Music spaces regenerating our cities
- Trevor Mason
- Jul 11, 2014
- 13 min read
Updated: Jul 15
Without a space, music scenes remain rootless, moving from one location to another with little time to explore, connect and create. Musicians need a place so are music spaces regenerating our cities?
Several studies have evidenced the importance of music in giving a sense of place when regenerating our towns and cities. In research conducted in 2011 as part of the Creative Economy Programme it found: "The things that contribute to a vibrant, creative local sector are part of the wider cultural assets of a city – its sense of identity, its record shops, its large and small venues, its libraries and book shops, its museums and galleries, its parks and open spaces, students and cafes" (p.44).
Music rehearsal spaces stimulate urban regeneration by acting as catalysts for creative clusters, transforming vacant industrial properties into vibrant hubs, and attracting secondary economic activity like cafes, equipment shops and independent venues. This ecosystem drives local tourism, generates jobs and helps rebrand post-industrial neighborhoods.
Evidence of this transformative power operates across three primary dimensions of urban development:
Real Estate and Spatial Transformation: Rehearsal spaces routinely move into under-utilized, redundant or abandoned industrial buildings because of cheap rents and a lack of noise complaints from immediate residential neighbors. Over time, these buildings transform into active, multi-room creative hubs, physically reclaiming and re-valuing former "dead zones" in the urban landscape.
Economic Agglomeration: Data supports the concept that music zones fuel local economies, keeping money circulating within the community. By clustering musicians and music businesses (producers, instrument repair shops, independent studios), rehearsal spaces naturally create networks of innovation and specialized talent pools that attract further corporate investment.
City Branding and Cultural Vibrancy: Cities that embrace and support these underground ecosystems successfully rebrand themselves as destinations. Cultivating localized music scenes helps shape a city's narrative, fostering tolerance, demographic diversity and a "cool" people climate that draws a highly skilled creative workforce.
A prominent real-world example of this is the Rock Lititz campus in Pennsylvania in the US, which transitioned from a localized rehearsal space into a global production hub. UK-based initiatives detailed in the Greater London Authority's Cultural Infrastructure Plan utilize localized data mapping to protect grassroots rehearsal spaces as key drivers of urban community building.
A UK Government task force also found the benefits of participation in the arts display similar benefits to those reported in the areas of health, crime reduction, employment and education (p.21-22, PAT10, DCMS, 1999). Music-making as a social activity in all its forms brings benefits to our towns and cities.
However, in 2018 the Live Music Exchange survey of UK musicians suggested a third found a lack of an affordable rehearsal space had a negative impact on their career development (p.73/74). So why doesn’t the planning to build music rehearsal spaces feature in regeneration programmes?
Place not location
Generally, public and commercial organisations take much interest in the physical regeneration of an area as the key to rejuvenating communities rather than social programmes. However, the notion that the future economic success of a city is founded on its creative base is increasingly accepted across the developed world.
As a society how much we pay for a particular use of a building reflects the value we as a community place upon the activity taking place there.
Musicians have played an important part in establishing the location of music scenes. Seattle had its sub-pop grunge, Chicago has electric blues, and Nashville country. Detroit was the birthplace of both Motown and the hard-edge distorted indie rock of The White Stripes. Austin has Stevie Ray Vaughan, Willie Nelson, and a host of legendary singer-songwriters.
Then there's of course New Orleans jazz, brass, and funk; San Francisco’s psychedelic sound; and the reverb-soaked rockabilly that is inextricably associated with Memphis’s Sun Records.
Punk emerged in late 1970's London. The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays came along in Manchester in the 1990s. Going back further, cabaret-style jazz in 1920s Paris and symphonic classical music in 18th century Vienna helped to create vibrant urban cultures. As well as the talent making a scene, buildings create the conditions in which it is fostered. Music scenes are places.
Richard Florida in his paper Music for the Masses (2009) wrote how musicians cluster more in some places than others. Musicians are mobile, and do not require a lot of capital, access to raw materials, or even proximity to anchor institutions like universities. They come to some places because there are lots of venues, clubs, conservatories and recording studios, and they can make a living and stake out a career. Musicians create places.
If towns and cities increasingly look the same, offering similar experiences and similar world-wide brands, the quest for wider recognition will hot up. Increasingly city authorities are recognising their unique culture is a major asset to project their distinctiveness and specialness: “Culture plays the central role in establishing the identity of a place and that having a distinctive identity is crucial in a world in danger of becoming homogenous” (p.15, Landry, 2003).
