DNA Lounge: Donate (original) (raw)
Support DNA Lounge!
Your donation helps ensure that we can continue bringing you the kind of awesome, eclectic and weird events that you've come to expect from us! Your donation keeps us independent, and lets us continue to take chances on the kind of local live entertainment that makes San Francisco great. Won't you pitch in?
To support us on a monthly basis, please subscribe to theDNA Lounge Patreon!
DNA Lounge has been one of San Francisco's most popular nightclubs for a quarter century, but today we need your help.
Who We Are
The umbrella of DNA is host to countless vibrant communities and thousands of regulars. We've had many years of the most diverse, weird, interesting calendar of any venue. A typical month here doesn't include just bands and DJs, but comedy, lecture series, circuses, robotic exhibitions, dance performances, hair shows... We always strive to provide a home for a whole lot of truly amazing art.
We are one of the very few independently-owned, non-corporate-controlled live music venues still remaining in San Francisco.
DNA Lounge has always been a political project: an attempt to move the needle of culture in this city. To provide a forum for a wide variety of art that makes this city a better place. DNA Lounge is putatively a business, but it is also activism.
A political, cultural and artistic project like this does not come cheap. While we consider DNA Lounge to be monumentally successful in all the ways that truly matter, monetarily, the club has always operated at a significant loss.
In the last few years, the financial situation has gotten particularly dire, and we're trying very hard to figure out how to stay alive -- and that was before the gut-punch of COVID-19.
We were in lockdown for 465 days -- nearly 16 months. About six months after lockdown ended, we finally received some COVID-relief government grants, which helped. But now all of that grant money has finally been spent, just keeping the lights on.
We have enormous fixed costs (rent, insurance, payroll, licensing) that do not go away when the club is empty, and those expenses have only increased, far outstripping mere inflation. Since we opened back in 1999 our rent has tripled, our insurance is probably five times higher than it used to be, and employee health care costs just keep going up.
And yet our attendance has not even remotely recovered to pre-COVID levels.
A major contributing factor to our plight is that San Francisco's local music scene is being systematically taken over and dismantled by the multi-billion dollar international media conglomerates AEG and Live Nation / TicketMaster. For years, they have been using their vertical integration and monopoly power to make it nearly impossible for independent venues to compete with them -- and then taking those venues over when they fail. I wrote about this on the DNA Lounge blog in 2018, but it's only gotten worse since then, with Great American now controlled by Live Nation, and with Slim's, Mezzanine, Elbo Room, and Hemlock now permanently closed.
Meanwhile, the astronomical wealth inequality in San Francisco is destroying cherished local businesses and cultural cornerstones on a daily basis, driving them away with high rents, real estate speculation, and higher costs across the board.
So we are asking for your help!
Support DNA Lounge!
Your donation helps ensure that we can continue bringing you the kind of awesome, eclectic and weird events that you've come to expect from us! Your donation keeps us independent, and lets us continue to take chances on the kind of local live entertainment that makes San Francisco great. Won't you pitch in?
To support us on a monthly basis, please subscribe to theDNA Lounge Patreon!
But what's in it for you?
Your donation allows DNA Lounge to continue to exist, plain and simple. We think that's important. We think that's a pretty big deal. We hope that you do too!
But to sweeten the deal, and to give you some well-deserved bragging rights with your friends, if you subscribe to ourPatreon, the higher levels of monthly patronage include a membership card that entitles you to free admission for you and a friend!
Check the Patreonpage for details on the various membership card levels.
Thank you!!