UC Davis

Music venues have increasingly become sites of cultural commodification as cities utilize live music culture as an anchor for urban branding to appeal to tourism and industry investment. However, branding and marketing strategies based on local cultural vibrancy neglect the needs and desires of the very communities which build the cultural depth being enclosed, leading to a loss of meaningful cultural establishments. Given the juxtaposition between cultural commodification and meaningful sites of cultural production, my research focuses on Club Passim, a local non-profit music venue in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a case study to uncover the values and meanings ascribed to live music venues by various stakeholders including artists, audiences, venue staff, and business representatives. These values (aesthetic & material, social & cultural, experiential, historical, and economic) reveal the complexity surrounding the benefit of live music venues and capture the ways in which music venues are shaped by the interests of different stakeholders. I use David Harvey’s “Right to the City'' (2003) to discuss how the manifestation of these values in the built environment express certain claims on space. I argue that Club Passim’s right to a space is based on a set of values which serves their local community and therefore functions as a site of meaningful cultural production.