Cultural resources such as music rehearsal spaces are the raw materials, and the act of music-making the mechanism which bring places to life.
Cultural opportunities such as easy access to a music rehearsal space can be an effective way of providing a spurt to wider regeneration of a neighbourhood or an estate (p.8-9, Smith, 1997).
The Creative Economy Programme research concluded: "Place differs from location because it encapsulates a set of social, environmental and cultural factors in addition to locational factors such as distance to market and the availability of appropriate labour" (p.7).
Although musicians can record and distribute their music from anywhere, they continue to cluster in city centre's to be closer to live music venues and alternative employment opportunities for additional income.
Many studies have emphasised locational difficulties for visual artists, whereas the exploration of rehearsal space for independent musicians has yet to be investigated. It may therefore be problematic to suggest musicians experience the same challenges as visual artists, dancers or actors when assessing issues of displacement and affordability. Even though independent musicians face comparable struggles, they also face new and unique challenges when acquiring space.
These particular space requirements are not appropriate for residential and most commercial spaces. Although there may be plenty of commercial space available, sound proofing and acoustic treatment can be costly, requiring technical know-how often beyond the capabilities of the average person.
Musicians may not necessarily rehearse and prepare for shows in their home. This is due to a sonic requirement for space and working with others.
Loud volume will need to be tolerated by landlords, tenants and the building’s physical structure. Musicians accessing the space by car also means parking and traffic noise is a consideration. Access to good public transport aids musicians in getting to their rehearsals faster and cheaper from home. These particular space requirements have left a specialised niche market which has been filled by rehearsal space businesses.
Given that live music now makes up the majority of income for independent musicians, having a centrally located rehearsal space comes at a great economic advantage for musicians. Of course, the downside to improving the quality of life in an area where the music scene becomes popular, attracts property developers, forcing up the cost for space, gentrifying the redundant buildings often used as rehearsal spaces, to convert in to homes and offices.
Case Study: Toronto (Money For Nothing)
Independent musicians in Toronto are forced to continually negotiate between affordable space and separation from the central city’s employment opportunities and amenities.
Research in to the cost of monthly rehearsal spaces for musicians in the City of Toronto, Canada in 2010 highlighted easily accessible rehearsal spaces in the central area of the city were the most costly, posing a serious concern in retaining emerging musical talent, forcing many to relocate to other affordable cities or suburban areas. They found centrally located rehearsal spaces were closest to the largest number of music venues in the city, best served by public transport, and the most costly to rent.
Musicians' finances
Independent musicians face challenges that burden them financially adding to their difficulty in paying for their use of a rehearsal space. Since the advent of music streaming, the value of recorded music has plummeted.
Although musicians can now distribute their music independently over the internet and record professionally for much less money than ever before, the combination of these factors has resulted in lower entry barriers into the music economy. This has led to an increase in the number of independent musicians competing for sources of income for their work.
Other factors, such as the rise in divorce rates, an increase in the number of people living alone and lower incomes during a recession, have driven more people to downsize or live in flats and apartments – which in turn means increasingly musicians are looking for places outside the home to make music.
Add to this the cost in soundproofing a room in your home and still the likelihood of the lower frequencies annoying your neighbours at unsociable hours, means many musicians resort to looking for a rehearsal space.
An international Statista survey in 2020 of the average size of homes in selected countries found Australia had the largest, closely followed by the U.S. and Canada. Houses in Europe, Mexico and Brazil were significantly smaller.
This suggests the demand and use of homes for music rehearsals may differ from country to country depending on available space. For example, it may be more common in the US and Canada for musicians with larger houses to use their garage or basement to rehearse rather than hire a practice room.
Music rehearsal spaces are reliant on the limited finances of musicians. For many musicians, hiring a professional rehearsal space is a direct cost to themselves. Those workers in the music industry who do not perform and whose focus is on maximising concert income, merchandise sales and streaming may not appreciate the value music rehearsal spaces play in supporting music artists.
Scale and size
The scale and purpose of music rehearsal spaces vary according to the size of the community they serve. Some must necessarily be for general purposes, whereas others may specialise.
