Crowbar Sydney

Crowbar Sydney needs your help.

Closure has become a very real risk for Crowbar Sydney, and the time has come to call on our supporters to survive. 

After 12 months of lockdowns and restrictions, live music venues around the country are closing down or just holding on by a thread - but we refuse to become a statistic of this pandemic. We ask you to help us fight the good fight into 2022.

Crowbar is an independent, family operated business, built on 9 years of blood, sweat, tears, and 20 years experience in the music industry. Supporting live music in Australia and nurturing our once thriving music scene has stood at the forefront of everything we do, and despite this massive hurdle of COVID-19 recovery, we aren’t going to lay down and die. We are overwhelmed by the tremendous support from our friends, bands and industry colleagues who have donated some amazing prizes and rewards for this crowdfunding campaign.

Comeback Kid, photo by April Josie

We are all battling negotiations with landlords, restrictions and reduced income, facing the end of JobKeeper and struggling to pay ongoing fixed costs and debt that keeps piling up. As one of the first industries to close and the last to re-open, we’ve been hoping that State and Federal Governments might come to our aid, but we're no longer in a position to patiently wait. And so, we need your help. Without it, we face making the gut wrenching decision of having to stop the music and close our doors permanently.

In March 2020 COVID-19 restrictions forced us to close our doors and stand down staff while we cancelled months of shows and events. We spoke to our landlords regarding rent and came to some arrangements, and are continuing to negotiate with them. We managed to trade at 1-3% of regular turnover with takeaway sales for the next few months until we were able to open the bar again for a much smaller crowd in mid June. We were eventually able to put on shows again in late August, returning to 20-30% of trade, dropping from 28,441 ticketed attendees in 2019 to just 8,336 in 2020. With restrictions slowly easing we are now returning to 30-40% of trade.

 
We have spoken with Ministers, Parliament, MusicNSW, the Australian Hotels Association, APRA and media. We have completed surveys and submitted our gravely reduced figures for turnover and attendance. We have carried on as best we can, working within government restrictions and operating at severely reduced capacities. We have taken loans to keep our staff paid and our doors open, in the hope that the NSW government would step up to help live music venues with something more to survive and put towards operational and fixed business costs like rent, insurance and utilities - something like the Victorian Live Music Venues Program. The grants we have been eligible for, like Live Music Australia, can only be used towards artist fees and venue improvements, which is helpful, but leaves us in a tenuous position with our operational costs when artists and venue capacities have been controlled by restrictions and border closures.

We’re asking our friends, our fans, our families, and everyone we know to help keep Crowbar alive by donating to our CrowFunder campaign.

Dune Rats, photo by Pat O'Hara

We feel it's important to be transparent with how the money will be spent if we reach our target of $200,000 across the Pozible and auction.

Our biggest debts are rent and loans taken out in 2020 and ongoing rent in 2021 while we are still recovering. We also have manufacturing costs of rewards, ongoing fixed costs such as insurances, GST & BAS, utilites and supplier invoices. Any extra money raised will be used to keep our heads above water, put on some great shows and keep the Crowbar dream alive.