Maine’s Independent Music Movement

MEMA was born in 2020 at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Portland’s music venues were plunged into financial crisis. Overnight, shows were canceled, but rent, staff wages, insurance, and upkeep expenses still had to be paid. Without outside assistance, most venues faced permanent closure. Federal relief was rumored — what would eventually become the Save Our Stages Act in the COVID relief bill passed in December 2020 — but most independent venues couldn’t wait that long for help.

That’s when longtime Portland musician, booker, and venue worker Scott Mohler sounded the alarm. He called on the music community to create a mutual aid group to keep the city’s independent venues alive. Mohler said at the time that there was no other option: “We’ve worked too hard to build the scene up, we can’t just wave the white flag.”

Musicians, venue workers, and organizers began meeting online, dubbed themselves the Maine Music Alliance, and quickly launched an ambitious fundraising campaign to bankroll a grant program for struggling independent venues. Portland musician, venue worker, and MEMA organizer Peter McLaughlin recalled that he got involved because it was clear “that help was not coming fast enough, and [he] realiz[ed] that we had to protect each other.”

It was one of Portland’s first-ever arts organizing coalition, built from scratch in the middle of a crisis. “We were just building this stuff as DIY people,” McLaughlin explained. Their effort ultimately raised more than $100,000, 100 percent of which was distributed to local venues and arts organizations. While countless small venues across the country shuttered during those first pandemic years, leaving holes in their music scenes, which remain unfilled, every Maine Music Alliance grantee in Portland is still open today.

Why Portland Said No

After its intensive campaign for pandemic relief, MEMA took a needed break. Venues reopened for regular shows, musicians began touring and making records again, and Portland’s arts community got busy with its usual work.

Then, in December 2024, a new crisis emerged: Live Nation–Ticketmaster, partnering with Mile Marker Investments — a so-called local developer with projects stretching from Israel to Florida, and Texas — announced plans to build a 3,300 capacity theater in downtown Portland. Despite the corporation’s subsequent claims to value local community engagement, no one in Portland knew about the plan until it was broadcast in the press.

“When we learned about Live Nation’s plan to build a venue in Portland, that was when we decided that it was time to bring this organization back, said McLaughlin. “Because we, the community, needed a unified advocacy voice. Music communities as a whole have not been organized enough. And this is just the nature of politics: if your side is not organized, you lose.”

The alarm was justified. Live Nation–Ticketmaster has been long hated by musicians, fans, and antitrust activists for its widely condemned, monopolistic business practices that have caused skyrocketing ticket prices, declining wages for artists and venue workers, and the decimation of independent music across the country.

The company’s power rests on its extreme vertical integration. Since its merger with Ticketmaster, Live Nation has amassed control of almost every link in the chain: venues, ticketing platforms, artists’ tour contracts, and even food and merch. Live Nation owns, operates, or holds stakes in some 60 percent of large US venues. Artists who want to play those are forced to sell tickets through Ticketmaster, which now controls almost 80 percent of the ticketing market and an even greater share of the arena market. The company even controls artists directly, with over 400 big-name artists locked into Live Nation’s management services. By any measure, these market shares far exceed those of other corporations already branded monopolies in the US economy.

Because of Live Nation’s monopoly, artists are forced to play ball or be left with nowhere to tour. Pearl Jam famously and valiantly tried to boycott Ticketmaster during their 1994 tour, only to see the effort collapse under venue scarcity, and a Ticketmaster-led blacklist. The band was ultimately forced to cancel the tour and return to work with the company. That was two decades before Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged and further consolidated their power.

In recent years, superstars like Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen, and The Cure have publicly shamed the corporation into making piecemeal adjustments to ticketing practices. But even these stars could not credibly threaten to switch to another live-music network, and the company has generally only adjusted its ticketing systems for their specific tours.

Live Nation’s Price-Gouging Playbook

Musicians in the UK and Europe scored a rare victory last year, forcing Live Nation to cut ties with Barclays Bank over its investments in weapons and military technology used by Israel in its genocide against Palestinians. Backed by the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement (BDS), artists launched a boycott of The Great Escape festival in Brighton, UK, and threatened to extend it to other Barclays-sponsored Live Nation festivals. Notably, this was a collective effort of working musicians as opposed to the demand of a single megastar.

