I'm Looking Through You

When institutions tell you the full picture is too complicated to share, the useful question is not how complicated it is. It is what does the full picture contain they'd rather not tell you.

The assumption that ordinary people cannot handle complicated facts is one of the most durable and least examined beliefs in institutional life. It shapes how governments communicate policy, how corporations explain pricing, how regulators frame their findings, and how industries manage their public image. The assumption is almost never stated directly; it expresses itself instead as a preference for simplicity, a caution about overwhelming the audience, a concern that the full picture might be misread. Behind all of those reasonable-sounding qualifications sits the same basic judgement; the public will get it wrong, so we will decide what they need to know.

The evidence for this position is, on inspection, extremely thin. The evidence against it is just about everywhere.

In 2003, the United Kingdom introduced mandatory front-of-pack nutritional labelling on food products, over the sustained objection of the food and beverage industry, which had argued for years that consumers would not understand it, would be confused by it, would make irrational decisions based on it, or would simply ignore it. What actually happened is that people read it, understood it reasonably well, changed their behaviour in response to it, and created sufficient commercial pressure on manufacturers to reformulate products that were suddenly, visibly, embarrassingly high in salt or saturated fat. The labels did not cause panic, they caused accountability. The industry that had predicted confusion found itself having to justify, in plain numbers on the front of a packet, decisions it had previously been able to make in private.

The same dynamic played out in energy billing, though with a different outcome that is, if anything, more instructive. For years, household energy costs in the UK were presented through a system of tariffs and unit rates and standing charges of such deliberate complexity that meaningful comparison between suppliers was effectively impossible. When greater transparency was eventually mandated, bills became legible in a way they had not previously been. Prices did not fall. What happened instead was that people began to understand, with some precision, what they were actually paying for; which included standing charges that had risen sharply and that had no relationship to the volume of energy consumed, charges that contributed substantially to supplier profit margins while providing nothing that could reasonably be described as a service. The complexity had not been protecting customers from confusion. It had been preventing them from seeing clearly what the money was for. Transparency did not solve the problem of energy pricing. It produced something arguably more significant; a public that understood the problem, could name it accurately, and could not be told by an energy company that its bills were fair when the itemised evidence, and their extraordinary profits, said otherwise. If you were to track more transparent bills to the rise in the demand to nationalise the energy companies it would be an almost perfect correlation.

Neither of these cases is unusual. The pattern recurs across industries and institutions with enough regularity to suggest that the argument about audience’s lack of analytical skills is less a good-faith concern about comprehension and more a reliable indicator that the institution making it has something to lose from being understood. When a company or a regulator or an industry body tells you that the full picture is too complicated for the public to understand, the correct response is not “how complicated is it?” The reply should be “what does the information contain you are trying to keep hidden?”

There is a further point worth making, which is that opacity does not actually protect the people it claims to protect. The food industry’s resistance to front-of-pack labelling was framed as a defence of consumer choice and against oversimplification; what it was actually defending was the ability to obscure ingredients that would have changed purchasing decisions. The energy industry’s complexity was framed as a reflection of genuine market nuance; it was actually a friction device that reduced switching and preserved incumbent market advantage. In both cases, the people supposedly being protected by the information gap were the ones paying the price of it. When the labelling arrived, consumers were not overwhelmed; they were, in many cases, relieved to finally have a basis for decisions they had previously been making on instinct. Transparency did not harm the people the industry had claimed to be protecting. It ended the industry’s ability to operate without being asked to justify itself.

People like facts. This is not, it turns out, a controversial position. When given accurate information in accessible form, most people process it, update their views, and make better decisions than they would have made in its absence. And yes, I know you’re probably already muttering the dreaded word ‘Brexit’ under your breath, but that’s a good example of people not being given facts in a digestible form and making decisions based on misleading information; in this analogy, Brexit is the replica of the packaging on food that didn’t tell you what the ingredients were but did have a shiny picture on it. Personally, I can offer a small and local piece of supporting evidence: The pieces on this Substack that have travelled furthest beyond their original readership, shared by people who thought someone else needed to see them, are consistently the ones that go deepest into the data. Not the opinion pieces. The ones with transparent, clearly laid out numbers in them. Audiences are not fragile about knowing stuff; they are, in the main, curious.

