Alice Springs heavy metal music venue raises $1m in donations in fight to stay open — SkimNews
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- Black Wreath raised $1m via a month-long Pozible crowdfunding campaign — donations from $20 up to $10,000 arrived from supporters around Australia — aimed at buying Alice Springs' only dedicated live music venue and placing it in a trust.
- Pirate, the venue's leather-clad founder and creative director who works as an unpaid volunteer, must still close the gap to the owners' $1.23m asking price and plans to seek additional funding through philanthropy and by "reaching out to some of the biggest bands in the world."
- Founded in 2011 by a collective of three bands as a record label and backyard studios, the Black Wreath later leased a run-down industrial building and now also operates the national heavy music festival Blacken Open Air an hour outside town.
- In a town of 34,000 located 1,500km from the nearest city, Pirate attributes the local metal scene's intensity to "the isolation of the place – small-town frustration," though the volunteer-run venue serves every genre from First Nations and queer acts to punk and hip-hop.
- The campaign mirrors Melbourne's Tote crowd-funding $3m two years ago to stay open, and Pirate has set a new fundraising target of $1,111,111 — a date-nod to the venue's 11 November 2011 inception.
Why it matters: The $1m milestone shows community crowdfunding can sustain remote live-music infrastructure, but Pirate still faces a $230,000 shortfall against the owners' $1.23m asking price. The venue's long-term survival now hinges on his ability to court philanthropy and major-label acts — a high-stakes test for whether Australia's smallest markets can fund their own cultural spaces.
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