Venue

Grassroots music venues stage over 160,000 live music events in 2024

Featured Image: Edward Cisneros on Unsplash

Grassroots music venues staged more than 162,000 live music events in 2024, comprising 1.5 million individual artists. 

Over 20 million guests watched these events, contributing £526m (€624m/$656m) of direct value to the UK economy according to a survey of the 810 members of the Music Venues Alliance.

The data has been published as part of Music Venue Trust’s 2024 Annual Report. Last year saw the charity celebrate 10 years of supporting grassroots venues and the continued success of Music Venue Properties which has secured freehold ownership of five small venues. Last year also saw the publication of a Culture, Media and Sport (CMS) report that highlighted the need for support in the industry.

However, despite the positive number of shows staged, the report detailed how grassroots music venues were operating on a profit margin of just 0.48%, with 43.8% of them reporting a loss in the last 12 months.

This means that the sector as a whole effectively subsidised live music activity to the tune of £162m, according to the report.

Additionally, a concerning trend has emerged around locations dropping from the UK’s primary and secondary touring circuits. An average tour included roughly 22 dates in 1994, and this has since dropped by 50% to 11 in the last 30 years. In 1994, these dates would be spread across a range of different locations in the UK compared to now where primary and secondary tours only visit major cities.

Cities and towns such as Leicester, Edinburgh, Bath, Hull, Windsor and Stoke-on-Trent have dropped off the primary route over the last few years. The realist is that there has been a decrease in the total number of live music shows – down 8.3% compared to 2023 – and an even steeper decline in ticket revenues (down by 13.5% since 2023).

“The 2024 Annual Report recognises that after 10 years of work by MVT a very broad consensus has been built among politicians, industry, artists and the public that grassroots music venues must be protected, supported, encouraged and nurtured,” commented Mark Davyd, chief executive of Music Venue Trust.

The Trust’s Emergency Response Service also dealt with 200 emergency response cases, a 19% increase from 2023. This means that 24.9% of the membership faces a theatre of permanent closure.

The service offered financial, planning, licensing, noise, acoustics, and legal advice to grassroots music venues across the UK. More positively, disputes involving planning issues boasted a 97.7% success rate. In particular, the adoption of the ‘Agent of Change’ principle – which states that the responsibility for mitigation of the impact of a planning application falls to the Agent of Change and not to existing businesses to modify their practices, as guidance in the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) – and the use of Section 106 agreement between local councils and developers have been vital in this area.

Davyd added: “In 2025, we have to see that consensus brings forward positive, practical interventions in the real world. Venues, despite all the very welcome good intentions and acknowledgements they are receiving for their vital work, are still closing, still under extreme and totally unnecessary financial pressures, still failing to be recognised, as everyone agrees they should and must be, when the government designs policy, taxation, and legislation. It isn’t good enough to keep saying how much we all value them, we’ve got to practically do something about it. We need action not words.”