The Room Where It Happens

A short guide to why nobody at your local Grassroots Music Venue is keen to tell you when anything starts

Emma Wilkes took a proper, informed run at the mystery of unpublished stage times for Drowned in Sound this week. The guessing game is familiar enough to anyone who attends a lot of gigs that you barely notice you are playing it. You have some basic parameters to start from; doors at seven, curfew at eleven, three acts. One support you have heard of a bit so would feel slightly guilty about missing, another that you might give a go if everyone you’re meeting in the pub turns up on time. Probably twenty or thirty minutes for changeovers unless someone decides to dismantle a snare drum in real time. You stare at the ticket on your phone trying to work out the shape of the night like a detective who has been sent the evidence folder but not the password that opens it.

The article captures that quiet tension that sits behind so many gigs. If your last train home departs at a time chosen by someone who clearly never leaves the house, or if you have childcare that cannot be moved by the whims of a touring guitarist, or if your job requires you to show up looking awake, then “doors at seven” is not information. It is more like a shrug. You really do need the stage times to plan your evening, so why won’t the venue just give them to you?

The artists quoted make entirely fair points. Los Campesinos publish detailed stage times because they have stood outside venues with the same creeping sense of “have we missed it”. The Anchoress wants predictability because once you have children you essentially become a stage manager looking after a vocalist who not so much refuses to simply wear a watch but actually doesn’t believe in the concept of time. Benefits have decided to run gigs more like cinema showings. A simple idea, and a humane one, although I would note that cinemas tell you that the film starts at 7pm, when we all know it will actually start at 7.30pm after they have sold some advertising and some popcorn. Similarly, there’s a reason airports want you to check in two hours before your flight leaves, and it isn’t because they couldn’t make the check-in process work more efficiently, it’s because someone wants you to wander around the shopping centre they have built an airport in.

Fans want clarity. Artists want their fans to be able to get home without a military extraction plan. None of this is unreasonable. Yet in grassroots venues, the default is still a loose arrival window rather than a precise timetable. The article did a very good job of considering all the elements that would suggest that published stage times are a positive measure which support, among many other things, accessibility and build trust between audiences, artists, promoters and venues. So why aren’t they included in the most basic information on your ticket or elsewhere?

The reason is not anything dramatic. It is simple economics, and oddly like the airport two-hour check-in and the cinema misleading start times.

The romantic idea of live music at a grassroots level hides a very basic, practical truth. Ticket income is not enough to pay for the show. What seems like a lifetime ago in promoting years but may actually be as recently as 2005, the tickets sold would pay the artist, the crew, security, venue staff, chip in for the electric, rent, rates, and have a good go at being financially viable as a source of income sufficient to keep the bank manager happy. Those days are long gone. The majority of the money that keeps a grassroots venue alive, about 60% to 75% of what you need depending on the size of the venue, comes from what people buy once they are already inside. Drinks. Food. Hopefully a second drink, and if Dumpy’s Rusty Nuts are still going, maybe four or five. Anything that adds up across an evening. Without that part of the night, the figures collapse. As The Anchoress noted elsewhere this week, for artists that includes the hours of opening needed to have the opportunity to sell merch - it’s not like artists are making enough money out of the ticket price either.

This does not mean the venues want to trap anyone. It means the whole system has been pushed into a corner where the only stable source of sufficient income to keep the whole thing creaking along is adding what people spend while they are in the room onto what they spent to get into the room. And that is very different from the public’s default habit, which is to meet their friends in the pub down the road for two drinks before walking in at the last possible minute. That habit now shapes the future of the entire circuit far more than most people realise.

It is easy to explain this properly by just doing the maths. A 200-capacity room that opens at seven thirty and closes at eleven has three and a half hours in which to trade. If 200 people are in the room for that whole period, that is 700 hours of potential spend. Remove half an hour from the evening by the people who know that the first band isn’t on until 8pm and you lose 100 of those hours. Remove an hour and a half, or even two hours, for the people who don’t mind if they miss the support acts and the hole you’re in from that first 100 hours of lost trade deepens into a bottomless well of lost income. Venues operate on margins so thin they could be used as tracing paper, so every single one of those missing hours of trading time matter.

