Sunrise

Are we emerging from a long dark night for the grassroots music sector?

I have been thinking a lot this year about January 2020. Not nostalgically, not in a misty-eyed “before everything went wrong” way, but as a very specific professional memory. Because in January 2020 I stood up and said, with data to back it up, that after six years of solid and hard work by Music Venue Trust and the grassroots sector, there were more trading grassroots music venues than there had been twelve months earlier. Not stabilisation or a “slower decline”, actual growth. A small number, and certainly a very fragile number, but at last pointing in the right direction.

Obviously, with impeccable timing, the live music world dived off a cliff less than 2 months later.

What followed was not a slight dip in fortunes, it was a massive crater. A period where survival replaced progress, and where the job became less about building the future and more about stopping the present from collapsing entirely. Regular readers will know all too well what came next; lock-downs, debt, deferred rent, exhausted operators, energy crisis, exhausted audiences, cost of living crisis, additional taxes, and a slow, grinding restart to live music that, honestly, still feels a little like trying to push-start a bus uphill.

It has taken six years to get back to the point where we could even imagine being in sight of where we were then. That is not because nobody was working hard enough. It is because once you knock out part of an ecosystem, everything connected to it wobbles for years afterwards. Venues stop investing. Artists stop touring. Promoters stop taking risks. Audiences fall out of the habit. Confidence drains away quietly and takes a long time to refill.

That context matters, because January 2026 will not, sadly, not be the year where I will be able to stand up and say it again. We did not quite turn the corner in 2025. Even with with all the best will, and the most amazing work, in the world, the numbers on venue closures and openings remain stubbornly uncooperative. The Annual Report 2025, which MVT will launch on 20 January, will still be tough reading. There will be graphs that slope the wrong way. There will be sentences that begin with phrases like “continued pressure” and “ongoing challenges” and end with a piece of data that makes you reach for a stiff drink. No one who cares about this stuff will be taking it on holiday for some light sun-lounger reading and a few giggles.

And yet, here’s the strange thing. I feel more certain about the future now than I did when the numbers briefly smiled at us in January 2020. That certainty does not come from misplaced optimism. It comes from hefty concrete foundations built on the unglamorous, largely invisible work of the last six years and the way the things we have fought for and the sector has made its case for have, very slowly across the last three years, finally lined up into something that looks like an actual working system to protect, secure and improve grassroots music venues. We now have a plan founded in the reality of what can actually be done rather than a series of emergency responses held together with determination, goodwill, and caffeine.

2025 has been the year when the long game started to make sense in retrospect. When things we argued for a decade ago stopped sounding like campaigning and started sounding like infrastructural change. A grassroots contribution that moved from “nice idea” to “expected behaviour”. Ownership models that went from a daft idea that ‘will never work’ to delivered practice that is, surprise, surprise, actually working. Support mechanisms that no longer rely on venues discovering them five minutes before disaster, but are embedded and ready to provide support to venue operators long before they experience any kind of closure threat. New ways of thinking about how to support the incredible people who run these venues that are about to turn from impossible concepts into funded programmes.

It has also been the year where I have had to recalibrate my own sense of time. Advocacy is a painfully slow process. Structural change is even slower and I am both impatient by nature and have tendency to get very frustrated when something incredibly obvious to do does not get done. I also like milestones. I like being able to say “this is better than last year” and mean it without caveats. 2025 has reminded me that sometimes the most important years are the ones where you do not get the game-changing statement you want but spend your time deep in the long grass of policy arguing for a point in the future when you will not only be able to say it, you will also be 100% correct about it.

If I am honest, there have been moments this year where the weight of it all has, personally, landed harder than at any time in the last 11 years. It is exhausting repeating the same conversations, identifying the same warning signs, spending weeks on end detailing outcomes and being bluntly ignored. There is a particular fatigue that comes from being proved right slowly, from watching predictions you are told are alarmist quietly and inevitably become factual.

In my job, humour is an essential protection mechanism. It is often dark humour, admittedly, but still humour. If you cannot laugh at the absurdity of explaining, for the fiftieth time, that a venue with a 0.48% margin cannot absorb another pre-profit tax hike, you will end up screaming at a spreadsheet. Nobody wants that. Least of all the spreadsheet.

The thing that has kept me going through 2025 is not the idea that things are suddenly easy. They are not. It is the sense that we are finally playing on a board where the rules are visible, where levers for change exist, where, when a venue asks “what can we do next”, there might, finally, be an answer that does not begin and end with “crowdfunder?”

Looking ahead, the work MVT is able to do is about to take a major shift. From firefighting to construction. From explaining the problem to testing solutions at scale. From asking whether grassroots music venues matter to deciding, collectively, how much they matter in practice. That is a harder phase in many ways, but it is also a more hopeful phase. One where the question is no longer whether this part of our cultural infrastructure deserves to exist, but how ambitious we want to be in giving it the respect it deserves.

So yes, 2025 was too difficult and we did not, sadly, turn the corner. It was another year of grit, stubbornness and more than a few early mornings and late nights wondering whether we are all completely mad.

Six years on from that moment in January 2020, I am realistic enough not to tempt fate. But I am confident enough to say this: We are closer now to a sustainable and viable grassroots music sector than we have been at any point since the pandemic hit. And that is not an accident. It is the accumulated result of thousands of decisions, arguments, compromises and acts of belief made by people who refused to let this stuff quietly disappear.

If the speech I give in January 2027 turns out the way I think, believe, and hope that it will, it will not feel miraculous. It will feel like the end of a very, very, very long argument finally being won on a close points decision. No knockout blow, no cheering, no fireworks, just a quiet moment where you look around and realise the lights are still on and maybe, just maybe, there are a few more of them than there were 12 months ago.

That would be a huge win for all of us.