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Out in Calgary, another long-running venue, Mikey’s Juke Joint, announced its closure at the end of June, after a month that saw three other music clubs in the city shut down. Torontonians might think a place like Calgary is impervious to the same real estate crisis we face here, what with its expanse of surrounding land, and higher per capita income. That’s proving untrue, and the closing of venues is often the first indicator that things are very, very wrong.

I suppose it’s indicative of our tendency to think we’ve beaten the system when it comes to art, that cultivating our own entertainment is the ultimate entrepreneurial achievement. We save money by subscribing to Netflix and Spotify; we draw up playlists and rate shows. We stay in when it’s too cold. And we accomplish the best part of capitalist accrual in withholding our money from other entrepreneurs (musicians) by not going to see them labour right in front of us.

My job, as a culture critic and academic, is to view these shifts objectively. I’m supposed to see them in the broader scope of ongoing change, to comment from a distanced perspective on our nature as audience members and musicians. I could offer that here: maybe we are increasingly becoming our own curators, picking and choosing entertainment from a range of cheap options. Perhaps we are finding value and community in playing music at home, with friends, or through learning new techniques via YouTube lessons. This moment is possibly one of crisis for music, wherein we stop treating it like a commodity, or an avenue for making a living, and transform it into something that is as yet unfamiliar to us. There are positive and negative possibilities that spin out of a neutralized analysis.