It’s a Thursday night. You’ve just left your local and you’re heading further down the high street to see a couple of bands at one of the three music venues in town. There are a few of you going, £10 to get in. Afterwards you’ll probably grab something to eat, maybe even head on somewhere to dance. You actually grew up seeing bands here with your mates, having a drink on a Friday. Your daughter goes to the nightclub they have on a Saturday, and she says she might try putting her own gig on with her mates’ bands.
Except, she doesn’t. And you don’t go there. Because this isn’t 2005, it’s 2025, and the venue closed down in 2019. Another closed during the pandemic, and the only other venue stopped putting on live music in 2023 because it just wasn’t cost effective anymore.
This is the reality playing out in towns and cities across the UK today. Places that were once home to vibrant local culture, putting on live music week in, week out, for the communities around them, are now closed. For the people who love live music, or simply love the community that a grassroots music venue (GMV) brings, they are forced to travel further afield, to bigger cities such as Manchester and Birmingham that continue to attract touring artists.
Music Venue Trust’s Annual Report shows that 2024 has seen a further decrease in the number of places on the touring circuit. An average tour in 1994 would have included 22 dates. An average tour in 2024 included only 11 dates. Worse, while tours in 1994 were spread over a range of towns and cities across the country, with 28 different locations on the primary and secondary touring circuit regularly accessing exciting new and original live music, in 2024 just 12 locations – all of them major cities – remained as primary and secondary touring circuit stops for grassroots tours. Cities and towns with fantastic venues that used to be tour staples – Leicester, Edinburgh, Bath, Hull, Windsor, and Stoke on Trent – have dropped off the primary route. This means swathes of the country are cut out altogether, resulting in people having to travel further or simply being unable to access live music at all.
The result is a decrease in the total number of live music shows (down 8.3% since 2023) accompanied by an even steeper decline in ticket revenues (down 13.5% since 2023). Consequently, GMVs are being forced to decrease their live music offer, running fewer shows at a higher cost.
What these venues provide to communities goes well beyond showcasing a live band a few times a week. Of the 810 venues surveyed for MVT’s Annual Report, 50% engage in other social and education projects encompassing cultural initiatives, community work, and courses. A further 43% provide resources and space for musicians, including rehearsal studios, recording studios, and resource centres. For many young people starting out as musicians the commercial hiring of such spaces further afield is unthinkable.
Without the opportunities that these venues offer to the next generation of upcoming touring musicians, there won’t be the touring artists we continue to flock to see. That’s not just at the arena level – the Sam Fenders, the Coldplays – but also at the level of 1200 capacity venues and above.
Sir Chris Bryant MP, Minister for Creative Industries, Arts and Tourism, recently said that the government, “will continue to broaden and diversify the talent pipeline in the creative industries, through giving young people the opportunity to learn more about career pathways, and directly engage with creative workplaces and employers.”
Yet without GMVs, young people cannot see the career pathways the government wants to support. At MVT, we are strong believers in the saying, “if you cannot see it, you cannot be it”, whether that’s as a promoter, sound engineer, lighting technician, or venue operator. The government’s aspirations are noble ones but, without the local opportunities and funding, the direct engagement they want to happen will simply not be able to take place.
At the crux of this is the protection of our vital community spaces. Since its inception in 2014, MVT has considered the commercial ownership of the buildings that house GMVs to be one of the most significant threats to the sector. Data from the 2024 Annual Report demonstrated that 88% of GMV operators do not own the building that houses their venue. The rents paid by these tenant venues continue to rise year on year, up an astonishing 51% since the end of the pandemic, while those buildings continue to need constant maintenance and care simply to meet basic standards. Regardless of their rental or ownership status, 58% of GMVs invested over £3,000 in enhancing their buildings in 2023.
We believe that community ownership of these assets would help to address the ongoing issue of venue closures due to increasing rent, property speculation, and lack of ownership security. GMVs are community hubs, vital incubators of and investors in talent, supporters of regeneration and the local economy, education, and employment. To do this, however, they need long-term security that has the potential to unlock finance to invest in carbon neutral buildings, accessibility, facilities, and programming budgets.
In 2022, MVT established Music Venue Properties (MVP), a Community Benefit Society with charitable status, and launched the “Own Our Venues” Community Share Offer as the means to achieve this objective.
Throughout 2023 and 2024, MVT and MVP successfully bought five GMVs across England and Wales, including The Snug (Atherton), The Ferret (Preston), The Bunkhouse (Swansea), The Booking Hall (Dover), and Le Pub (Newport).
