Underground forms of popular music, their collective local appearance as well as their spaces recently undergo considerable transitions. Taking into account broader processes of urban regeneration, the appearance of a rather commercialized live music culture and changing spatial strategies of local scenes, the paper examines how originally underground music venues – as spaces of bottom-up movements and as breeding grounds of music production – handle ongoing transformations within urban environments.
Therefore, the paper presents some insights from three case studies undertaken in Hamburg St. Pauli. Basing on space as theoretical tie between urban, cultural and economic developments, fieldwork around Golden Pudel, Molotow and Mojo Club shows that in each case, the actors apply different strategies in order to preserve their basing – and individual - idea(l)s of self-governed cultural work.
Therefore, reactions towards new basic conditions include fundamental changes regarding their initial spatial and cultural strategies, which lead to new forms and levels of autonomy, professionalization and institutionalization. As a consequence, the status of these venues reaches from traditionalist but highly dependent to paradoxical forms of ‘subcultural institutionalization’.