Contact the Fact
The live music industry committed to delivering the voluntary levy on Arena and Stadium shows. How are they doing?
An unusual column from me this week, because without any need to personally add my views, I’m just going to present you with the latest facts about the Grassroots Levy on Arena and Stadium tickets and then invite you to offer your own comment on what you think about progress towards delivering it. I mean it, let’s hear what you think.
Fact 1: In 2018, Music Venue Trust created the idea that changes to the structure of the music industry, the basic principles around which we had been doing business, must inevitably result in the creation of a new mechanism by which grassroots music venues, artists, and promoters were financially supported from the economic success at the top of the live music pyramid. I’m not going to make you sit through yet another history lesson about how we came to that realisation, or rerun the arguments about why, nor am I going to tell you about every detail of the campaign to make that into a policy across the next six years.
Fact 2: In May 2024, when the Culture Media and Sport Select Committee published their report into Grassroots Music Venues it backed the view that a levy was needed and justified. The May 2024 report finally put on record that MPs and Parliamentary officials agreed that the case to have a levy was clear.
Fact 3: In November 2024, the Government announced that it accepted the CMS Select Committee report, and the Grassroots Levy became official government policy.
Fact 4: On 18 December 2024, at a live music industry round table, Culture Minister Chris Bryant indicated he wanted to see the Grassroots Levy delivered under a Voluntary Blanket model. LIVE, the live music industry umbrella body, stated they would bring the industry together to deliver it, creating a LIVE Trust to receive and hold the funds to be subsequently distributed to bodies who would present projects and plans for investment. At this meeting, senior executives from all the world’s biggest live music companies committed to deliver the voluntary levy under this model. It was made clear to them that the government would impose a Statutory Levy if that could not be achieved.
Fact 5: On 30 April 2025 a subsequent round table meeting took place to assess progress. There had been some small progress, with a limited number of events announced since December containing a levy that would be given to the LIVE Trust to distribute. The position was presented to Minister Bryant that progress was solid but slow as this was Quarter 1 of 2025 and there had been limited number of new shows announced, and many of them had already been contracted. The number of new tickets put on sale in Q1 was 5 million.
Fact 6: On 13 May 2025, the CMS Select Committee held a hearing to assess progress on the entirety of their May 2025 report, including progress on delivering the Grassroots Levy. They were told that there was significant progress and that the industry remained confident that it could be achieved. Giving his evidence, Culture Minister Chris Bryant stated that he wanted adoption of the levy to go ‘further and faster’.
Fact 7: On 23 June 2025 the government set out its ambitious Creative Industries Sector Plan, with a range of very positive interventions into the grassroots music venue sector, many of which directly respond to the CMS Select Committee report and the campaigning work of Music Venue Trust since 2014. One of the most important and specific pledges in the plan is that “A new industry-led ticket levy on arena and stadium gigs will deliver up to £20 million annually through the LIVE Trust to bolster the UK’s grassroots music sector”
Fact 8: The Executive President Touring International Music at Live Nation, was quoted last week as saying this about industry efforts to intervene voluntarily in the UK:
“The LIVE Trust is a way for the the industry to come together and make a lasting difference to the grassroots sector, and the whole ecosystem that makes live music possible. Live Nation is proud to support any call for action that powers meaningful change, and look forward to seeing how the Trust progresses.”
These are all facts. They are not in dispute by anybody, all of this is where we are and where people want us to be. Let’s move on to Fact 9; the data that will give you the information you need to see how the live music industry is doing on delivering this pledge to create a Voluntary Levy:
Total Arena and Stadium tickets on sale for 2025: 23,148,743 (23.1 million tickets)
Percentage containing grassroots levy: 7.79%
Total number of tickets with grassroots levy contribution 2025: 1,803,499 (1.8 million tickets)
Total number of tickets without levy: 21,345,244 (21.3 million tickets)
Total Arena and Stadium tickets on sale for 2026 so far: 1,374,318 (1.3 million tickets)
Percentage containing grassroots levy: 7.25%%
Total number of tickets with grassroots levy contribution 2026: 99,600
Total number of tickets without levy: 1,274,718 (1.2 million)
It is the end of Quarter 2 of 2025. The percentage of tickets on sale for 2025 that include the levy has actually decreased since the end of Q1, despite a further 3 million tickets being put on sale in April, May and June. Since December 2024, when a pledge was made to include a voluntary levy on new show announcements, 8 million additional tickets have been put on sale. The number of these that included the levy is actually lower than had already been independently achieved by artists taking the lead and delivering it prior to the industry-wide agreement to do it in December 2024. Uptake for the voluntary levy for 2026 tickets is currently 0.54% lower than was achieved for 2025.
If adoption of a voluntary levy to create a meaningful and impactful version of the LIVE Trust is the aim, then in arena terms we aren’t even in the Co-Op Live car park yet. We are still in the traffic queue halfway down Pottery Lane trying to work out if the show will have finished before we finally get there.
It is therefore an inevitable outcome of the simple facts and data presented above that unless the live music industry actually takes the lead and moves, as Minister Bryant has requested, ‘further and faster’ to deliver the Voluntary Blanket Levy then, despite the best efforts of everyone, including very senior people within that industry who fully understand this is the right thing to do and needs to be done, there will be a Statutory Levy. Well, unless we imagine a world in which the government and other key stakeholders would settle for receiving £1.8 million from an income source that in 2025 should be raising as much as £23 million.
Nobody’s winning at the grassroots. And if we let that stand, then the industry doesn’t just have a financial problem, it has a credibility problem. A music business that can’t support live music doesn’t deserve the name.
If the grassroots fails, the rest will follow. Not today, not tomorrow, maybe not even soon - but it can and will happen if actions is not taken to stop it. We are in the middle of clear and assessable Market Failure, and Government cannot and will not let that happen. They will pursue a Statutory Levy, and when that happens, no one will believe the companies at the top didn’t see it coming.
The artists are still here. The audiences are still here. The venues are still here - just.
I said I wanted your comments and views and didn’t need to waste your time telling you mine, because facts are just facts, no matter how inconvenient they are. Whatever comment I make it doesn’t really make any difference, because here’s your penultimate fact:
The next move belongs to the senior executive teams at the very, very top of the live music industry with the actual power to deliver this. They need to decide, and very quickly, probably before the end of Quarter 3 on 30 September 2025, if we can, in reality, get this done together and voluntarily.
Or, one last final fact: We will have it done to us.
I absolutely love the way you have laid this all out. For 3/4 years now I have been supporting grassroots artists and venues. It pains me to see this situation and I really want to thank you for everything you are doing to highlight this desperate situation.
It feels as though the likes of Live Nation and a lot of other big stakeholders love the sound of their own goodwill when they say that they support the levy but then it appears that nothing gets done about.
Perhaps a way of getting this done (which kind of makes it a mandate) is to have the biggest artists and their agents agree to include a clause their performance contracts that the tickets for the arena and stadium shows that they play must include a levy for grassroots music.
That, or perhaps an outside intervention from someone from LIVE UK who comes into each of these companies and ‘helps’ them to bake the levy into their policy and processes for setting up tickets for shows.
Of all of the 7% of tickets that include a levy thus far, I’d love to know who the companies were and whether the engagement with the idea is in correlation with how much air time the levy is getting in the media at a given time.
A bit like how social media trends around current affairs spike and then gradually abate as the next unjust atrocity enters from the wings.