How Much Will the Grassroots Levy Raise?

And what should we do with it?

Exactly how much will the Grassroots Levy raise? And if we know how much it’s going to raise, maybe it has a very significant impact on how we think about what to do with it.

There’s a set of strident positions being taken about what anything raised by the grassroots levy might be spent on, with all sorts of people chiming in to let us know who should get what money, and why and how they should get it. A lot of this discourse is related to an assumption that the benefits of any grassroots levy on arena and stadium shows needs to be fought over in a distributive negotiation, a process that imagines a particular part of the grassroots sector needs to ‘win’ the spoils of the new fund, and therefore, to balance that, another part of the same sector must in some way ‘lose’. That’s not just an unfortunate look when it comes to the ethics of the whole project, it’s also a terrible waste of time when we look at what the levy is actually going to raise and what that money can potentially do.

Music Venue Trust began work on the concept of the levy in April 2018. It was the only organisation at that time who stated unequivocally that the most successful parts of the live music industry would need to invest in the grassroots venues, artists and promoters on which that success was built. We were the lone voice in the industry for some five years highlighting that a failure to invest would have a dramatic impact on the availability of live music in our towns and cities, and that the decline of access to that creative opportunity in our communities must, inevitably, result in the top tier of the industry feeling the ripple impacts at some point in their own future. Success has many master, failure only one runs the old saying. Seven years on and we find that the whole industry now agrees with this simple concept. Well, except apparently the boss of the Isle of Wight Festival who didn’t get the memo.

MVT took that position in 2018 because we could already see the economic challenges emerging which have subsequently become incredibly focused and very public in the last few years. Those issues bear repeating, because they have not changed. These are the root causes of the decline in live music in the UK and they must be tackled:

1. Costs have exploded. Not increased, exploded; rent increased by more than 50%, energy bills up by more than 400%.

2. The UK has a unique tax regime for a leading world music economy that actively removes value from the grassroots sector for no returning benefit.

3. There are changes in audience behaviour which significantly reduce income, especially the generational change in the attitude to alcohol.

4. Facilities which are gradually declining are bashing headfirst into a market with higher expectations, limiting the possible face value of ticket prices.

These economic challenges sit as a distinct subsection within the overall Venn diagram of problems presented to the sector which includes other well-discussed issues like gentrification, noise complaints, a bad licensing and planning regime. Changing the planning policy framework to protect live music is a very worthy thing to do, and more should be done to enforce it and legislate it. But a new paragraph in the National Planning Policy Framework isn’t going to balance the books of a grassroots music venue facing a 780% increase in the cost of its energy supply, nor is it going to put petrol in the tank of the van that the artist needs to get to the venue.

No amount of people offering alternative views of what the problems are, and I am thoroughly beyond bored of reading an older generation of music fans claiming that young people simply don’t like music anymore ‘like they used to in my day’, can argue with the validity of the facts and the data. And that evidence tells us that music is more popular than ever. Live music sales are up, both in terms of raw numbers of people attending and in the gross value of the ticket market. We don’t have any problem with demand for live music. We have a problem with supplying it to our local communities at a price that makes it economically viable to present it. That problem isn’t caused by any lack of enthusiasm for it, or even by people deciding not to have that extra drink for whatever reason. It’s caused by the wildly inflated costs of presenting it not being able to be met by the price we can charge to see it, or the money we can make out of selling drinks or food while people are watching it. To address that problem, we need to re-balance the books with a radical intervention into both the facilities and the way touring is done in the UK.

In 2018. MVT could already see this and were already planning how it could be tackled. We knew than that we needed to get investment into the sector which could tackle these fundamental issues. Post the pandemic, MVT has worked directly to pilot, trial, and deliver the investments which remove or mitigate these challenges, whether that’s hugely ambitious projects like buying the venues to remove the landlords, and thereby remove the possibility of rent rises, or simple practical work like forming partnerships with energy suppliers and energy brokers to reduce the cost of supply and to start looking for a long term, sustainable solution to the risk of energy price rises over which the sector has no influence and no control. We’ve invested millions of pounds in putting artists back out on tour, money that literally puts fuel in their tanks, food in their stomachs, and a pillow under their head at night, and we’ve started looking at the core issues that underlie those challenges – things like fuel costs, accommodation, even, believe it or not, food supplies.

