Is San Francisco’s Music Industry ‘So Back’? It Depends Who You Ask

It’s been an exciting time for San Francisco’s music scene. Local rappers and DJs showed out at high-profile parties for NBA All-Star Weekend. Billboard ran a cover story on the entrepreneur Ghazi, who built EMPIRE into the largest privately held record label in the U.S. And last week, nearly 100 bands performed at over a dozen venues for this year’s Noise Pop festival.

Simultaneously, Noise Pop producers teamed up with city government for the first-ever San Francisco Music Week, a series of panels, workshops and events aimed at bolstering the local ecosystem.

Music Week culminated on Feb. 28 with an Industry Summit, which brought independent artists and small venue operators in dialogue with powerful people like Mayor Daniel Lurie, executives from Another Planet Entertainment and Goldenvoice, and the director of the Recording Academy’s San Francisco chapter.

When about 200 caffeinated music professionals and enthusiasts first sat down in the wood-paneled ballroom of Swedish American Hall, people kept repeating a certain phrase: “We’re so back.”

“Let’s get this city to its rightful place, which is the greatest city in the world,” said Lurie during his 15-minute onstage conversation with Noise Pop co-owner Jordan Kurland.

Yes, the Bay Area has an incredible legacy of nurturing musicians and artistic movements, from Carlos Santana to E-40, from hippies to hyphy. But as discussions deepened throughout the summit, the tone shifted from local pride to unpacking the dire situation holding San Francisco back from its full potential as a music industry hub. Exorbitant rents that require artists to move away or hold down multiple jobs, leaving no time for music. Impossible economics for small venues. A collective post-COVID mood shift towards introversion. Large labels and promoters profiting; small businesses in crisis. A brain drain to New York and Los Angeles.

Yet as speakers aired out these very real obstacles, there was also hope in the ether. As freelance journalist and KQED contributor Emma Silvers pointed out during a panel, “We have government officials talking about nightlife as something other than a nuisance, which honestly is a really big change in my lifetime.”

So how do musicians and industry workers want to leverage that interest to boost San Francisco as a music city? Here are a few key takeaways.

Locking in government support for the arts

In the 2010s, Mayor Ed Lee turned Market Street into a tech corridor with tax incentives that lured in large corporations. But after pandemic office closures rendered downtown nearly a ghost town, Lee’s successor, London Breed, positioned arts and music as key to San Francisco’s economic recovery. Throughout 2024, she created several Entertainment Zones to promote block parties that drove customers to bars and restaurants, and spent $2.5 million on free concerts. Lurie, who celebrated his inauguration with a free block party headlined by SF EDM star Zhu, seems to want to build upon that policy.

“I think the Entertainment Zones, the Free First Thursdays, Outside Lands, Music Week — I mean, there’s no reason why we can’t continue these. They’re working, and I’m going to lean into them,” he told KQED as his staff hustled him out of Swedish American Hall to his next engagement.

But what will happen to city support of the arts once the free shows have drawn sufficient foot traffic, and therefore business interest, downtown? As multi-hyphenate musician and educator La Doña pointed out in her panel, San Francisco doesn’t have a great track record of standing by its artists and working class. (“There’s a lot of people that are successful in San Francisco, but it’s not usually the people who were born and raised here,” she said.)

“City Hall really needs to protect the arts community, enable the arts community, before everything is occupied by AI companies, which we know is coming,” said Noise Pop’s Jordan Kurland.

He and several San Francisco arts leaders, including EMPIRE’s Ghazi, advise Lurie on cultural matters. In a backstage interview, Kurland pointed to several successful initiatives in other cities, including Seattle’s Office of Film and Music, which has promoted creative use of office space and career development for artists.

“Soon, office spaces will be rented again,” Kurland said. “Right now, there’s an opportunity to carve out — whether it’s to turn some of these office spaces into creative spaces, whether it’s offering some lower-than-market rate housing for artists, now’s the time.”

In his 15-minute talk at the Industry Summit, Lurie offered a list of possible solutions, including workforce housing for artists, more low-income and affordable housing, less red tape for small businesses, better public education and improvements to public transit. How effective his policies on these issues will be, however, remains to be seen.

“It’s going to take time,” he implored. “Know this, I’m not here to tell you things are going to change overnight.”

What do artists want? Economic justice

During the Future of San Francisco Music panel, Analog Dog singer Austin Waz summed up the struggle of working musicians this way: “I just sold out The Independent,” he said, referring to the 500-person-capacity club, “but I can’t afford my apartment.”

Even P-Lo, the hitmaking rapper-producer, revealed in his keynote address that he lived with his parents until age 25 to make his career work.

There was a lot of talk throughout the day about creating opportunities for local artists to open for touring artists. But Maryam Qudus, who performs as Space Moth, said rates for those kinds of gigs haven’t gone up since she started getting them in 2011. “Generally it’s $300 if you’re an opener, and that’s really rough,” she said.

With artists scraping by, the economy of managers and booking agents around them shrinks as well, La Doña pointed out. Small venues, too, are struggling. Waz, who books shows at Kilowatt in the Mission District, said he’s seen at least 10 close in the past two years.

A possible solution? Government subsidies, philanthropic funding and corporate sponsorship for artists and venues, several speakers suggested. Waz shouted out the Market Street Arts program, a collaboration between the Office of Economic and Workforce Development and a private foundation, as a model for paying artists to perform at free community events, as well as recent city-funded SF Live concerts in parks and public spaces.

For many of the speakers, bolstering San Francisco’s music scene is so much more than making the city a hospitable place for big stars to stop by on tour. It’s about nurturing the creativity of upstart artists and small venues that are their proving grounds, so that new music can emanate from the city’s stages, sidewalks and speakers for generations to come.

“Art is a spiritual practice. And similar to healthcare, it is good for your body, it is good for your soul, it is good for society,” Waz said, prompting robust applause. “So that’s why I think you have the opportunity here to start to re-conceptualize music in and of itself. This is not a commodity of industry. This is a human right. And it is the thing that brings us all together. Without protections, without city governments protecting human rights, they are at stake.”