This is what sits underneath the hesitation about publishing exact times. Not some arcane ideology; simple arithmetic. Looking at some of the online responses and reactions to the piece, which was largely supported (and, I should add, those supporters include me), people described patterns of behaviour they felt strongly about as dedicated music fans. Concepts like ‘If I know what time the support act is on, I can make sure I am there on time’. Unfortunately, data from over 800 venues across the country tells us that this attitude is far too rare, and large parts of the audience, the majority, will choose to arrive to see the part they know they want and leave shortly after it finishes. Interestingly that attitude is partly driven by the perceived relative cost of drinks between a standard pub and a music venue, so more time in the pub is perceived as a cheaper evening. That issue of comparative drink prices is a whole other article, but I would note that respondents to the piece frequently suggested that any negative impact on income from publishing stage times could be addressed with cheaper tickets for being there earlier or cheaper drinks for the first hour to encourage people to attend from door opening. Nobody, as far as I can see, suggested that turning up just for the main act should result in a higher ticket price, or failure to spend any money on the bar in the venue (alcoholic or non-alcoholic, I’m not pushing people towards a drink problem) should result in a higher ticket price. Those are obviously both bad ideas, but would actually address the economic issues potentially created in this conversation rather than possibly making things even worse for the total income.

The strongest part of the Drowned in Sound piece is that it treats this whole subject as a set of overlapping needs rather than a moral failing. Audiences want a fair chance to see the full show. Artists want to look after the people who support them. Venues want to stay open long enough for everybody to do all of that again next month. It only becomes complicated because the margins are so tight that small shifts in arrival times have real effects.

There might be ways forward that respect all of those needs without avoiding discussing the economics. Artists could perhaps be the ones who lead the way on publishing their own stage times if there were also the lead vocal on helping the audience understand why an early arrival is essential to support both the venue and the support acts. That could be framed positively. Something like: We’re on at nine, the first act is on at eight, this is a whole evening of music. It helps the venue if you come early, we want you to see the support acts, and both those things help us because early-house energy makes the whole night better. That might feel honest rather than transactional.

It might also help to expand what “doors open” actually means. The dead zone between opening the room and the first act is the part of the evening where people’s idea of what the whole night looks like drifts to include the pub across the road. If that part of the night became something worth seeing, people might change their habits. Maybe artists could premiere a new video, or venues could bring back comperes. You could put a comedian on early, or a DJ who actually knows the bands on the bill, or a short interview with the main act projected onto the back wall. Anything that signals that the event starts from the moment the venue opens the doors rather than when the headliner walks on.

That last idea also helps artists directly. Merch is one of the only ways emerging acts can make their budgets balance. Keeping people in the room for longer gives the artists more time to speak to fans and sell their work. Earlier arrival helps the venue survive and helps the artist pay for the journey home. There is nothing cynical about that. It is simply recognising that physical presence and time spent in the building is an essential functioning part of the touring economy at this level, for artists as much as it is for venues.

It might also be possible to work together on the wider culture of the night out. If audiences begin to understand that the two pints bought across the street or bought inside the walls of the venue might be the difference between a venue surviving or closing, that habit might shift. Not because anyone lectures them, but because people who care about music tend to care about the buildings that make it possible. If audiences shift even a small part of their pre-show spend into the room, the pressure on stage times starts to ease.

I think I should say that none of this needs to be adversarial. Artists are not demanding impossible conditions. Venues are not trying to be mysterious. Audiences, particularly those with specific accessibility needs or facing the other pressures of life, are right to want to access this information. Everyone involved is dealing with rising costs, shrinking touring circuits, and public transport that often behaves like a historical reenactment. Nobody is the villain here. There may come a point, once the grassroots levy finds its feet and touring picks up again, where venues have the flexibility to publish precise times without worrying about the financial ripple effect and that hopefully might not be far away.

The whole discussion also needs to address the core motivation for keeping the stage times as a weird secret, which is that ticket prices at grassroots level are simply too low for what is actually being delivered and the division of income from tickets sold has failed to keep up with the reality that infrastructure costs have exploded. The average price in 2024 of £11.48 has no potential to adequately pay everyone involved for the work they put in, let alone address the giant crater of costs now caused by rent, rates, energy, water, PA, lights, box office and promotion. Who makes money out of all this activity? HM Treasury, Premier Inns and Ginster’s Pasties. See something like 30 other articles on this Substack for more details.

But simply putting ticket prices up wouldn’t be enough to automatically give venues the leeway to stop worrying about how many cumulative hours are spent in the building - that would require agents, managers, artists, promoters and venues to get in a room and have an open-minded and frank discussion about where the money currently comes from to turn on the lights and where it could come from if we all, collectively, rethought the economics of the grassroots music venue network. At a minimum, “you’re alright, you’ve got the bar” would need to be consigned to the dustbin of history as a contract negotiating tactic.

Until the wider financial support for the whole grassroots ecosystem improves and allows us all to collectively address these issues, we could, and almost certainly should, experiment with approaches that give audiences better information while keeping the whole evening economically viable. There are lots of possibilities if we explore them together. Because if watching live music becomes harder than staying home, the entire culture shrinks, and the first buildings to go dark are always the smallest ones.

Or, to borrow from Hamilton, if we are going to move towards publishing stage times, we have to simultaneously give audiences the feeling that they need to be in the room where it happens, and we need to work together to make sure that they know it’s happening from the moment the doors open.