Road to Nowhere

Staffing shortages, collapsing career paths, and the need for a radical rethink

Somewhere between the tour manager asleep in the van, the lighting tech who hasn’t invoiced since January, and the bar manager who’s now also the sound engineer because nobody else turned up, there’s a word we should probably start using more often: Precarious.

That’s the word that fits the live music workforce. Not “flexible”. Not “creative”. Not even “passionate”, though that’s the one we’ve all been trained to use when asked why we put up with this. The truth is that most of the people who make live music happen are one broken boiler away from not being able to do it anymore. And this isn’t just an emerging trend. It’s a full structural collapse that nobody is properly tracking.

In the UK, the latest CMS Committee review heard from venues and artists who couldn’t find tech crews, had no freelance pool left to call on, and saw no clear path for anyone new to join. The Live DMA report confirmed the same across 16 European countries. The Australian national inquiry into the live music ecosystem went even further, dedicating whole sections to mental health, burnout, and what it called “labour precarity” — a polite term for “we can’t go on like this”.

Because here’s the bit we never say out loud. The live music economy isn’t just built on undervalued labour. It’s built on invisible labour. The engineers, runners, merch sellers, door staff, freelance bookers, programmers, tour managers and venue crew who don’t appear in glossy impact reports. The ones who don’t have pensions. Don’t have job security. Can’t get a mortgage. Who sometimes wait weeks just to be paid - if they get paid at all.

They’re not hangers-on. They’re not interns. They are the infrastructure.

And if we lose them - and every report from every part of the world tells us we are losing them - there’s nothing underneath to hold the rest up.

We used to have pathways. There were entry-level jobs. Mid-tier promoters. A range of part-time, one-off, occasional work opportunities that created a patchwork of part-time and freelance work that just about let you imagine this might be your life. You never had any guaranteed path to getting rich. But you could learn, grow, and maybe stay in the game long enough to carve out something that looks like a career. Now? It’s not just harder to get in - it’s easier than ever to fall out.

Live DMA found the same everywhere: venues with no paid staff, artists who couldn’t afford to bring techs, festivals that couldn’t train fast enough to replace the people they were losing. There is no substitutes bench of up-and-comers waiting for a shot. There’s just a shrinking pool of overworked people juggling too many roles and wondering if next week’s show might be their last.

We like to talk about the ladder for artists in live music. The idea that you start local, then scale up. From the grassroots gig to the support slot to the tour to the festival. But ladders need rungs. And rungs need people to build them and right now, those people are walking away. Not because they don’t care, but because they can’t afford to keep pretending that care is enough.

It’s not a lifestyle issue, it’s a broken labour market. And every broken labour market ends the same way - with collapse.

If this were any other sector, we’d have national policy focused on workforce retention. Training pipelines. Professional standards. Living wages. But live music? We call it a scene and expect people to survive on the vibe.

We are lucky to be part of it. Lucky to believe in it. But belief doesn’t fix a broken system. And passion doesn’t pay council tax. Eventually the sound cuts out, the lights don’t come on, and the venue doesn’t open. And it won’t be because the people who cared gave up. It’ll be because nobody gave them the tools to stay.

So how did we get here?

Let’s talk about the “grassroots pound”, a concept Music Venue Trust first began exploring in 2019. The grassroots pound poses the simple question ‘what happens when an audience member hands over £1 at a grassroots venue’. Because what the purchaser thinks they are paying for isn’t even close to what they are actually being charged for.

When you pay £1 at the door to see a band in a grassroots venue, the reality is that the vast majority of it isn’t going to support live music. Not even close. The first thing to start ripping the value out of your £1 is VAT. In the UK, that’s 16.6 pence gone before a note is played. In most of Europe, VAT on live performance at the grassroots level is half that or waived entirely. In the UK, we tax access, and the smallest venues feel it the most.

Now you’re at 83.4p left. Rent comes next - 88 percent of grassroots venues don’t own their building. Most sit on insecure leases with zero negotiating power. Rent rises have averaged 37 percent in the last two years. The rent cost takes you down to roughly 71p that you might be able to put towards the staff and artists that are making the event happen. But we even at 71p we haven’t finished distributing your £1 to people who aren’t anything to do with the show yet.

