Grassroots music venues in the UK are facing up to £90m ($121/€104) worth of debt due to the costs incurred by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Venues across the UK faced a genuine threat of closure, after they were forced to close for months.
Music Venue Trust’s (MVT) chief executive Mark Davyd told NME: “The grassroots music venue sector is more than £90m in debt. Getting that paid off isn’t going to be done this year, it likely won’t be done next year and might not be until 2024 or 2025 if things keep going as they are.
“The average debt they’re emerging with is around £80,000-£120,000 per venue – some are in much more significant debt than that.”
MVT announced in April 2020 at the start of the pandemic that it was seeking to raise £1m from within the live music and cultural sector, to help prevent closures across grassroots music venues.
The trust launched the Grassroots Music Venue Crisis Fund. Despite UK Government action, it said at the time that over 550 grassroots music venues remained under threat of closure and wanted to place its existing Emergency Response Service on crisis footing.
In February this year, MVT said that it had managed to save 13 out of the 30 grassroots music venues on its Save Our Venue Red List from immediate threat.
In Bristol, Strange Brew was removed from the list, while Waterloo Bar in Blackpool and Hootenanny in Inverness were also taken off the list of venues in imminent danger.
The announcement followed the trust’s introduction of the Traffic Light plan, which focused on fundraising work to help 30 venues that were ineligible to receive funding, or were partially unsuccessful in their application to, the Government-back £1.57bn Culture Recovery Fund.
Davyd went on to advise how people could help venues across the UK. He said: “The number one thing that people can do is go out there, go and see a show, put your money in a venue, because they know how to use it best to recover from this.
“If everyone who cares about live music went to one extra grassroots show a month it would completely revolutionise the economics of this sector. Just go and take a chance on something you haven’t seen before, fill up those gigs that are currently half full.”
Image: Free-Photos from Pixabay
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