11 O'Clock Tick Tock.

HC 128, the Grassroots Levy, and the consequences of a choice that was always Live Nation’s to make

There is a paragraph on page 20 of HC 128, the Business and Trade Committee’s report into competition and market functioning in the UK live music industry, published last Sunday, in which the committee, without asking me, chose to quote me. The quote they decided upon is from an NME article published in January, and even without my consent to use it I can’t exactly object to its inclusion since it is 100% accurate. It is also, word for word, what I had already said directly and privately to senior people at Live Nation on multiple occasions before I said it in public. Finding those words reproduced in a parliamentary report is not, therefore, a surprise. It is still a dispiriting thing to read, not because I was wrong, but because being right about this was never what I thought would be the best outcome. Here’s what I said:

It will be a direct consequence of the overwhelmingly dominant force in the arena and stadium market deciding not to deliver a voluntary levy. That’s your choice, Live Nation, and everyone in the industry hopes you make the right one.

I want to be careful about what HC 128 actually is and what it actually claims, because the report deserves more precise consideration and nuanced thought than it has received in most of the coverage it has so far generated. The Business and Trade Committee, chaired by Liam Byrne MP, issued a call for evidence in October 2025 and received 45 submissions. A significant proportion came in anonymously or confidentially, which the report claims may have been because contributors feared reprisal from Live Nation if they were identified. The Committee named this as a factor explicitly, and its view is that an industry in which people are afraid to speak on the record about a single company is, in itself, a data point about the nature of that company’s position in the market. You do not need a regulator to have made a formal finding on what may or may not be a monopoly for that observation to give you pause for thought.

The Committee’s central position is that Live Nation’s level of vertical integration, its simultaneous control of venues, promotion businesses, ticketing infrastructure, festival brands, artist management companies and data systems, creates harms to competition across the live music supply chain sufficient to warrant a full CMA market investigation, to be launched before the end of 2026. It is not for me to say whether the Committee is right. That determination falls to the CMA, but given what the report contains, a market investigation now seems close to inevitable. What I can say is that the picture the Committee draws of how this market functions is largely consistent with what anyone working close to the sector has been watching for some time, without anyone previously having had the power to compel the disclosure of data that would make our understanding of it complete.

The CMA uses three tests to determine whether a firm holds a dominant position; substantial market power over a sustained period, barriers to entry and expansion by others, and the ability to behave independently of the normal constraints imposed by competitors. The Committee’s view is that evidence gathered through the inquiry raises concerns against all three for Live Nation specifically, others more widely, and it makes its case across the full supply chain.

On the question of market power, analysis of Pollstar data provided to the Committee by Which? found that in 2025 the top five promoters were involved in nearly half of all UK shows, with Live Nation first among them; when measured by ticket value rather than volume, the Committee’s position is that Live Nation or a subsidiary promoted over half the total. The Association of Independent Festivals provided data showing that of the 23.1 million arena and stadium tickets on sale in 2025, Live Nation directly controlled 58%, rising to 66% when its affiliated companies are included. SJM Concerts, the second largest promoter in the market, controlled 23%. The Committee also notes that there has been no significant investigation of the UK live music sector since the Competition Commission examined the merger of Live Nation and Ticketmaster in 2010, and that the difficulty in establishing how that position has changed in the intervening fifteen years is itself a consequence of the absence of compelled disclosure. The gap in evidence, in the Committee’s framing, is part of the evidence.

On barriers to expansion, the picture the Committee puts forward is of a market structured in ways that make it progressively harder to operate independently of the largest company in it. Live Nation’s integration across promotion, venues, ticketing and festivals allows it to offer artists all-in-one touring arrangements that no independent competitor can match, and to use profits from higher-margin activities, principally ticketing, to subsidise promotion, absorbing losses on underperforming events and offering headline fees that smaller promoters cannot come close to. Independent promoters who want to work in Live Nation-controlled venues, the Committee was told, face higher costs, shorter booking windows and mandatory use of integrated ticketing systems that do not apply to the company’s own arm. Phil Bowdery, Executive President of Touring International Music at Live Nation, told the Committee in June 2025 that the reason for the company’s large market share in arenas and stadia was that they are “very good at what we do. Therefore, there is interest from the major artists to be with Live Nation.” The Committee received that explanation and found it, let’s say, incomplete in its ability to answer the question of whether a monopoly position exists.

