The Space Between

The live industry promised every arena and stadium ticket would help grassroots. Nearly one in three now does. What more do we need to do to reach blanket adoption?

In 2025 nearly twenty-four million tickets have been put on sale for arena and stadium shows in the UK. Just under two million of those tickets carried a contribution to the grassroots sector, the concept that developed into the new Grassroots Levy, a voluntary scheme that every major promoter and industry body has now committed to. On the surface, that looks disappointing – only just over eight per cent of tickets contributing to the grassroots ecosystem that keeps the whole live music industry alive. But 2025 was always going to be a messy year.

Many of those tickets were already on sale before the levy was agreed in December 2024. Some tours had been locked in long before there was an industry-wide consensus. Others were caught in the gap between a public promise and the private machinery of contracts, ticket builds and settlements. So while the 2025 data is important as a baseline, it doesn’t tell us what the levy really looks like in practice. It shows the overlap between old business and new commitments.

The real test begins with 2026. From the start of January this year, every show, every promoter, every ticketing company knew that the voluntary levy was supposed to be in place - and to be clear, that commitment was to a voluntary but blanket levy, applied to every show by choice as opposed to a statutory levy which compels you by law to do it. There were no excuses of timing, no ambiguity about the agreement, no lack of clarity about what was expected. The good news is that this time the figures so far tell a very different story. More than 2.6 million tickets have already been put on sale for 2026 shows, and nearly a third of them now include the levy. That is more than 857,000 tickets already contributing to the grassroots, a significant step up from 2025, and clear evidence that the message is getting through and the process is starting to bed in.

Even more encouraging is what has happened since July. In the third quarter of 2025, over 44 per cent of tickets announced have carried the levy. That is within touching distance of the government’s fifty per cent target for the end of this year. Some promoters are already above 50% adoption on their shows. What was once a distant aspiration is now close enough to be achievable. The industry is not there yet, but the progress is unmistakeable. The levy is starting to feel like the norm rather than the exception.

This shift matters because it shows that the voluntary system can work. Nobody in the industry wants a statutory levy. Not the promoters, not the ticketing companies, not the venues, not Music Venue Trust. A statutory scheme risks being blunt and bureaucratic, stripping away flexibility and adding layers of red tape, and it has real problems with implementation and distribution at a national level which I write about previously. The voluntary levy is better. It is smarter and quicker. It can adapt to different circumstances. And the latest figures show that it is beginning to do exactly that.

There is still a gap to close, and understanding why that gap exists is important. One reason is unintentional silence; the levy falls out of the process because nobody mentions it. Contracts are written, tickets go on sale, and the levy isn’t there because no one stopped to check it was. In that silence, a convenient myth can take root with the public; that it was the artist’s decision to not include it. We need to stamp on that myth, because the simple fact is that artists don’t have control of what’s included in the price of their arena and stadium ticket shows and they never have. Artists are not asked to approve the coffee machine in the office foyer of the ticketing company that sells their tickets and pays for it with the service charges. They are not consulted about the end-of-year bonus obtained from the profits from their tour paid out to the CEO of the company that promotes their shows. They are not the gatekeepers of a venue management group whose Chief Financial Officer’s holiday in the Bahamas comes from the salary the company can afford to pay him as a result of the boom in stadium concert receipts.

There has been some misplaced discussion about whether the levy belongs inside or outside the ticket, but that’s a bit of a false friend to the reality that all the money there is in arena and stadium performances, every penny of it, comes from the ticket sales. It isn’t being beamed down from other planets. The levy belongs in the same category as the cost of the PA, the lights, the staff, the company profits and the investor pay-outs. It is not a nice add on; it is a sensible and justified part of the industry’s responsibility to research and development. That doesn’t need an artist to say they want it any more than the artist has to tell a promoter that it’s okay if they charge the sandwich they are eating on the day of the show to the costs of the event.

What everyone in the industry can do, and increasingly are doing, is to make sure that someone asks the question. Current experience shows that when they do, the levy appears. It’s great if that question is asked by the promoter, the venue, the ticketing company or the agent, but it can also be asked by the artist or the manager. An artist or their manager asking what their teams are doing is not the artist deciding, as some people have concerns about, it is making sure the people who deliver the shows on behalf of artists are accountable. The huge leap in uptake over the last quarter demonstrates exactly how effective this simple intervention can be, regardless of who makes it.

This unintentional silence is why some of the most confusing moments so far for the public in adoption of the levy have occurred when artists who are outspoken champions of grassroots venues have announced major tours, only for those tickets to go on sale without the levy. We’ve seen this with acts who have built entire campaigns around their connection to grassroots, who have spoken movingly about the venues they came from and the importance of protecting them, and who genuinely believe every word of that. Music Venue Trust knows some of these artists, knows the teams around them, knows that their belief in grassroots is absolutely real.