The Bands Boycott Barclays campaign grew quickly: first Barclays agreed to drop out of The Great Escape, then all Live Nation festivals, including Download, Latitude, and the Isle of Wight. It was a massive victory, showing that musicians’ collective power could take on both the biggest entertainment company in the world and one of the UK’s largest banks. Live Nation, though, still maintains an Israeli subsidiary — Live Nation Israel — and promotes concerts in the apartheid state in violation of the BDS boycott.

For fans, the monopoly is most apparent in wildly high-ticket prices and mysterious ever-increasing fees. Ticketmaster has introduced exploitative innovations like dynamic pricing, which can push tickets into the thousands when purchased at times of peak demand. Overall, the cost of buying a concert ticket has nearly doubled over the past decade.

In line with intensifying wealth inequality across the music industry, a small number of superstar artists benefit from rising ticket costs, but the vast majority of working musicians and venue workers have seen only stagnant or declining wages. The rest of that profit has gone to Live Nation–Ticketmaster and its executives. In 2022, Live Nation topped the S&P 500 for CEO-to-worker pay disparity. CEO Michael Rapino took home $139 million — 5,414 times median income of Live Nation workers, which was $25,673. This August, the company announced a staggering second-quarter revenue increase of 16 percent, up to $7 billion.

Earlier this month, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a lawsuit against Live Nation–Ticketmaster for misleading consumers about ticket prices and colluding with scalpers to mark up resale tickets. The FTC accuses Ticketmaster of a “bait and switch approach” in which tickets appear deceptively inexpensive at first, only to be jacked up at checkout with fees.

Live Nation’s strategy is systematic: In cities from Austin to Boston, the corporation follows a similar playbook, buying up larger venues (like the one they’ve proposed for Portland, Maine) then gradually acquiring additional smaller ones. Within a few years, the company has taken control of a majority of the city’s live music ticketing, curation, production, and promotion, and can dictate whatever terms they want. Independent venues, promoters, and musicians can’t compete. Local scenes are gutted as Live Nation imposes its homogenized corporate curation. As MEMA executive director Mohler told Maine Public Radio, “This is how a city loses its character. It takes decades to build but months to destroy.”

The company’s abuses have prompted a federal response. In 2024, the Department of Justice (DOJ) launched an antitrust lawsuit to break up Live Nation’s monopoly. In a statement, the DOJ charged that the company “relies on unlawful, anticompetitive conduct to exercise its monopolistic control over the live events industry in the United States at the cost of fans, artists, smaller promoters, and venue operators.” The suit now has already won the backing of forty states, a level of support that MEMA points out is “reserved for some of the most evil, predatory corporations one can imagine: Big Tobacco, Purdue Pharma (makers of Oxycontin), Facebook.”

The Maine Music Alliance Returns

For all these reasons, dozens of independent venue owners, musicians, and venue workers turned out for a neighborhood meeting in February 2025, the first since Live Nation’s plans for Portland were announced. “It became pretty clear immediately how little the developers and Live Nation New England really cared about the local music and art scene and had any desire to work with anybody in any way,” said McLaughlin. “It was obvious that there wasn’t any option but to fight this.”

After the meeting, McLaughlin, Mohler, and others got on a call and agreed they needed to revive MEMA to fight Live Nation. “Live Nation coming to Portland is the biggest crisis our music and art scene has seen since COVID. It is an immense threat to what so many people have worked so hard to build,” McLaughlin added.

McLaughlin is the music and community programmer at SPACE, the venue that became a focal point of the movement. First started as an all-volunteer DIY warehouse space in 2002, SPACE is now a pillar of the Portland independent arts scene. It has a stage for performances, an art gallery, thirty-one art studios, a print shop, an artist-in-residence apartment, and holds more than 200 events a year.

SPACE staff and Maine Music Alliance veterans reactivated their 2020 network, pulling together a large coalition of music venues, arts organizations, musicians, arts workers, and supporters. “While I can’t say I was shocked, the community showed up immediately,” McLaughlin told me. “I mean, it’s been just unbelievable.”