On the third test, the ability to behave independently of competitive constraints, the report names Swansea, which in 2025 failed for the first time to secure any major tours, with shows routed instead through Bristol and Cardiff, where Live Nation own and promote venues. It records evidence that access to Live Nation venues is in some cases made contingent on participation in its festivals, or vice versa. Dean James, who co-founded MAMA Group before its sale, described that arrangement in terms that have the quality of a slightly exhausted n admission: “if you don’t play their venues, you don’t play their festivals.” The data and infrastructure section of the report adds a further dimension that is easy to miss; evidence submitted to the Committee alleged that even where third-party ticket agents participate in primary sales, they are required to integrate their systems with Ticketmaster’s, which means Ticketmaster retains the customer data from a competitor’s transaction and can deploy it across its promotion, marketing and event operations. The US Department of Justice complaint against Live Nation, filed in May 2024, described this as the company monetising a unique data trove to increase its bottom line and further entrench its positions. A federal jury found in April of this year that Live Nation illegally maintained a monopoly harming competition among venues, ticketing services and other promoters. The US market, to be very clear, is not the UK market. But the Committee’s position is that the UK and its consumers should not be left waiting for the CMA to reach conclusions that American courts have already reached through litigation, with all the time and expense that entails for everyone concerned.

The report recommends a full market investigation across the entire supply chain, to be launched before the end of 2026, and states that if the investigation concludes it is necessary, the CMA should use its powers under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, which includes the power to break up a business. That language is in the report. It is parliamentary, not journalistic, the difference between an outcome and a hyperbolic headline.

Now, at this point, most people in the grassroots sector who have read this far are either punching the air or reaching for the phone to ring someone and share the news. Many of my colleagues across the campaign community, and a significant number of people who work in and around grassroots music, take the view that Live Nation’s dominance of the market is not merely a competition problem to be managed but a moral and ethical one to be dismantled; that the company’s behaviour toward the grassroots sector represents a deliberate and sustained act of extraction from an ecosystem it exploits without adequately supporting, and that the correct response to HC 128 is unambiguous celebration. I understand that view. I have sat in enough rooms watching enough venues close to understand exactly where that level of anger comes from and why it is often easier to seek a single target for it. But it is not quite my view, and I think the report deserves engagement with what it might actually mean rather than with what we would like it to mean.

There is a question HC 128 does not fully answer, and it is worth asking plainly. If the CMA were to investigate and find everything the Committee believes it will find, what would actually happen? The report raises the possibility of a breakup under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. It is worth thinking seriously about what that would mean in practice, because the answer is not straightforwardly good news for the grassroots sector, and it is not the outcome many of the people celebrating today’s report are imagining.

Getting a major headline artist out on a stadium or arena tour in 2026 requires an extraordinary level of capitalisation. The production costs alone, staging, lighting, sound, crew, logistics, transport, insurance, the sheer physical infrastructure of putting shows of that scale on night after night across multiple countries, mean that the company doing the promoting is carrying financial exposure running into hundreds of millions of pounds before a single ticket is sold. That level of investment can only be shouldered by large companies with deep balance sheets and the ability to absorb losses on individual events across a portfolio of wider activity. This is not an argument Live Nation has invented to justify its existence and sold to me to win my support. It is a structural reality of how the market at that level works; it was true before Live Nation existed in its current form and will be true after any regulatory intervention, however dramatic, tried to change it.