The core concept of all this work is simple: To establish a healthy grassroots touring circuit that is economically viable, resilient and sustainable, the ambition should be that every penny spent on a ticket at a grassroots music venue is directly supporting the venues, artists and promoters that delivered the show. That involves removing the financial demands of as many of the non-music related individuals and organisations as possible, eliminating the money they demand for their own financial benefit or for the services they provide from the financial model of the sector.

Who is taking the majority of the financial returns from the grassroots circuit right now? Private Landlords (rent), HM Treasury (VAT), British Gas, EDF, Eon, npower, ScottishPower and SSE (Energy), Esso, Shell and BP (Fuel), Premier Inn, Travelodge and Best Western (Accommodation), Greggs, Subway, McDonalds, KFC and Ginsters’ Pasties (Food). Because of the way these costs break down, and who accepts and pays for them being a disparate marketplace which varies from show to show, it can be difficult to work out exactly how much of each £1 spent at the door of your local grassroots music venue event is going to who. Some of it is easy to assess as a pure data point (HM Treasury get 16.6p) and some of its more anecdotal (even the price of a pie varies hugely from central Wales to London). However, we began thinking about this issue and plotting it as early as 2014, seeking to as accurately as possible understand who earns what from the grassroots ticket.

The data indicated that in 2014 the people actually delivering live music in our communities, the venues, artists and promoters, ended up with 58% of the ticket you, the music fan, paid when you chose to attend the events they created. By 2024, the amount left for all the venue staff, the crew, the musicians, everyone, to share was down to £2.98 from an average ticket priced at £11.48. That represents just 26% of your ticket that actually pays for the show, a huge 55% reduction in available income for everyone involved in delivering it.

These numbers, and the costs they reveal, are reflected in the amount that venues are having to try to raise from other activities to keep music live. The MVT Annual Report 2022 set the amount that the 900 plus venues in the Music Venues Alliance had to raise from beverage and food sales to subsidise live music at £79 million. By 2023, across just 835 trading venues, it had risen to £114 million. The 2024 Annual Report showed it rising exponentially to a staggering £162 million across just 810 venues. Between 2022 and 2024, the subsidy required to deliver a live music programme, a subsidy funded by alternative activity, beverages, food, club nights, venue merch, subscription schemes, everything else a venue does to raise money, rose from £80,000 per venue per year to £200,000 per venue per year. To repeat; the costs didn’t increase. They exploded.

This data on the costs of delivering live music returns us to the grassroots levy, to what people want to do with it, and what it could and should do. Immediately and urgently there’s going to be a need to simply manage the short-term issue of the huge increase in costs and the fall in income. So yes, there will need to be emergency funds to stop venues closing due to short-term economic challenges, and yes there will need to funding put behind artists who can’t afford to tour, and yes, there will need to be funding to enable promoters to return to taking risks.

Ultimately though, that’s a potentially bottomless bucket into which we would need to permanently tip ever more subsidies. It’s important to kickstart things back to a semblance of workable, but it is short-term thinking about a long-term problem. The grassroots levy must get into the root challenges, looking for opportunities to radically change venue costs and touring costs so the whole thing becomes affordable for everyone. It shouldn’t be rewarding private landlords for hiking rents by 50%, it should be trying to eliminate those landlords. It shouldn’t be permitting hotel chains to think that a 50% hike in room costs is okay, it should be tackling the issue of where artists can stay.

So let’s do that most cliched of things and do some ‘blue sky thinking’. What could this all look like if we rethought the whole thing on a long-term basis and not on the needs of short-term disaster management?

It’s 2028. Venue X is a run by a Community Interest Company, thanks to financial support to convert from its previous Limited Company it was able to access from the Grassroots Levy in early 2026. Because of it’s not-for-profit structure, the local authority have agreed with national government to zero rate its Business Rates. Being a not-for-profit registered cultural entity, it doesn’t pay VAT on its tickets thanks to the VAT Exemption on Cultural Ticketing. The building that houses it is owned by a Charitable Community Benefit Society, which acquired the property from a private landlord in late 2026 using funds from the Grassroots Levy, immediately reducing and then permanently freezing the venue’s rent. Following the installation of a Solar array and insulation thanks to the Grassroots Levy in early 2027, the venue enjoys not just free energy supplies but even a small cash injection from the energy it sells back into the national grid in less busy times. Upstairs, in a previously un-used part of the building, the venue offers overnight accommodation for touring artists, with showers and a full kitchen paid for with a capital investment into touring facilities by the Grassroots Levy in late 2027. On stage, the venue has a comprehensive, well-maintained backline available for all performing artists, reinforced by the latest PA and lighting, secured again during its capital investment phase working with the Grassroots Levy in early 2028. As part of that capital investment project, to the rear the venue has installed an EV charging station, where the touring artists can recharge their electric vehicles for free overnight – the vehicles that were purchased with Grassroots Levy money and are maintained for use at a greatly reduced rate in the grassroots sector by the UK’s best hire companies.

