OPINION
Growing the grassroots
Ahead of a panel at the Event Production Show main stage conference exploring the challenges facing the grassroots live music industry, Music Venue Trust CEO Mark Davyd outlines the stark findings recently published in the charity’ s annual report.
Every year, when Music Venue Trust publishes its annual report, it offers a moment of clarity the live music industry would rather skip. Not because the findings are surprising, but because they are precise. Hundreds of grassroots venues submit real figures. The result is an accurate snapshot of the UK live music ecosystem.
In 2025, grassroots music venues staged 174,552 live events, welcomed 21,683,552 audience visits, employed 24,742 people and contributed £ 558.5 million to the UK economy. This is national cultural infrastructure operating at a human scale in towns and cities across the UK.
The numbers tell us what is really happening. More than half of venues, 53.8 percent, made no profit at all. The average margin was 2.5 percent, so slim that survival depends on believing nothing unexpected will go wrong, an assumption requiring imagination in any environment involving live production, alcohol, ageing buildings and tight cashflow.
The structural problem remains unchanged. Live music itself is lossmaking at grassroots level. In 2025, venues took in £ 179.2 million from live
Mark Davyd
music and spent £ 255.9m delivering it, subsidising a £ 76.6m gap through drinks, burgers and the occasional t-shirt. The average venue lost £ 95,685 on live music across the year and carried on regardless. Thirty-eight percent are formally not-for-profit. The rest operate as if they were.
The most significant shift in 2025 was the cost base. Employer National Insurance increases and reductions in business rates relief landed on a sector already operating on minimal margins. The response was predictable. Employment fell from 30,865 to 24,742 people in a single year, a contraction of almost 20 percent.
These were not surplus roles. They were entry-level jobs, trainees, casual staff, junior technicians and box office assistants. Their loss represents a drain on future talent that cannot easily be reversed.
Business rates illustrate a wider policy failure. In 2025, changes to relief regimes added around £ 7m in additional tax to a sector that made approximately £ 2.5m profit in total. This is pre-profit taxation landing on organisations that mostly do not generate profit at all. Government now risks repeating this in 2026, raising questions about how many job losses policymakers will tolerate while describing the creative industries as central to growth.
Despite this, the sector has not collapsed. At year end, 801 grassroots music venues were operating across the UK. Thirty closed, which matters deeply to every community it happened to, and 48 more had to stop putting on live music for the wider business to survive. At the same time, 69 new grassroots music venues were recognised, almost all existing spaces brought back into use by people still prepared to take risks.
Touring is where the damage is most visible. In 2025, 59.3 % of grassroots venues were excluded from significant tour routings. The venues that were included served just 29.8 % of the UK population. More than 175 towns and cities, home to around 25 million people, no longer receive regular professional touring shows. This is not a failure of demand but a structural failure of the live industry.
For Music Venue Trust, the Annual Report marks a shift in response. Alongside continued emergency support, we are setting out an immediate £ 2m intervention plan focused on reducing costs and rebuilding sustainability, including energy independence, artist accommodation and targeted investment to rebuild touring as infrastructure.
Government action remains essential, but the industry also faces a deadline. A voluntary grassroots levy must prove it can work by June 2026. If it cannot, legislation becomes unavoidable.
The message is not that grassroots music is failing. It is that it has been carrying too much, for too long, without structural support. The health of the entire live music industry still depends on what happens in these rooms first.
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