Campaigners want £1 ticket contribution to save grassroots music venues
Music venues in the UK are under more threat than ever, as ITV News Entertainment Reporter Rishi Davda reports
Adele, Oasis, Coldplay, Blur, Radiohead, Ed Sheeran, Amy Winehouse… honestly it goes on and on and on, the list of musical superstars who have grassroots music venues to thank for their success.
No one begins their career headlining Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage or shouting "Good Evening, Wembley" to 90,000 fans.
Every big name will have cut their teeth, found their sound and mastered performing live on a small stage.
The smaller music venues up and down the country are not only the research and development department for the chart-toppers of tomorrow, but the cornerstones of local communities that provide a place to sing, dance, laugh and be inspired by what you see.
However many of the UK’s grassroots music venues (GMVs) are struggling to keep their doors open. In 2023, 125 closed for good and the picture for 2024 isn’t much better.
43.8% of GMVs are making a loss in 2024. They’ve seen a 23.4% decline in ticket sales compared to last year.
In the past year, rent in the grassroots sector has increased by 37% on average and energy bills went up by around 240%.
So it’s more expensive for venues to put on shows and it’s become more expensive for artists to tour, meaning there are fewer shows in general.
That’s why the Music Venue Trust is calling for a ticket contribution, which would see £1 from every ticket sold for a major music event at an arena or stadium in the UK going into a fund that would be used to help grassroots venues stay afloat.
The Lab in Northampton is one of those suffering. It’s currently crowdfunding to secure its immediate future but the Ticket Contribution could provide a long-term solution.
Operations Manager Kirsty Wilkins says: "We are always one or two months away from closing potentially. It depends on if we have a few bad weeks or if we get a funding application turned down. All the overheads have doubled if not tripled. We are always sort of living on the edge."
Roy Stride, the frontman of the band Scouting for Girls knows the importance of the smaller venues and how they set the group up for later successes - their debut album went to number 1.
He tells me that "it’s like the playground where you can make mistakes and where you start putting your songs together, putting your set list together and you start getting really good.
"We need those small music venues. You can’t just go from playing on TikTok to playing Glastonbury."
A similar scheme to the proposed £1 ticket contribution already exists in France, where a mandatory 3.5% contribution from the sale of tickets at music venues goes to the Centre National de la Musique.
It’s a state organisation which supports everything from independent record stores to community-driven music venues that nurture up-and-coming talent.
Its General Director Romain Laleix says the "system was created in 1986, to organise solidarity between the small and big ones. So, we don’t have a lot of bankruptcies in the live industry in France."
Meanwhile, I also caught up with Birmingham-founded indie band Swim Deep in Paris at one of their gigs. They’d been touring Europe and could see a clear difference when comparing other countries to the UK.
Members Thomas Fiquet and Austin Williams say that "in mainland Europe, the governments inject a lot more money into music in general. They appreciate the arts. You can feel it when you walk into a venue.
"There’s more crew for a start, more amenities. Communities thrive on these things. It’s such an underrated commodity."
The £1 from each ticket that campaigners are calling for wouldn’t cost fans any more, according to the Music Venue Trust.
It would be factored in as a show cost in the same way as a venue hire fee or insurance. So it could be incorporated in the current ticket prices rather than being added on.
That’s probably part of the sticking point, the owners of the biggest arenas and the stadiums can see it eating into their profits, which is why they aren’t keen on agreeing to the ticket contribution scheme…at least voluntarily.
Even if grassroots venues could provide the very talent that will fill their stages one day.
No one from the 02 Arena, Co-op LIVE, the AO Arena, Utilita Arena, BP Pulse LIVE or Wembley Stadium had anything to say when I asked what they thought about the scheme and if they would endorse it.
The Music Venue Trust has been going for 10 years now, its CEO Mark Davyd says "the whole music ecosystem should be benefitting from the success we are seeing at the arena and stadium level. Local communities have the right of access to live music in their communities. All we need is a small contribution and we can guarantee that access."
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How close is this to happening?
Well, feasibly if the industry decided to make it happen… then it could be sorted in a matter of weeks.
If all venues, promoters and influential figures collectively agreed to contribute towards the grassroots music scene, much in the same way that the Premier League helps fun lower-level football, then we could see fewer venues in trouble pretty quickly.
Chair of the Media, Culture and Sport Committee Caroline Dinenage MP says: "We published a report in May which recommended that there should be an industry led solution to this. But if they couldn’t come together to deliver that, then the government should step in, we are waiting for the government to respond to the report."
If the government does have to step in, it could take a lot longer to get money flowing into grassroots music venues.
The more that are forced to close, the greater the chance we miss out on discovering a new British global musical icon.
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