicians as well as venues.
“Is there any kind of night in, night out industry of music that supports a [local] band scene? That’s what’s under attack with the corporatization of everything,” Wilson said. Those kinds of questions are key, not just for Portland’s identity as an independent music town but for the city’s economy as a whole.
According to an economic impact study funded by the Oregon State Legislature three years ago, Portland has more music venues than both Austin and Nashville. The state’s for-profit music industry as a whole generates some $3.8 billion in economic output annually across the state, with the vast majority of that output concentrated in Portland.
Jamison said Portland City Council President Jamie Dunphy, a former MusicPortland board member who vocally opposed the granting of permits for the Live Nation venue, is at work on a comprehensive music policy package for the city to “strengthen the entire music ecosystem and community.”
If that plan includes efforts to limit possible expansion efforts from Live Nation or AEG in Portland, Sever will cheer it on.
“Nothing good comes from those companies,” he said.