The cost of running music rehearsal spaces is such that their number can be supported by any given population is limited. With a smaller population it may be difficult to sustain this number: there may be only two practice rooms or even one, jeopardising its very survival (p.34, adapted from Alec Nisbett’s Sound Studios, 1995).
In an evaluation of a new arts centre involving young people in Gateshead in the UK, the consultants found the benefits of having 26 practice rooms in one music rehearsal facility. They suggested how the scale of a music rehearsal facility might look:
“Scale is important in two ways. First, scale involves the notion of critical mass. Only by being on a large scale, with the involvement of large numbers of schools and young people can some of the beneficial features of the whole system emerge. For example, scale enables progression, where talent can be taken to its limits. Scale offers variety, so that if a young person is not drawn to one genre, they can still flourish in another. Then there is the scale of the building itself and the facilities that come with an investment of that size – opportunities to perform, chances to listen to the world’s best musicians, rehearsal spaces of differing sizes and formats” (p.23, Hitting The Right Note, 2005).
Richard Florida found the size of a town or city is not everything, as Nashville's dominance and the performance of other smaller cities show. Smaller places can develop significant clusters of musicians and the music industry: "Talented musicians are drawn to and cluster around other talented musicians. Doing so, they generate a human capital — competing against each other for new sounds and audiences, combining and recombining with each other into new bands — a Darwinian process out of which successful acts rise to the top and achieve broad success."
In this way, through the clustering of talent and combination and recombination, cities with vibrant music scenes mimic the process of innovation more broadly.
Engaging with the music scene
Local talent once encouraged can promote an area on a worldwide basis. A major task is to engage meaningfully and on a level with the scenes that already exist. Providing a performance venue can help build the local scene, where perhaps bringing only internationally known musicians might be good for prestige, but does little to support what's already happening other than the occasional performance.
The challenge is finding ways to play a role in supporting music rehearsal spaces, working with musicians to interweave the changing fabric of their work and influences.
Providing space is just the starting point: what matters is what musicians do in a shared space. Not all music genres require the same pattern of organisation. For example, independent music colleges such as the UK's Guildford Academy of Contemporary Music and The Institute of Contemporary Music use their rehearsal spaces to host showcase evenings for students to perform in front of invited record label staff, artist managers and publishers. The rehearsal space is a route to being “signed”. Due to their size and production needs, orchestras and opera companies often need larger spaces and performance venues to rehearse.
Paul Willis, in his book Common Culture, based on research into the cultural life of young people makes an important point about the demographic of musicians accessing popular music activity: "Even rock music, which was expected to be associated with working-class cultural creativity, was often found to be more accessible to those who had benefited from middle-class upbringings which offered the resources and positive attitudes to encourage musical and artistic involvement from an early age" (p. 50-51, Common Culture, 1990).
New spaces can’t simply be built and then ignore what’s happening around them. As the monetary value of land and buildings grow, music rehearsal spaces can be increasingly scarce and expensive. Policies of access to facilities are of great importance in terms of cultural production, representation and identity.
Performance spaces as a rehearsal space
New venue initiatives will be more effective if they take on board the idea of developing a sense of local ownership from the beginning. Supporting low-rent music rehearsal spaces to encourage the involvement of the indigenous population can lead to the first glimmerings of a creative music scene.
Widening engagement is about ensuring musicians have the opportunity to participate and create their own music. This becomes particularly important for musicians who see the social experience as of equal importance to the event. They may want to enjoy their time outside the performance venue in a rehearsal space collaborating with other musicians. The book A Creative Future argued: "It is clearly misguided to provide poor facilities for community-based work on the assumption that users do not expect high quality surroundings" (p.118, ACGB, 1993).
When studies have looked at the use of performance spaces as music practice rooms, they found over three-quarters (77%) of venues have never used any part of their spaces for bands or musicians to rehearse. Church halls, community centres and student unions are more likely to have held rehearsals (p.34, A Survey of Live Music Staged in England & Wales in 2003/4, 2004).
In 2018, the UK-based Live Music Exchange survey findings of UK musicians, venues, promoters and audiences also suggested only a quarter of performance venues offered tools and space for musicians to rehearse and record (p.32).
Strong spaces of cultural consumption connecting spaces of production breed innovation and in turn lead to competitive creative businesses capable of attracting the highest quality creative knowledge workers (p.10, The Creative Economy Programme, 2011).
Public funding
There is little direct investment from the public sector in the building infrastructure for rehearsal spaces. There is no one policy, but various strategies, programmes and publications have stressed the importance of space for rehearsing as part of other activity.
