The Quiet Bit Before the Drop

DCMS have launched their Creative Industries Sector Plan. It's the opportunity we have been waiting for.

The UK Government’s new Creative Industries Sector Plan is the most comprehensive attempt yet to think about how music fits into the future shape of the British economy. It doesn’t fix everything; it doesn’t claim to. But it does provide us with a serious platform to work with.

For years, we’ve been told that music policy has to be measured against what the Treasury might accept, or what industry partners might agree to, or what one department thinks another might block. This plan puts that kind of thinking to one side and sets out a positive direction of travel for the grassroots sector. It commits public money to creative infrastructure. It names grassroots music venues as part of the cultural and economic story. And it sets a target and expectation for the live music industry funding mechanism that could create long-term security for venues, artists and promoters.

That mechanism is the Grassroots Levy, a financial payment from every arena and stadium ticket sold, to be redistributed across the grassroots sector, which I’ve written about so often since 2018 that I can scarcely believe there is anyone left in the country who cares about music and doesn’t know what it is. The government had already confirmed it supports the principle and wants to see it delivered. Events featuring Artists including Enter Shikari, Coldplay, Diana Ross, Sam Fender, Mumford & Sons, Pulp, Katy Perry and Gorillaz are already pledged to contribute. There has for some time been cross-party, majority support in Parliament for the idea that the success of the top end of the industry must include investment into the base. It’s worth saying this over and over again: Not a donation. A sensible and affordable investment in research and development which secures future UK talent on which the entire industry depends.

The problem is not the idea. It’s the execution; if you are a regular reader you will have seen the latest data in last week’s column. Agreement to deliver a voluntary version of the levy was reached in December 2024 with backing from the biggest live music companies in the world. Six months later, the data shows that fewer than 8 percent of arena and stadium tickets for 2025 include it, and a lower percentage (down to 7.25%) for 2026 shows so far. Those numbers have fallen slightly since Q1. The industry led, fully agreed, version of the Voluntary Blanket levy is actually delivering lower returns than individual artists, agents, and promoters had already delivered without that industry coordination. Is that good enough?

In the Creative Industries Sector Plan, the government has announced that this levy will deliver up to £20 million a year to support the grassroots sector. I;ll go further; it’s a central plank of the Plan, which won’t do half as much to support live music in our communities without it. Right now, it’s on track to raise around £1.8 million in 2025, with the live industry coordinated voluntary levy since December 2024 responsible for less than half of that - more than half of these contributions were instigated by artists, agents, managers and promoters working directly with MVT. It’s key to the plan that it should be raising ‘up to £20 million’. Now, while I realise that £1.8 million is indeed ‘up to £20 million’, but I don’t personally think that the government will settle for it as being what they intend to achieve. In fact, I know they won’t, because in an answer to a Written Question from Jonathan Davies MP on 4 July the Culture Minister set a target for the uptake he wants to see by the end of 2025 (i.e. on 2026 ticket sales), stating that the live music industry should “sign up to the levy as a matter of urgency so that at least a majority of qualifying tickets carry the levy by the end of the year”.

Strap yourself in, because I’ve been burning a hole in my calculator and, as our American cousins like to say, doing the math. By the end of 2024, 15 million tickets for Arenas and Stadiums were already on sale for 2025 shows. 8 million more tickets for 2025 have been announced since, but let’s punch some numbers based solely on that established historical precedent. Assuming that a similar number will be on sale by the end of 2025 for 2026 events as were available at the end of 2024 for 2025 events, that means that between now, when there are 1,374,318 (1.4 million) 2026 tickets on sale, and 31 December 2025, when the prediction is there will be 15 million tickets on sale, a further 13,625,682 (13.6 million) tickets will be announced. Currently, just 99,600 of the 2026 tickets that are on sale contain the levy. That’s a rather lowly 7.25%. To hit Chris Bryant’s target of a minimum of “the majority of qualifying tickets” including the levy, the industry needs to ensure that 7,500,001 (7.5 million plus 1) tickets on sale on 31 December includes the levy. That requires that 7,400,401 (7.4 million) out of the next 13,652,682 (13.6 million) tickets will feature a levy. 54.2% of all tickets that will be announced in Q3 and Q4 of 2025 will need to include it. That already feels like a tall order, but let’s park it for now, return to it later, and explore the rest of the Creative Industries Sector Plan.

The wider Sector Plan looks further ahead than just the performance of the levy this year or next year. It sets out a road map to 2035. It brings forward a government funded £30 million music growth fund. It identifies the creative sector as a priority for export, innovation, skills, IP and inward investment. It speaks about ownership and community infrastructure. It references regional growth and the importance of place. And it recognises the role of grassroots venues in sustaining talent, audiences and culture.

There is a lot in the plan that we welcome and want to build on. We want to see the music growth fund targeted to the parts of the sector that need it most, so that grassroots venues, artists, and promoters benefit as a whole ecosystem, not just singling out those lucky enough to submit the right application with the right buzzwords. We want to ensure the long-term success of Music Venue Properties and the cultural lease model. We believe we can help the government to invest this money to reduce costs for all, making the sector as a whole more economically viable. We want local and regional funding to include support for venues at community level. And most of all, we want to help government make this strategy work.

But to do that, we also need to talk about what’s not in the plan.

In 2024, UK grassroots music venues collectively subsidised live music by £162 million. That is the financial gap between what audiences can afford to pay and what it costs to put on shows. That number appears nowhere in the plan. There is no strategy to close it. Until there is, the sector will continue to deliver public benefit at a private loss.