Through the creation and provision of a ‘cultural lease’ for the five operators, MVP was able both to give tenants assurance of tenure and to address the power dynamic of a standard commercial lease. While the operators agree to deliver a minimum amount of cultural activity and a commitment to best practice, the venue is able to enjoy much longer-term financial security. Venues can identify and apply for funding for projects that are much more about future investment; instead of constantly peering over a financial cliff-edge, venues can look to the long term, resulting in much more valuable investment for their local communities.
Such an approach is still not viable for all venues for a variety of reasons, including funding and the availability of the property. For many venues, the threat of development continues to loom heavily. In 2024, MVT had a 97.6% success record on having planning applications near venues rejected. This is good news for GMVs but demonstrates that there is much more room for improvement in the way developers survey cultural noise as a material consideration in their plans.
The adoption of the ‘Agent of Change’ principle as guidance in the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and the use of section 106 agreements between local councils and developers have been vital tools to protect GMVs from threats from redevelopment. The Agent of Change principle states that the responsibility for mitigation of the impact of a planning application falls to the developer instigating the change, and not to existing businesses to modify their practices. This means that an apartment block proposed to be built near an established live music venue would have to pay for soundproofing, while a live music venue opening in a residential area would be responsible for the costs. A resident who moves next door to a music venue would, in law, be assessed as having made that decision understanding that there's going to be some noise, and a GMV that buys a new PA system would be expected to carry out tests to make sure its noise emissions don't increase.
The correct use of this guidance has protected GMVs in areas where there has been rapid redevelopment. When Agent of Change guidance is not followed, however, poorly sound-proofed residential developments are built in close proximity to GMVs, many of whom have been carrying out their activity for years. This then results in inevitable noise complaints and can begin the long, slow death of a local GMV.
By adopting the Agent of Change principles into the statutory framework, we can quickly ensure that planning applications involving music venues abide by those principles in every community and in every application. This would not only reduce the number of planning objections being raised by GMVs down to zero but would also speed up the planning process by preventing long, drawn-out retrospective objections that MVT are forced to make to avoid the inevitable disruption to a venue.
For those venues that do survive the threat of redevelopment, there continue to be a myriad of financial challenges, both long and short-term. One of the biggest, borne out by the stats for 2024, is the impact of rising business rates.
Business rates without any relief still existed for Scotland throughout 2024, resulting in an additional £780,000 in pre-profit taxation for Scottish MVA members in excess of their English counterparts. A new 40% rate relief for venues with a rateable value of under £51,000 is due to come into effect in April 2026. This will still leave approximately 24% of GMVs in Scotland receiving no business rate relief.
Venues in Wales saw their rate relief cut from 75% to 40% in April, resulting in additional costs for Welsh MVA members of £127,000. England is due to follow suit in April 2025 and cut rate relief to 40% from its current level of 75%; as a result, business rates in England will go up by 140% for GMVs, creating an additional £7 million in pre-profit taxation.
These additional sums in taxes made prior to any profit should be considered in comparison to the overall economic performance of the sector, which returned an entire gross profit across all 810 such venues in the UK of just £2.5 million.
Valuation methods in England have historically resulted in high and unjustified valuations for GMVs which are significantly in excess of the ability of the businesses to meet them, discourage best practice, and unjustifiably remove financial support from venues, artists, and promoters. It’s not an operating environment that anyone would want to run a venue in, let alone try and open a new one. And yet, we seem to expect people to do it, to survive another year, and to do it well.
So back to that Thursday night, at your local venue. There’s a new block of flats over the road, which the venue is pleased about because they’ve got a whole host of new audience members, excited to have local culture right on their doorstep. They understand the role of the venue in the community, borne out through regular consultations with the developer and the local council as the plans were drawn up. In fact, the local council has been offering hardship relief on their business rates until the central government completes their business rates review in April 2026. The residents enjoy high-quality sound-proofed housing, and the venue appreciates the extra footfall and bar spend.
This isn’t the reality, but it can be. The operating environment needed for this to be achieved is simple, affordable, and absolutely non-negotiable if we want our communities – from our world-famous cities to our rural towns – to keep enjoying local live music. It’s time for local and national governments to step up and work meaningfully with us to create that environment.
Read the full Annual Report here
Sophie Brownlee is the External Affairs Manager at Music Venue Trust, where she leads advocacy and strategy across all UK nations. With a background in public affairs and policy, Sophie has worked with major businesses and associations to manage political strategy and stakeholder engagement. She is passionate about supporting grassroots music venues and driving positive change to ensure their long-term success.
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