The writer Charles Landry has suggested government and local authority structures supporting culture should be rethought: "Cultural thinking needs to move away from an exclusive focus on art forms to an emphasis on culture as the lived experience or complex reality of a place.
This has a significant implication in that ministries of culture or divisions in cities responsible for it should see themselves as ministries advocating for culture right across other ministries and departments rather than being the ministry or department of culture" (p.5, Landry, 2003).
Local government authorities can play an important role in the provision of music rehearsal facilities. From the local parks to leisure centres, town and city councils enable a huge range of recreational activities to happen. They have an important leadership role to play, bringing schools, voluntary clubs, National Governing Bodies, health and the private sector together to forge partnerships, unblock barriers to participation and improve the local music scene.
Yet despite local authorities duty to promote healthy lifestyles and economic development, there is no statutory or legal requirement for them to provide facilities for leisure, let alone music. With no statutory duty, it allows for an incentive to sell or close facilities.
The challenge is finding appropriate ways to support music spaces. If more rehearsal spaces are to be developed and accessed by musicians, with the consequent benefits to the economy, new ways of financing development must be considered. The Live Music Exchange (2018) survey suggested local and national administrations [should] encourage more extensive funding for music rehearsal spaces (p.68).
Diversifying revenue streams amongst a mix of public grants and earned income would suggest a route to consider when drawing up a sustainable business plan.
Consideration needs to be given to placing new spaces in deprived areas only when consistent and long-term support from a public authority is guaranteed.
London's Mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone in his 2011 manifesto Protecting London’s Live Music asserted: “The preservation of particular venues alone will not secure the future of live music in London - it is just as important to ensure that support for venues is coupled with a strategy that supports the provision of rehearsal space and places for making and performing and studying music”.
The Live Music Exchange argued for future live music censuses, other components of the ecology should also be mapped such as rehearsal spaces (p.10). If agencies are ignorant of how rehearsal spaces can connect musicians to their audiences, regenerating our towns and cities using music will be limited.
Local authority policies used to protect rehearsal spaces from gentrification
Local authorities protect grassroots rehearsal spaces and music venues from gentrification primarily by deploying integrated planning frameworks, targeted tax relief and strict zoning restrictions. When urban areas experience rapid residential development, these policies shift the legal and financial burdens away from creative spaces.
1. Planning and Noise Mitigation Policies
The Agent of Change Principle legally places the responsibility for noise mitigation on the incoming developer rather than the existing music space. If a developer builds flats next to an established loud rehearsal studio, they must fund and install heavy soundproofing. This is codified natively in the UK's National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and specific regional mandates like Policy D12 of the London Plan.
Councils use these Article 4 legal directives to strip away "permitted development rights" from commercial or industrial zones. It prevents property owners from automatically converting cheap industrial spaces - where multi-room rehearsal studios usually thrive - into residential apartments without full planning permission and scrutiny.
2. Zoning, Asset Designation, and Land Use
Cultural Infrastructure Mapping is a way to utilize data-driven spatial mapping to designate precise "Creative Enterprise Zones" or "Hospitality Zones". Within these boundaries, developers are faced with much stricter regulations if they attempt to displace cultural spaces.
In the Uk Assets of Community Value is a way in which communities can nominate a rehearsal space or grassroots venue as an ACV. If the property owner decides to sell, the designation triggers a mandatory six-month moratorium, granting the community and local operators a window to raise capital and submit a bid to purchase the building.
3. Economic and Operational Protections
High business property taxes frequently force low-margin creative spaces out during gentrification waves. Local authorities can use business rate relief to push for long-term business rates cuts and specific premises definitions to shield cultural spaces from ballooning market rates.
Advocacy groups like UK Music lobby local and national governments to update outdated industrial Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes. Properly classifying multi-use rehearsal spaces ensures they qualify for tailored cultural grants, subsidised licensing, and specific protective policy brackets.
References
Alec Nisbett - Sound Studios, 1995, p. 34, Focal Press
Paul Willis, Common Culture: Symbolic Work at Play in the Everyday Cultures of the Young 1990
Chris Smith - Creative Futures: Culture, Identity and National Renewal, Introduction, Fabian Society, 1997
Charles Landry - Imagination & Regeneration: Cultural policy and the future of cities, 2003 Council of Europe
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