The music industry is also, at every level but especially at the top of it, a personal relationship business. Artists, managers and agents making decisions about who promotes a major stadium tour are not selecting from a procurement list. They are making a judgment about who they trust with the most significant commercial event of their career, often over a relationship built across years and multiple tours at ascending scales. Let’s go back to Phil Bowdery telling the Committee that Live Nation is very good at what it does. He is at least partially right about that. The truth is that Phil Bowdery, personally, is very, very good at what he does, and he happens, at the moment, to do it for Live Nation, having previously been good at it for a variety of other companies. Being very good at your job does not, of course, resolve the competition question the Committee is asking. It does, however, complicate any suggested remedy considerably.

If the CMA were to conclude that Live Nation must be broken up, the consequence would not be a sudden flowering of independent promoters competing on equal terms for stadium tours. It would be the rapid emergence of a new investment-backed entity, organised around the same people and the same relationships, because those are the only basis on which those shows happen. The capital requirements do not disappear because a regulator has expressed a preference for a different market structure. Someone has to write the cheque, and whoever writes it will want, and will likely obtain, the same structural position Live Nation currently holds. The problem, in other words, does not live in the corporate registration documents.

This is not an argument that the CMA should not investigate, or that the Committee’s findings are wrong, or that the current structure is acceptable. It is an argument that the remedy which would actually serve genuine competition is not dissolution but more likely constraint; behavioural undertakings, transparency requirements, the separation of ticketing from promotion in terms of how venues are accessed and how inventory is allocated, the enforcement of level-playing field terms for independent promoters in Live Nation-controlled spaces. The CMA has the powers to require all of that, and it is my personal view that, if the allegations made by the select committee are correct, those are the interventions that address the specific harms the Committee has identified without trying to dismantle the capitalisation structure that makes stadium and arena touring financially possible in the first place.

But there is a further question that a CMA investigation into the live music industry would need to sit with, and it is the one that matters most from where the grassroots sector is standing. If Live Nation were replaced tomorrow by the investment-backed successor entity that the economics of this market would inevitably produce, would that entity be more willing to back a voluntary grassroots levy than Live Nation has so far been? The honest answer is that nobody knows, and the CMA cannot know, without asking it. If the answer turned out to be yes, then the Committee’s findings about market dominance would be directly relevant to the grassroots sector’s future, and the investigation would matter enormously to every venue, artist and promoter working at the level where the levy would make the difference between surviving and not. If the answer is no, then for the grassroots sector the entire question of monopolies and competition, however important it may be on its own terms, becomes an interesting sideshow to a more fundamental problem; that whoever provides the capitalisation for the largest shows in this country, under whatever corporate structure a regulator eventually permits, cannot see or will not acknowledge that those shows would not exist without the smaller shows from which every artist on those stages first emerged. That would not be a Live Nation problem. It would be an industry-wide failure of understanding, and a statutory levy would be the only available response to it, because the voluntary approach would have been demonstrated, finally and completely, not to be capable of delivery by anyone, in any configuration of the market.

Which brings me to page 19, and to the paragraph I can speak to with more direct authority than I can speak to the Committee’s broader findings on market dominance.

The Committee records that as of March 2026, only 30% of tickets sold for shows in 2026 had supported the voluntary contribution, and attributes this widely to Live Nation not implementing the levy. It then quotes my January statement. What the Committee is not primarily doing, and this matters, is making a finding about the levy itself. Its argument is more precise; what it puts forward is that Live Nation’s singular failure to deliver an industry-wide agreement, when SJM, Kilimanjaro and AEG have all delivered it, is a demonstration in practice of what its third test looks like when answered by conduct rather than theory. A company that controls the majority of a market declines to participate in a government-backed, industry-wide agreement, watches every significant competitor comply, and faces no commercial consequence that alters its behaviour. The Committee’s view is that this illustrates what operating outside normal competitive constraints actually means. It is quite hard to construct an argument against that position that does not ultimately rest on the claim that 58 to 66% market share is somehow compatible with normal competitive discipline, and I would be genuinely interested to hear someone try.