The coalition settled on a moratorium as the clearest solution to delay Live Nation. Under Maine state law, moratoria allow for pausing developments if there is a risk of imminent public harm. For 180 days, no large venues could be built — including Live Nation’s proposed project — giving the coalition much needed time to build power and develop a strategy to permanently keep the monopoly out of Portland.

MEMA then launched an intensive public education drive, warning Portlanders about Live Nation’s record and urging residents to contact their city councillors in support of the moratorium. They organized turnout at every city meeting, filling up hearing rooms and going on the record with testimony. The response was overwhelming — amazed councillors commented that they had never seen such a volume of constituents contacting them on any issue.

On the strength of that groundswell, MEMA won the support of two city councillors who officially introduced the moratorium in April. Dozens of members testified at its first hearing, and the council referred the measure to committee for further discussion.

Taking on the Music Industry’s Robber Barons

Live Nation launched its own propaganda push to squash the moratorium, but MEMA answered by redoubling their efforts. They secured support from national groups like the National Independent Venues Association and United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW). They screened documentaries about the music industry, covered the town in posters calling Live Nation “An Old School Robber Baron” and “The Music Mafia,” kept pressure on city councillors with email drives, and presented a petition signed by twenty-one Portland music arts businesses and organizations — including nearly every venue in town — and more than two thousand musicians, arts workers, and fans.

The moratorium cleared committee on a 2-1 vote and returned to the full council for public comment and a final decision slated for July 15. MEMA canvassed the community to show up to testify on July 15, and dozens of people turned out. Supporters filled the council chambers, the balcony, and the overflow room. But the moment fizzled: in a twist of irony, with a building full of musicians and venue workers, the meeting was canceled due to a technical issue with its sound system.

When the meeting was rescheduled for August 11, MEMA drew an even larger crowd. “When you’re organizing, it’s one thing to be able to get everybody to turn out once,” Mclaughlin commented. “But our people continued to show up over and over.” The meeting stretched for almost eight hours  — with each individual comment capped at three minutes — as Portland spoke out to protect their community and stop Live Nation. No one could remember anything like it in local politics.

“By allowing this project to proceed unchecked, it is saying that Portland and its creative economy and its cultural identity is up for sale,” Mohler warned. “There should be no fear in imposing this moratorium. It’s a legally viable tool at your fingertips to be used to prevent serious public harm, and people losing jobs and businesses is public harm.”

The council voted 6-3 in favor of the moratorium. Days later, the city planning board also voted to table the Live Nation development. MEMA claimed victory the next day: “This is the best possible outcome for us right now. Thank you so much to everybody that wrote or showed up. There will be A LOT more battles as we wage this campaign, but knowing that this community exists makes each one of them feel a lot more winnable.”

The fight is far from over. The moratorium only stalls the project for 180 days, after which Portland will reevaluate the development. Still, Portland and MEMA have pulled off something unprecedented: a grassroots campaign that stopped Live Nation cold.

In recent years, local music organizing has started to notch real wins. UMAW has organized artists in Austin to win pay raises from the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival for the first time in decades. As in Portland, that victory came in part because musicians packed city hall and won support from local officials. Prior to the SXSW victory, Austin musicians also won minimum pay rates for musicians performing at city events. In 2024, Austin for Palestine Coalition, later joined by UMAW, successfully led efforts to force SXSW to divest from the weapons industry and the US military.

Elsewhere, momentum is building. In Minneapolis-St Paul, Twin Cities United Performers has organized more than 500 local artists to use a standard minimum work advance when playing shows. This spring in New York, UMAW brought dozens of artists before city council to testify in support of a fair pay in streaming and the Living Wage for Musicians Act. The council voted to pass the measure in May. In cities like New Orleans, Hartford, and Fort Worth, artists are working with public libraries to launch municipal streaming services as an alternative to exploitative corporate platforms like Spotify.

Meanwhile, MEMA hasn’t let up. The group is still gathering signatures, deepening education efforts, and working with a legal and policy team to develop a political strategy to keep Live Nation out for good.