The music industry has not historically proceeded on this basis.

The operating assumption in live music, held with particular conviction at the higher end of the business, is that fans are passionate but not analytical. That if you show them the money they will get angry at the wrong things. That the complexity of what we do and how we do it is a reason to say less rather than more. This assumption has produced a set of persistent public misunderstandings about how the economics of live music actually work, each of which generates low-level resentment directed at the wrong target, and each of which could be dissolved by a reasonably clear explanation that nobody has chosen to provide.

Venue hire fees are one example. The settled general public (and I would include artists, managers and agents in that category) belief is that grassroots venues extract a meaningful profit from the fees they charge promoters for access to the room, or are at least covering their costs. The reality is that in 2026, hire fees across the sector do not cover the basic costs of opening for the vast majority of venues in the country. The reason hire fees are kept low is not the outstanding generosity of benefactor operators; it is commercial pressure from promoters, which is itself a consequence of the standard industry contract’s insistence on directing more and more of the gross toward the artist, leaving the promoter and the venue to find their operating costs somewhere else. This is, in turn, resulting from the extraordinary costs of touring being forced upon artists, leaving them no wiggle room to even start a conversation about why you can’t actually man the door, turn on the lights, and strike up the PA for £100.

Bar income is the same, and significantly related, conversation. The general assumption is that the venue takes the bar and therefore the venue is alright, even when the hire fee cannot possibly cover the costs of opening; that a sold-out show means a healthy margin that compensates for everything else. Bar margins in hospitality have collapsed over the past decade, and bar spend per head at grassroots venues has simultaneously evaporated. The relationship between capacity and bar income is, if anything, counterintuitive; a sold-out show means a more crowded room, longer queues, and proportionally lower spend per person than a room running at seventy per cent capacity where everyone can get to the bar. The bar is not the cushion the public, or the promoter, agent, manager or artist, believes it to be, and the assumption that it is allows the sector’s actual financial position to remain comfortably invisible.

The most revealing example is the additional charges that appear on tickets; things like restoration levies, venue maintenance fees, facility charges. The audience sees these and reasonably concludes that someone is profiting from a line item that appears nowhere in the advertised price. What is actually happening is a structural outcome of the pressures mentioned above. The standard deal between venue, promoter, agent, manager and artist has been assembled in such a way that there is no room in the face value of the ticket for anyone to cover their true costs. The venue cannot embed its real costs in the hire fee. The promoter cannot include the actual costs of promoting the show in the offer document. The agent cannot put the full costs of the van, the hotel, the equipment hire fees in the contract. So the costs that should, and frankly in any reasonable working economic model must, be in the ticket are not in the ticket, leaving no choice than to have them reappear as charges that sit outside the contractual arrangement entirely, which is the only place they can be paid without triggering a renegotiation nobody can afford to get involved in. You restoration levy is not restoring the venue, it is paying the costs of opening it. Your fulfilment fee does not pay for your ticket to be sent to you, it pays for the promoter to take on the risk of the show at all. Even your ticket service fee is, certainly at the biggest events, structurally supporting the costs of the production in ways that would make most people’s heads explode.

The audience is right that the price structure of a ticket that emerges from this inability to be transparent is wrong, but they are, thanks to a complete lack of honesty about it, consistently wrong about the who, what, and why, of how that price came to be. That wrongness is not their fault; nobody has explained it to them, because explaining it would require everyone involved to account for their own position in the arrangement.

None of this requires classified information or a source who asked not to be named. It is a description of how the economics work, available to anyone willing to be honest or investigate it, which the industry has not been willing to allow to happen because transparency about the mechanics also illuminates the power relationships, and the power relationships favour whoever sits at the top of the negotiation. The lack of transparency about all this is not an unintended and incidental failure of the system, it is the system.