Next up is business rates - between 5p and 8p more, so let’s say for the sake of argument we have 64p left. Remember; no one’s been paid yet. No soundcheck’s been done. These specific taxes and bills have to be paid whether the room’s full or not.

Next up in the unavoidable costs of live music are the utilities - energy, water, rubbish, broadband, card processing. Energy alone has tripled or quadrupled in two years. By the time you’ve taken all these elements away from the value of the original £1 given by a fan in support of live music, we’re now hovering around 37p left - and we haven’t hired a single person.

We are past all the fixed costs you cannot avoid now, so we can, finally, after 63p of the £1 has been removed, move on to the next in line, the artists. If it’s an agency touring act, they are probably on a guaranteed minimum fee which is intended to be enough to pay for petrol, maybe accommodation, maybe van hire, possibly backline. They’ve probably brought someone to sell merch. If they’re lucky, there might even be enough left to cover that. But by now, once the artist takes their fee - a fee which to be clear probably also sees them struggling to meet their own costs - the £1 is all gone. We haven’t got to the costs of putting the show on; there’s nothing left in the pot for security, insurance, or staff. Or the support act. Or the promo campaign. Or dozens of other minor costs without any income source to fund them.

By the end of the night, that £1 isn’t any way near covering the costs of staging the live music. Live music at the grassroots level, as an activity in and of itself, is permanently in the red - a deficit traditionally made up for with bar sales, food, maybe bouncing money across from a private venue hire. In 2024 the gap between what live music raised through ticket sales and what it cost to produce, even ignoring the unpaid work being delivered by crew, staff, volunteers, and yes, by artists themselves, was £116 million. And that’s before we talk about the shift in drinking habits, or the cost-of-living crisis squeezing what’s left in people’s pockets. There simply isn’t enough money being raised from bar sales to cover that cost, and that’s why over 40% of grassroots music venues made a loss last year.

The grassroots pound doesn’t fail because venues are poorly run. It fails because the model is set up to bleed it dry before it can ever reach the people doing the work. When prices go up but the ticket can’t, the first thing to disappear isn’t the band - it’s the crew. The staff. The workforce. The people who make the night happen.

And that’s exactly what’s happening now.

These columns can tend towards a doom and gloom vision of the problem, but this isn’t irreversible. We are not short of ideas - we are just short of action.

There is one proposal on the table that’s ready to go - a plan to support the live music workforce by lowering the cost of employment at grassroots level. It’s called PACSTR — Performing Arts Creative Skills Tax Relief — and it works like this: Eligible grassroots venues would get back up to 45 percent of the wages they pay to people in creative, technical or production roles. Lighting techs. Sound engineers. Programmers. Stage managers. The people we are losing fastest.

PACSTR isn’t a grant. It’s not short-term. It’s not complicated. It’s the same tax relief already offered to film, high-end TV, theatre and orchestras. We’re not asking for special treatment - we’re simply asking for a level playing that includes rather than excludes grassroots culture.

It’s not going to fix everything. But it would mean a venue could hire a sound engineer. It would mean more shows run safely, to standard, with training baked in. It would mean a chance to retain the skills we already have - and open the door to people who never got that chance.

But the solution can’t stop there.

We need more than one tax relief. We need to explore that Grassroots Pound and radically rethink the economic model of grassroots live music - the cost base, the revenue streams, the role of the state, and the duty of the wider industry. We need a serious commitment to permanent protection for the people and places that keep music alive, and we need to tie that to fair pay and fair conditions for everyone involved. That radical rethink should be built around the basic concept that every £1 the audience gives us should be going into the music ecosystem and staying there, not helping government balance its books, not keeping an offshore landlord comfortable in Jersey, not fueling the profits of global fossil fuel companies, or price gouging hotel chains. Every part of the existing mechanism by which we deliver live music in our communities should be taken apart, examined, analysed, and then challenged for its ability to meet the main purpose: How is this charge, this cost, this expense, contributing to delivering live music? And if it isn’t, how do we get rid of it?

This isn’t charity. It’s infrastructure. It’s the groundwork for every tour, every headline, every streaming success and cultural export. It’s the reason artists exist in the first place - and the reason audiences return.

If we don’t build a future for the people who make it happen, we’re not saving live music. We are on a Road to Nowhere.