If the government is serious about sustaining grassroots music as a cultural infrastructure, it must go further in trying to close that gap, identifying the policies and processes for which it has responsibility which are magnifying that burden of costs. These are five practical example of steps that need to be added into the detail of the current Creative Industries Sector Plan:

1. Reduce VAT on tickets to grassroots events. And yes I know we keep being told that you can’t do this, but actually you can if the case is clear and unequivocal. And this case is exactly that; the current rate is out of line with comparable sectors and countries. It raises the price of access and cuts into the viability of every small show in the country. Taxing Research and Development of anything, in this case the development of new talent and research of new intellectual property, is just daft economic policy. It will never be sensible, and for that reason it will never go away from being an ask of government until it is changed to bring it in line with common sense.

2. Ensure that the Business Rate review ends egregious and unaffordable premises taxes while allowing digital companies to exploit the system and walk away almost tax free on infrastructure. There’s no point in a plan to regenerate our High Streets if we have a tax system that actively penalises people for running or opening cultural businesses on those streets. Alongside this general issue of ‘Clicks versus Bricks’, Grassroots Music Venues are, in any case, incredibly badly assessed for rateable value and that needs to be tackled comprehensively and decisively.

3. Commit to a ten-year national plan to ensure access to live music in our communities. That means reversing the collapse of the touring circuit. It means funding infrastructure and accessibility in places that struggle to maintain a music offer or, in to many cases, simply don’t have it. And it means treating music as a core part of cultural provision, not an optional add-on.

4. Provide targeted support to open new venues. Planning reform, capital investment, advice and coordination would unlock new spaces and new opportunities for artists, promoters and audiences.

5. Use tax incentives to stimulate employment. Other parts of the creative sector already benefit from this. Music should not be left behind. A tailored employment tax credit could be transformational for workforce resilience - we suggest PACSTR but we are open to any ideas that achieve this.

We want to work with DCMS to help deliver what’s already in the plan and to identify the practical policies and interventions that can achieve the ambition in it. We’re ready to work together to shape what comes next. The policy signals in the Creative Industries Sector Plan are strong and the principles are sound. Outcomes depend on what happens next in shaping how we deliver the plan; not in 2035, not in ten years’ time. This year.

Returning to the levy, there is a very practical point about how serious the government is, and whether the plan can be delivered, which creates an almost immediate test in the calendar for how and if the government is determined enough to deliver its plan. So let’s look again at where we are and the numbers so far.

Bluntly, in Quarter 1 and Quarter 2 of 2025, the live music industry has failed to deliver the voluntary levy version of the Grassroots Levy it committed to in December 2024. Sorry to all the people doing everything they can to make it happen, but that’s how it is. Some people have done all the heavy lifting and should be roundly praised for it, and I mean you AEG Presents, SJM and Kilimanjaro, and I certainly mean Jon Collins and Steve Lamacq at LIVE. Other people, and I don’t need to name you, you are fully aware of who you are, haven’t been quite so committed to it, requiring them to be summoned to a private meeting with the Culture Minister where I like to imagine the main agenda item was ‘What the fuck are you doing? Do you actively want a Statutory Levy?!?’

I am sure colleagues in the industry will want to present a multitude of reasons why it hasn’t happened yet, and some of those reasons have strong validity and some have none at all. But whoever has done whatever they have done or not done, it doesn’t matter to the outcome and the government has to be clear:

If there is not an entirely different rate of progress towards delivering the Voluntary Blanket Grassroots Levy by the end of Quarter 3, that’s the day after 30 September 2025, then attempts to deliver the voluntary levy will have failed. In his written answer to Jonathan Davis MP’s question mentioned above, Minister Bryant said “Summer ticket sales and the establishment of the LIVE Trust should mean greater uptake by Autumn. If not, the government will reconvene the live music sector to consider legislative options.”

The Government has set a target of at least 50% of tickets including the levy by 31 December 2025, and for 2026 we are currently at 7.25%. There is a huge gulf between those two numbers, and massive progress towards bridging that gap must be done by 30 September. I’m sure everyone will want to bargain about it, but I’ll set my own test; if we aren’t at 30% uptake on all 2026 tickets by 30 September, we pretty obviously aren’t going to make it to 50% by 31 December. And if the positive change required simply isn’t happening then it will create the first test of DCMS’s commitment to the Creative Industries Sector Plan. And the Government will have to recognise that.

No more extensions. No more waiting. No more deferrals. If the industry cannot deliver meaningful, significant progress towards the ‘further and faster’ adoption of the Grassroots Levy, to ensuring the majority of tickets by the end of this year contain the contribution everyone agrees should be there, to reaching the targets and ambitions stated repeatedly by Culture Minister Chris Bryant and contained in the Creative Industries Sector Plan, if we aren’t anywhere near those goals by 1 October 2025 , then, despite all the well-known and discussed faults and the challenges it presents, the government will have to start the process of introducing Statutory Legislation. And Music Venue Trust will, reluctantly, be compelled to back that decision.

In the meantime, everything about the Creative Industries Sector Plan is a big opportunity for the Grassroots Music Sector. From planning through taxation, public funding and cultural infrastructure, and, of course, the government’s approach to the levy. I wrote before about the disappointment of the general spending review from the Chancellor and I didn’t pull any punches about what a missed opportunity it was. I’m not going to miss the chance to do the same here only exactly the opposite. The Creative Industries Sector Plan is a triumph for the grassroots music sector, a massive opportunity, and a turning point in the road towards a protected, secured, and rapidly improving sector.

We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that the chance to make major positive, sustainable, change to the grassroots sector which is opened up by this plan is not wasted.

“An opportunity. A moment. Capture it, don’t let it slip.” - Marshall Bruce Mathers III.