What I can say, because I have been close to this from the beginning and the arithmetic is not complicated, is that the levy was always going to produce one of two outcomes. It succeeds and stays voluntary if Live Nation backs it; it fails and becomes statutory if Live Nation does not. That is not analysis or opinion. It is a mechanical consequence of market share. The voluntary approach, which everybody in this industry understood to be better than the statutory alternative, was always contingent on the company that controls the majority of the relevant ticket sales deciding to apply it. Whatever press releases or assurances Live Nation has issued, it has not currently decided to apply the voluntary levy. Four weeks from the government’s 30 June deadline for 50% coverage, the figure for uptake stands at 30% as a result.

I want to add something specific about the people inside Live Nation, because the public conversation about this company is often conducted as if there is a coordinated project against the grassroots sector run by people who have never cared about music and never will. That is neither accurate nor fair. The individuals I know who work there, the people I have sat across a table from and made this case to directly, are not indifferent to it; some of them understand the argument clearly and pushed hard for action internally. The problem, as best I can describe it from the outside, is structural. Live Nation is a publicly listed American corporation. Decisions about what appears in event cost lines do not get made by the people in those London rooms; they are made several layers of management and an ocean away, within a company whose primary obligation runs to its shareholders rather than to the UK talent pipeline. That does not absolve the company of anything. It does, in its own way, describe precisely the argument the Committee is making.

Because the Grassroots Levy was not, and I’m sad to even have to make this point, a trap designed to catch Live Nation out and end up in a DBT select committee report. It was the opposite; a highly visible, publicly endorsed opportunity for the largest company in the market to demonstrate that its dominant position came with some sense of responsibility to the ecosystem that makes it possible. The talent filling Live Nation’s arenas does not materialise from nowhere. It comes through the sticky-carpeted rooms where nobody is making any money, and a £1 contribution per arena and stadium ticket from the company that sells the majority of those arena and stadium tickets would have been the right thing to do by the sector, would have been good politics, and would have been, in every calculation I can construct, good long-term business. Ultimately, we may be at the point where we have to accept that despite all the great people working there who firmly believe that they do have a responsibility and are invested in the future of UK talent, the company itself, as a global entity, could not deliver it. Not because the people I spoke to did not understand that, but because of what the company structurally is, and what that structure means for how decisions of that kind actually get made. That structural reality is precisely what a CMA investigation would need to examine.

I know that argument will frustrate many colleagues who would prefer a cleaner story, one in which the bad actors are clearly identified, the regulator acts, and the market is restored to something fairer. I am not unsympathetic to that preference. The ethical case for saying that a company which has accumulated this degree of market power while failing to support the ecosystem that sustains it deserves serious regulatory scrutiny is not a weak one; it is, in fact, the case the Committee has made, in detail and with evidence, across twenty-seven pages of parliamentary report. Where I part company with some of those colleagues is on what the investigation should be asked to achieve, because achieving the right thing requires being precise about what the problem actually is. Breaking up a company is not the same as fixing a market. And fixing a market, in this case, means nothing unless whoever emerges from the other side of any regulatory process is both willing and able to support the grassroots sector in a way that the current dominant entity has consistently failed to do.

The Business and Trade Committee has put its findings into a parliamentary report and sent them to the CMA. Whether the CMA agrees with the Committee’s reading of what they mean is not for me to determine. What I can say is that I have been making the same argument, to Live Nation directly, since long before any committee asked me about it, and the outcome now described in HC 128 was, complete with a random quote from me, the only one that was ever going to arrive if nothing changed. I did not want to be right about that. The grassroots sector needed the money, obviously; but it also needed the moment, the moment when the industry demonstrated it could govern itself, that the voluntary approach was real, that the biggest company understood its stake in the health of the whole. That moment has not arrived, and the window of opportunity for its overdue arrival, which would require something dramatic to happen in an office in Los Angeles, is rapidly closing.

Whether the live music industry can avoid a statutory levy in the UK, a system of supporting the grassroots that would quickly sweep around the world is, right now, still Live Nation’s call.

Tick tock.