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Playback: Strike Up the Bond

Sixteen months ago – long after announcement of the ambitious Omnibus fix-all, and long before the subsequent fumbling of venue-friendly policy – Mayor Steve Adler's office announced a scheme to preserve live music spaces threatened by vaulting rent and boundless development: a mini-bond program crowdsourcing funds to acquire a venue's land, which would then be rented back to the club at an affordable rate.

Its billing as "a creative solution for the creative class" wasn't hubris. "Playback" imagined that low-risk $500 bonds could be an attractive investment for creatively conscious citizens and perhaps even become a popular gift item: "Happy birthday, Aunt Dana, here's two shares of the Broken Spoke property." More importantly, the mini-bonds would be low hanging fruit for wealthy tech companies who need to back up their live music capital lip service with some actual capital.

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