Photo: Stephen Brackett | By Michael Roberts, Westword | Making it big in metro Denver’s entertainment industry has never been easy. For every success story like that of club king Regas Christou, who opened many popular nightspots over his lengthy career, there are countless tales of entrepreneurs who entered the scene with red-carpet fantasies only to wind up being swept under the rug. That’s especially true today, when financial realities are at their grimmest, as the owners of recently closed venues such as the Wild Goose Saloon understand all too well.
Against this backdrop, the City of Denver is doing something it hasn’t undertaken since the 1980s: revising the way entertainment businesses are licensed in the Mile High City.
Specifically, the Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection (formerly the Department of Excise and Licenses) is reimagining the way licenses are granted to commercial entities ranging from venues specializing in live music to pool halls. DLCP executive director Molly Duplechian hopes the result will be a significant reduction in the red tape that causes costs to spiral and dissuades creatives from launching projects in the first place. “One of our goals,” she says, “is to make it simpler and easier for people to access the license they need.”
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[Stephen] Brackett encourages anyone and everyone who cares about entertainment in Denver to take a look at the draft and offer their opinions. “The spirit of this is so right on,” he concludes, “but this office needs to hear from folks as to what all this will mean. And if the community shows up, I think we’re going to get something that’s a huge improvement over what we’ve had in the past.”
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Go here to read more on these laws that effect musicians all over Colorado:
https://www.westword.com/music/denver-revising-entertainment-venue-licensing-requirements-40872370/
