Speakers
About this event
Every career that ever mattered started in a small room.
Control Club. Expirat. Quantic. The rooms where bands played their first real gig, where a scene was born on a Tuesday night in front of forty people. Rooms like these exist in every city with a living music culture. But across Europe, they are disappearing - not because audiences stopped coming, but because rents went up, noise complaints won, and nobody built the policy architecture to protect them.
This panel covers the full chain - from the 200-cap club where careers begin to the 5,000-seat arena where they headline - and asks how cities build, protect, and connect their live music infrastructure.
But infrastructure alone is not enough. Running a venue is one of the most complex jobs in the live events industry - and until 2026, there was no postgraduate programme in Europe designed for it. In February 2026, the European Arenas Association and Ulster University launched the first MSc in Venue Business, alongside 18 micro-credential courses covering every specialist area of venue management. If the arena sector is professionalising its workforce through dedicated education, what about clubs, mid-size venues, and cultural centres across Eastern Europe?
Drawing on academic research on why venues are urban infrastructure, the Mannheim Model on how one city built an integrated system connecting education, industry incubation, and a UNESCO City of Music designation, the Timișoara European Capital of Culture experience on what survives after the programme ends, and the latest European data on who actually owns Europe's stages - this panel makes the case that deliberate ecosystem building requires three things together: policy architecture, infrastructure investment, and professional education.
A city with arenas but without grassroots venues has cut the roots of its own future. An industry with venues but without educated professionals is outsourcing its future to chance. The question is not whether to invest - it is how to connect the full chain and train the people who run it.
Whether you run a 200-cap club or a 5,000-seat arena, whether you sign the urban plan or open the doors every night - this conversation is about you. And about making sure the rooms that make your city worth living in exist not by luck, but by design.
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