KLOBUCHAR TOUTS LIVE MUSIC BIZ

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar offered her thoughts on live music to Rolling Stone after introducing the Save Our Stages bill with Texas Sen. John Cornyn.

Klobuchar notes venues “may have been the first to close because people are so close at concerts, and they may be some of the last to open. And we have to acknowledge that certain industries are targeted more than other ones by this virus.”

She talks about the need for independent venues, live music scenes, and domino economic effect live music venues create for communities. The smaller scale live music business, she avers, deserves the same government help that airlines have received.

She concludes: “My message to music fans who want to help their favorite venues is to advocate; call their congresspeople, and say “We need you to support this bill.” You have fans that go to venues all the time and miss it very much, and then you have people that understand that that’s how their favorite artists got started. You don’t want to take away the way that so many of our artists get started.

“Time is of the essence here. And we have this big package, the Heroes Act, , that has some small-business programs in there that would be helpful. But this isn’t yet in there. So we either have to have it passed separately or then work to get it into a package in the fall. You can’t go much further than that. To my fellow colleagues, I would say if you’re willing to put all that money into the airline industry because they’re uniquely affected, you’ve got to start looking at the music industry. That is a huge, huge part of our economy and such a unique American export. There are not other countries that have this kind of contribution.”

Read her op-ed here.