Concert attendance, revenue down at Burnsville’s GARAGE
by John Gessner
Thisweek Newspapers
Even THE GARAGE, Burnsville’s decade-old youth center, is feeling the effects of a bad economy.
Weekend concert attendance is down. And while organizers have always pointed out that THE GARAGE transcends its reputation as a premier all-ages music venue, those concert receipts help pay for after-school and summer programs, from Homework Help to support groups.
PHOTO: Performer and band-booker Jay McKinney, 16, says musicians who play at THE GARAGE want to keep the music program going despite flagging attendance. Photo by John Gessner
Meanwhile, participation in those programs is rising, along with scholarship subsidies for the many low-income teens who are joining up.
The venue’s two music stages aren’t likely to go completely dark. But Eric Billiet, THE GARAGE’s longtime adult manager, and the teens who help him run the center in a revamped section of the maintenance garage near City Hall, are holding off on booking shows for 2010.
The center’s advisory board will decide in November if a new direction is needed, Billiet said.
“The advisory board gets the final say,” Billiet said. “The police are on that board, and the mayor’s on that board. But the majority of the votes with that are the young people.”
The musicians who play the center’s main and lounge stages, mostly Burnsville-area teens, are united behind a strong music program. They said so at the last monthly performers’ meeting on Sept. 21.
“That was one of the first questions we asked: ‘Do we need this anymore?’ And all the musicians said yes,” said 16-year-old Jay McKinney of Burnsville, who serves on the band-booking team and is the advisory board’s representative for weekend events.
With its dwindling attendance, THE GARAGE isn’t alone among Twin Cities music clubs – including newer all-age venues that some speculate are further cutting into GARAGE attendance.
“Every club I’ve talked to and every club owner has said there just aren’t as many people coming out,” said McKinney, a junior at the School of Environmental Studies in Apple Valley who plays monthly solo acoustic shows at THE GARAGE.
Average attendance at Friday- and Saturday-night concerts peaked at 247 in 2006 and fell to 219 in 2007, the last of four years in which City Pages named THE GARAGE the Twin Cities’ best all-age music venue.
Average attendance slumped to 143 in 2008 and is on pace to hit 149 in 2009. Revenue from concerts – mostly by local teen bands, with the occasional national touring act – is the center’s largest single funding source, Billiet said.
Concerts, with tickets ranging from $3 to $10, produced 23 percent of revenue for the budget year ending June 30. A Minnesota Department of Public Safety grant contributed 22 percent of the $347,225 budget, followed by city funding (21 percent), a federal Community Development Block Grant (19 percent) and a McKnight Foundation grant (10 percent). The center tapped reserves for 5 percent of its budget.
Billiet said that parents who used to drop their kids off at THE GARAGE and pick them up after their own night out might just be staying home now.
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