So how do their arena or stadium tickets end up on sale without the levy? The answer is not that people changed their minds or that their words were insincere. It is much more mundane, and in its own way much more frustrating. Somewhere between the artist’s values and the ticket on sale, the levy simply fell out of the process. A promoter didn’t raise it. A venue didn’t think it was their business. A contract didn’t include it. A ticket build went ahead without it. No one along the chain asked the necessary question, and so the levy wasn’t there.

That is the crux issue at the heart of why this system, which to repeat, absolutely everyone in the live music industry is signed up to, is not yet perfect. It is not because artists or their teams are hypocrites. It is because the machinery around them does not automatically deliver what they believe in. Artists are not the people who can solve that, they have never enjoyed the power to sign off every single line on a settlement sheet. Their role, at most, is to ask the question: “Has the levy been included?” When they do that, or someone in their team does that on their behalf, the levy appears. When they don’t, it sometimes disappears. The responsibility for whether it is actually there rests mainly with promoters, venues and ticketing companies, but the responsibility for asking the question of if it going to be needs to be equally shared across everybody.

The failure to be clear and up front about that is why the contradiction between the words fans hear from the stage and the absence of the levy on the ticket can be so corrosive. It makes the whole industry look disingenuous, when in fact the problem is a gap in accountability. The artist’s belief is real. Their teams support for it is real. The levy’s absence is real too. The missing link is the responsibility of the teams who sell the tickets to make sure the two things line up.

On the positive side, there are examples that show what happens when that gap is closed. Wolf Alice, Olivia Dean, Mumford & Sons, Florence and the Machine, and many more have been clear about their support for the grassroots sector, and when their team came to put tickets on sale, that team collectively made sure the levy was included. Coldplay, one of the biggest bands in the world, didn’t just talk about the grassroots, they, their management, their agency, their promoter, the venues and the ticketing companies, ensured that their ticket sales delivered for it. These are the models that prove the voluntary levy can work, and the new data shows that more and more teams are following their lead.

That, to me, is the key lesson. The voluntary levy does not fail because artists, agents, managers, promoters, venues, ticketing companies, don’t care. It is working better and better because more people in the process are taking responsibility for it. The next step we may need to take is to make it the default. Right now, people have to confirm when the levy is present. If we can’t make that work, and we all want to avoid the statutory levy, then maybe we need to move towards a model where it is automatically enacted unless one of the key stakeholders confirms that it isn’t. If a promoter, or a venue, or a ticketing company is choosing not to apply it, let’s have them publicly state who they are and why they made that decision. Maybe they have a really good reason why not on this show, let’s hear it and be public about it.

Making it the default is the one change that could potentially flip the entire conversation. No more silent omissions, no more misunderstandings. Every ticket either carries the levy or comes with a clear explanation of why it doesn’t. The public can see who is walking the walk and who has reasons why they cannot. The government can see whether the voluntary levy is being delivered, or understand why that isn’t possible. And the industry can prove that it is doing all it can to sustain its own foundations without being forced into it, and has good reasons why it cannot do that when it finds itself unable to do so.

Because if the industry cannot deliver, it still remains the case that the government can, and will, step in. The statutory levy will be introduced. And however much people may try to pretend otherwise, or pretend that this would be some sort of major victory for ‘taming the big boys’, that will be a defeat for everyone. It will be widely perceived that the voluntary commitments made were a sham, and the public will believe that the people who sell the tickets could not be trusted to keep their promises. It will mean that bureaucracy and blunt instruments had to step in to take the place of good faith and responsibility, and it will result in a system that is clumsy, bureaucratic, take years to deliver and likely will not actually get the support where it is really needed.

The latest data shows, however, that we are not on that path right now. The voluntary levy is rising sharply. Thirty-two per cent overall for 2026 tickets, forty-four per cent of tickets since July. The direction of travel is unmistakable. With a little more focus, with a little more accountability, we can reach the government’s target and prove that the voluntary scheme can succeed. Millions of pounds will flow every year into grassroots music. The foundations of our live music ecosystem will be stronger, and artists will not be placed in the unfair and unreasonable position of having to explain decisions that were never theirs to make.

We should be clear to the public that this decision does not belong to artists, and it never has. It belongs to the industry. The limited role artists, and the people who represent them, agents and managers, can play is to be part of the ecosystem that ensures we keep asking the question.

The role and responsibility of the industry is to make sure the answer is yes.