Turn! Turn! Turn!

The gloom-mongering description of everything bad you need to read so we can understand how to make it better.

It starts the same way. A venue calls or emails and they tell the Music Venue Trust Venue Support Team that they’re under pressure, more than usual. They’re working late, chasing invoices, trying to pull in just enough to make next month work. A few weeks or months later the shows start thinning out, the repairs don’t get done, staff hours get cut. Then one day, it just isn’t open anymore.

In 2023, the UK lost 125 grassroots music venues. In 2024, we were down another 35 trading spaces, those places which will provide opportunities for musicians to start their careers, were lost. In that year 46 venues closed permanently, while a further 40 stopped putting on live music altogether, and we identified and supported 41 spaces either returning to live music provision or starting their journey for the first time. I think it’s worth emphasising that maths because sometimes its been misunderstood: We don’t simply report the number of spaces that stopped live music through business necessity or permanent closure. When we tell the industry and government there are only 810 spaces available, that takes account of all the openings or positive changes to operation as well as all the bad news. 810 is the number of opportunities left.

810 remaining places available to play original music in a proper gig setting represents nearly 15 percent of the circuit gone in two years. The number of active GMVs dropped from 960 to 810, and nearly a quarter of those remaining needed emergency support just to stay open. That level of losses and remaining risk of closure isn’t a temporary spike. It’s the new baseline.

Nobody designed it this way, this wasn’t anyone’s plan. Nobody set out to build a grassroots system where the average profit margin is 0.48 percent, where the average annual loss from putting on live music is £198,956, or where business rate relief is cut even as core costs rise. But while no one set out to cause this, we should be honest and admit that no one really planned to prevent it either, or responded effectively and quickly when it was happening.

It happened because of what we like to term the Law of Unintended Consequences, caused by everything that wasn’t understood or recognised and therefore for which nothing was done. Energy policy was made without any understanding of small venues. Lease protections were inadequate or simply ignored. Under pressure local authorities were never required to think about grassroots music venues as vital cultural infrastructure. Touring was left to sort itself out. And for years, the whole ecosystem has been allowed to drift, either through a lack of action or the assumption that someone else would step in.

That has placed MVT as an organisation in an incredibly difficult position when trying to prevent closures - and pretty much crippled us from doing the work that we really want to do and needs to be done to bring live music back into the communities that find themselves abandoned. When you’re faced by a constant and seemingly endless tide of challenges, your main focus is firefighting.

At our MVT meetings in Frome, Sunderland and Leeds in the last month, we spoke to rooms full of passionate and committed venue operators, the people keeping this thing running. More than a third told us that running the venue wasn’t even their main job. Half of that group said they were using money from their day job to keep the venue open. These are buildings with busy calendars, good reputations and established audiences, but that’s no longer enough to make them sustainable.

I hear the excuse that people don’t like live music anymore a lot, so let’s be absolutely clear on this point: The problem isn’t lack of activity. The grassroots sector still hosted over 160,000 events last year. There are more than 30,000 people working in it. In 2024 alone, there were 1.4 million artist performances. 19 million people bought tickets to see it. Grassroots venues, promoters and artists are doing their job. What’s missing is the margin, the planning space, the stability. What’s missing is the ability to run a venue without personally subsidising it.

And the reason that margin isn’t there is simple. The ticket price can’t keep up. It can’t rise fast enough or high enough to absorb all of the increased costs, because what’s being sold at this level isn’t a product people already know they want. It’s R&D. Everyone involved in a grassroots show - the venue, the promoter, the artist - is investing time and money into finding out what works, what connects, who has the potential to grow an audience, and which ideas are great and deserve a place in the ecosystem but will always be niche. This is a real life discovery engine, not a finished commercially viable market. The price of entry has to remain low enough to attract people to take a chance on something they haven’t heard of, and that price doesn’t come close to covering the true cost of production. The difference gets picked up by the people inside the ecosystem, while too much of the income gets pulled out of it by others who are supplying services and products to it, but not contributing anything to keep it going.

