Renowned Booking Agency The Venue Collective Is Being Dissolved

Stalwart booking powerhouse The Venue Collective will wind down its operations over the coming months, its founding partners have revealed.

Although the decision to dissolve the business was made "just earlier this week", director Ben Thompson told The Music, it's very much a natural and organic step, one born primarily of the gradually increasing pressures of market forces over the past few years.

"I think we'd been really analysing the business and the market for a little while now, and I think the model of a centralised office programming and promoting venues around the country has been a very ambitious challenge," Thompson said. "To be honest, it has been a massive challenge over the last couple of years.

"I think, with the current climate of the mid-size touring being significantly down, it's become more and more of a challenge, and I think that's the reason that we've come to the decision that it would be best perhaps for venues now to revert to having their in-house bookers and teams rather than relying on the centralised model."

Formed in 2014 to provide booking and promotional services around Australia, TVC now handles shows for nine Aussie live-music spaces, including Melbourne's The Corner Hotel, Northcote Social Club, 170 Russell and Shebeen, Sydney's Newtown Social Club, Brisbane's Woolly Mammoth, and the Max Watt's franchises in all three cities. Drawing staff from companies such as Way Over There and Corner Presents, Thompson — who had previously spent more than a decade working for The Corner and Northcote Social Club — and co-founder Anita Nedeljkovic made it their mission to create a central hub for booking and publicity in the country.

Despite the group's relatively short lifespan, its successes are massive, and Thompson says the experience of working with the group of venues under TVC's purview has been invaluable.

"I certainly don't think it's been done before in Australia, but we've had the pleasure of working with nine music rooms around Australia, and a good percentage of those, I would confidently say, are the most successful and busiest venues in the country," Thompson effused. "It's been an absolute pleasure to work with all those venues. It's been very exciting embarking on something like this national booking and promotion model, for sure.

"I think we all, in The Venue Collective office, have been on a steep learning curve over the last couple of years. I think it's become very clear that, to do something like this, working with many different personalities and many different venues, that it's very important to have the right product, and to have a good product; no matter how well known you are as a venue booker, you can't necessarily wave a magic wand to make people play certain venues. The way it works is that venues need to prove themselves and make themselves so good that bands aspire to playing there."

To that end, once The Venue Collective wraps operations, Thompson will be focusing his energies exclusively on Melbourne CBD venue 170 Russell; however, before that becomes his primary pursuit, he and Nedeljkovic are determined to wind down the business the right way, putting their staff and clients first as they look towards a post-TVC landscape.

"What's most important for me right now is just to ensure it's business as usual for all the shows that we have booked, and that it's business as usual as we continue working with all the same people until such time that we can hand over to new bookers for each venue," Thompson said. "I'm very, very hopeful that some of the amazing team in this office will assimilate into the various Venue Collective venues, working more independently with them, as they're all great people with a lot to offer.

"I'm very much looking forward to working with just the one venue for the time being, which will be 170 Russell in the city, which is a venue I've been immensely proud of over the last couple of years. I think it's come forward in leaps and bounds, and has 30 or 32 massive shows on sale at the moment, so I'm really proud of that venue and look forward to being able to be a little bit more hands on where I haven't been able to over the last few years, working with so many rooms."

"To be quite honest, I think it'll take a little bit of time for all the venues to find their new teams, and I'm totally committed to running the office fully until that time," he continued. 

"But, after that time, we have shows booked at all the venues right through the rest of this year, and it's my intention to oversee those and make sure that they run and are promoted and given all the love that they always would have been under The Venue Collective, so that's the priority now, and I think it'll be a slow wind-down over the coming months. I plan to keep everybody very much in the loop."

Ultimately, Thompson told The Music, the important thing to take away is that the dissolution of The Venue Collective is a far more sweet than sorrowful parting; an opportunity, not a roadblock. The closing of a door just lets more sunshine in through the window, after all.

"I do want the message to go out that this is not a sad story or anything, really," Thompson said.