Under this pie-in-the sky, madly optimistic model, venues, artists and promoters wouldn’t be sharing the 58% of the ticket money they used to get in 2014, or the 26% they are left with in 2024. They would be sharing 100%. Every penny you spend at the door could be supporting the live music in our communities we all want to see.

Every part of this insanely positive vision is completely achievable, and all it requires is to flip the current discussions away from the distributive negotiation model, the hands aggressively outstretched to see who can get that all important short-term ‘win’, and to move the conversation back to where we should all be; an integrated negotiation, where there is enough funding coming down the pipeline that everyone can work together and we can all get what we really need.

And that brings me, finally, right back to the start of this article. There has been too much discussion about the Grassroots Levy which has tended to view it as a one-off injection of cash which needs to be distributed and then we all move on. Much of that conversation has taken place without considering how much funding it might actually be, the mechanisms under which it might be distributed, and what, as a result of those two factors, might be achieved in the short and long term.

Let’s start with how much it will be, because I don’t think anyone has actually run the data, and if they have it certainly hasn’t been written down until now. In 2025, £1 from every ticket at a live music arena and stadium show would raise a minimum of £22 million, with a maximum possible scope of £30 million. This is tracked and evidenced data for the minimum amount of £22 million and a predictive estimate for the top possible amount of £30 million based on current announcement schedule – 2.7 million additional tickets for 2025 have been put on sale since 1 January.

Other than PRS Foundation and Arts Council England, who jointly remain the market leaders for distribution of live music funding, Music Venue Trust has been the biggest financial supporter of the grassroots sector in the last three years. During that time, on the kind of short- and long-term interventions proposed in this article, MVT has invested just over £7.8 million in projects like ownership (for which Arts Council England were, in any case, a partner), energy efficiency, touring costs, company structures, legal and financial advice. For the sake of this piece let’s assume that we did it at a regular pace of £2.6 million a year.

Thanks to our brand and corporate partnerships and the generosity of our donors, we are a well-staffed and funded organisation. To manage that £2.6 million per year, we have a dedicated team that deals with members, a dedicated team that deals with partnerships, a dedicated team that deals with grant applications, curated interventions, and an entirely separate charitable partner that manages ownership matters (in the shape of Music Venue Properties). We are a team of 18 people enabled by the skills and experience of a network of dozens of advisors and supported and informed by hundreds of venues manned by thousands of people.

And we need that infrastructure, and yes I am finally getting to the central point of this article, because giving away £2.6 million a year in a meaningful way that will actually make a difference really isn’t that easy. If the whole of the Grassroots Levy was in place, as it should be, for 2025, the amount to be given away would likely be £25 million. That’s ten times the size of the challenge we already have and, cards on the table, we simply could not do it. We could not increase what we are doing tenfold, it’s completely unrealistic to imagine we could.

The reason you don’t see MVT on the front page of the NME demanding that venues must get this amount or that amount, or making calls not to use the money for this or that project, or demanding it should be used mainly for another thing, or that venues must get a certain share that is at least the same as someone else is getting, is that we are keenly, and perhaps uniquely, aware of two facts:

1. There is plentiful money to do a range of short- and long-term interventions based on all the best ideas that almost anyone working in the grassroots sector can bring forward

2. Anyone’s ability to deliver their part of that solution is actually limited by very practical considerations, not by the money that might potentially be there if those practical considerations did not exist

£25 million that should be there in 2025. £25 million that must be there in 2026 - or the industry faces the almost certain outcome of a statutory levy that would, in all likelihood, raise double or triple this amount. £25 million in 2027, 2028, 2029. It’s not one set of money for one year. It’s a completely new income source, ongoing, stretching away into the distance.

Colleagues in the grassroots sector need to have a significant rethink about what they can actually deliver based on the scale of the task and the fact that we should all be in a collective process of delivering a radical rethink of the grassroots sector.

The conversation should be restarted from a simple concept: How do we deliver that radical rethink together so that everybody wins?