Music Venue Trust has a completely different approach. Since 2014 it has published the sector’s numbers throughout its existence; the losses, the data on touring contraction, the levy figures showing what percentage of tickets contain a grassroots contribution, the £76 million gap between what live music raised in ticket income last year and what it cost to produce. These numbers are public because making them public is important to the work of the organisation, and the transparency of the data is at the core of its successful relationship with its supporters . The choice to be transparent is not always comfortable. It invites scrutiny, including scrutiny of economic realities that are uncomfortable for the sector the charity represents. But it is the only approach that gives the argument any standing at all, and, as the food labelling and energy billing cases suggest, it is also the approach that eventually forces institutions that prefer opacity to either justify themselves or change.

Which is why the largest and most consequential opacity in British music is worth naming directly, and why it is particularly striking given who is responsible for it and what type of organisation they actually are.

PRS for Music is bringing in over a billion pounds a year in collections. It is not a corporation with shareholders to protect or a regulator with political sensitivities to manage. It is a membership organisation, constituted to serve the songwriters who have authorised it to collect royalties on their behalf, and as such it operates under an expectation of transparency that should, in principle, be higher than almost any other institution in the music industry. Its members are the people whose money it holds. They are entitled to know what is being collected, from where, on whose behalf, and where it ends up.

What they actually get is a higher degree of opacity, certainly within the grassroots live sector, on every one of those questions than almost every other part of the music industry. PRS does not publish meaningful data on what proportion of grassroots music performance falls within its catalogue; the figure that would tell you whether its core collection assumption, that every song performed is a PRS-registered work, bears any relationship to reality. It does not tell its licensees which songs it actually represents, information that would allow a grassroots venue to know, before paying a bill, whether the music performed on a given night generated any royalty obligation due to PRS for Music at all. It does not gather usage data at grassroots level in any systematic way, which means its estimates are not conservative approximations of actual activity; they are estimates of estimates, based on assumptions that have never been independently tested and which PRS has declined to submit to independent testing.

Then there is what PRS itself calls the Pop Concerts Available for Distribution, the pool of royalties collected from live performance that have not been successfully matched to the songwriters they belong to. The existence of this pool is not a secret, it is referenced in PRS policy documents for those who know where to look, but finding the data itself is a good training exercise if you fancy a career as Sherlock Holmes. How much is in it? PRS does not say. By what process does it attempt to match those royalties to the correct writers before the three-year redistribution clock runs out? PRS does not say. What happens to the portion that cannot be matched, and which therefore gets redistributed to members based on metrics that relate to just about anything except the actual performance? PRS will not say, or, at least, chooses to hide its answer behind statements that say, in effect, that this is how the policy works, which is not the same as explaining why the policy is designed this way or what the scale of its consequences is for the grassroots songwriters at the bottom of the market.

These are not questions about administrative detail. They are questions about whether the mechanism functions as it is supposed to function, directed at the institution that is solely positioned to answer them, addressed to a membership organisation that is holding its own members’ money. The food industry told us for decades that nutritional information was too complicated for labels. The energy industry told us that tariff comparison would only confuse people. PRS for Music, which occupies a position of statutory-adjacent authority over a royalty that every grassroots venue in the country must pay, and one of the few mechanisms by which songwriters can get paid, has for decades declined to say how much of the money it collects reaches the people it was collected for.

Songwriter royalties are not an abstraction. They are the income that compensates the people who write the songs that fill the rooms that generate the audiences that create the commercial case for all of it. Whether that income is reaching the correct people is a question with a factual answer. That factual answer is not currently available, because the institution best placed to provide it has decided, for whatever reason, that it would prefer not to create that information, let alone be transparent about it.

The music industry’s assumption that audiences cannot handle complexity has caused real damage, in misdirected anger and misunderstood economics, at every level of the live music market. But an institution that will not be transparent even with its own members is not making a judgement about audience sophistication. It is making a judgement about accountability. And the judgement PRS for Music has made is that accountability does not serve its purpose.

Transparency around songwriter royalties cannot, indefinitely, wait. Someone has to do something about this and bring transparency to it.

Stay tuned for a special Substack on Tuesday 8 June telling you who that is and how it’s going to be done.