This is true whether you are opening the doors of your venue or heading out on tour. If you are a venue operating one fixed space, or a promoter or an artist trying to move shows around the country, there is a long list of people who will definitely get paid and your name isn’t on it. HMRC will take its share whether you made a profit or not. Your landlord doesn’t care how the door split went. Petrol stations always get their money. Hotel chains will gladly take £1200 off the top of a three-date run for two shared rooms and a van-sized parking space. The only guaranteed growth industry in the whole circuit is garage forecourt food and late-night kebabs, the only meal you can get your hands on after the show is over. It’s entirely possible for a promoter to get five people to drive five hours, meet fifteen to twenty people in a venue helping to make the show happen, have everyone pull together to deliver a brilliant gig to 150 people, and almost everybody who made it happen take nothing at all home. What little financial returns are being made from the show are gobbled up by everyone from the tax office to the landlord who owns the leasehold on a room he hasn’t visited in three years, but whatever money there is it never seems to reach the pockets of the people actually delivering the music.

Energy remains one of the biggest drains. Many venues are still tied into fixed commercial contracts signed during the spike in wholesale prices. Some of them are paying upwards of £3,000 a month for electricity, with no price cap and no route to renegotiation until late 2025 or even 2026. Rate Relief changes in the UK resulted in a 140 percent increase in rates, around £7 million taken from a sector that made just £2.5 million in profit last year. There is no reasonable way to make that maths work, and there’s no way to pay that bill without it reducing the wages for everyone in the ecosystem.

Touring has collapsed alongside it. In 1994, the average grassroots UK tour was 22 dates. In 2025, it’s just under 11. Towns that were reliable stops ten years ago - Hull, Bath, Leicester, Wrexham, Carlisle, Middlesborough - are falling off the map. Fewer routes mean fewer shows. Fewer shows mean less work, smaller scenes, and an ever-decreasing pool of people who feel like live music is something that happens where they live.

Music Venue Trust has been tracking and dealing with this for years, publishing the numbers, taking it to Parliament, writing the reports. Facts, data, case studies, information, advice, guidance. Not because we’re pessimists, but because we’re trying to do something about it, and you can’t fix what you won’t name.

What matters now is that, for the first time, there’s the potential to do more than name it.

The Grassroots Levy exists because the depth of the problem was finally acknowledged and an answer to it was recognised. Simply put, recognise that the R&D at the bottom of the ecosystem supports the success at the top of it, and link those two things together with a simple financial formula. £1 from every show above 5,000 capacity creating a fund that enables the R&D to happen in conditions which don’t require a venue operator or a promoter to visit his personal cashpoint to give the artist enough money to put petrol in their tank so they can get home. It has public backing, political will, and now an oversight governance structure in the LIVE Trust.

The LIVE Trust exists because this damage is visible to everyone now. It’s well-described, backed by strong data and evidence, and because there’s a shared understanding and acceptance that something can, and must, be done. It’s our view that whether it is able to deliver something meaningful depends entirely on how it’s used, whether it just puts a series of sticking plasters over the injuries, or whether it starts on a major health intervention to deal with the causes.

That’s what Music Venue Trust has working on since the end of the pandemic, a structural move from short-term relief to long-term repair. A strategy shaped by what we’ve learned from the people we work with in the venues we support. By simply asking venues and their teams what are the real, multiple causes of why they have to work second (and more accurately first) jobs to keep this whole thing alive, and starting to think about how to change that.

I keep being pressed on it, so let me make it absolutely clear for anyone still not listening. Music Venue Trust has never claimed to have all the answers for everyone, and what we plan to propose to the LIVE Trust is, write this down so I don’t have to keep repeating it, not the only answer. Other organisations will have other approaches which will be based on the experiences of the people they represent, although hopefully they will include, as MVT has always done since we started this conversation in 2018, sensible and respectful recognition that you can’t fix the broken economic model by throwing support at just one section of it.

There’s more than enough funding available to support more than one way forward and to explore multiple opportunities to change the working practices, the cost and the returns, in the grassroots sector into something that actually works for everyone. But the approach of long-term fixes to a broken system is the one MVT is taking to the LIVE Trust. Not as theory, but as something we’re ready to deliver and know will work.

For now, I thought it was worth one last column being clear about how we got here and what are the real causes of the crisis, because although none of this could honestly be said to be an accident, it wasn’t exactly designed to have these negative outcomes either. It’s what happens when work goes unacknowledged and unrecognised for too long, resulting in a floundering and failing system that is allowed to drift towards being fundamentally broken. An ecosystem where shortfalls are absorbed by goodwill, and the whole thing only stays up because the people inside it won’t let it fall down.

Nobody planned for it to be like this. But nobody has had the real opportunity to take the action needed to stop it either. For the last eleven years MVT has successfully put buckets under the leaky roof of the grassroots sector, hoping that one day we might actually get the chance to fix the roof.

That’s the opportunity we have now, and we can, should, and must, take it.