Centre Stage: Mark Davyd examines the hidden, systemic costs of live music

Music Venue Trust's Mark Davyd examines the hidden, systemic costs of live music... There is a version of the Grassroots Levy story that ends well and a version that ends badly. The difference between them is not the money raised; it is what the money is used for. The LIVE Trust has started distributing funds this year and the early signs are very encouraging. The UK Artists Touring Fund, the money flowing to the Association Of Independent Promoters and the Association Of Independent Festivals are all doing what the sector urgently needs. They are getting artists on the road and giving promoters enough confidence to take risks. Every organisation running those programmes deserves credit for moving quickly and for understanding that the cost of delay is measured in venues that close, artists who quit and audiences who stop coming. What follows is not a criticism of those programmes. It is an attempt to say what they are probably already saying to each other, but in public. Let’s start with what we know works and what its limits are. Music Venue Trust’s own Revive Live and United By Music programmes have put more than £4 million directly into supporting artists to tour over the last few years. That money did what it was designed to do: it got artists on the road who would otherwise not have been able to afford to leave their postcode, and it got shows happening in rooms that would otherwise have sat dark.In delivering it, we learned that funding only the artist is not enough; they cannot get a show off the ground without a promoter taking the risk and a venue being able to absorb costs. The funding had to evolve to cover the full gig ecosystem, rather than just one component. Those programmes have direct successors now in the wider funding landscape and our own work. The Liveline Fund, the MVT’s national touring programme, includes a guarantorship model that makes individual shows viable for the artist, venue and promoter. It also provides dedicated support for tour routing into the places that have fallen off the map entirely. In Q1 2026, we delivered over 100 new shows in these places. Other funds and organisations are working on the same issue. But MVT has also just published longer-term proposals: a portfolio of programmes that address the structural costs sitting beneath the touring crisis. It is worth being clear about what the schemes’ objectives are, because they bring a different kind of thinking. Off The Grid installs solar generation and battery storage directly into venue buildings at no capital cost, permanently reducing energy costs with the aim of minimising the bill. Elsewhere, Raise The Standard places professional-grade mics, backline, PA and lighting into venues through a centrally owned virtual warehouse, so venues no longer bear the cost to own, hire, repair or replace the tools that make shows possible.Stay The Night, meanwhile, converts unused space into artist accommodation, saving touring acts up to £600 per night; Feel At Home does the same for backstage spaces. On top of this, Venue MOT works through the financial, licensing, lease and operational pressures that quietly undermine sustainability. Finally, Own Our Venues takes buildings out of commercial ownership entirely and places them into community-based ownership through Music Venue Properties. The logic connecting all of these is the same: the money a fan spends on a ticket should end up in the pockets of the people who deliver the show – the artists, the crew, the promoter, the venue team. Right now, a growing, unsustainable portion ends up somewhere else: with the hotel chain, the energy company, the commercial landlord. Those aren’t relationships that subsidies can fix, because subsidies pay those bills – and the bills remain. The long-term solution is to structurally remove those costs from the operation, so that the money circulating through a show stays in the ecosystem that created it. Every penny spent on artist touring is important, but it does not reduce the underlying costs. The successful applicants go on their subsidised tour. They come back. The costs are the same. The next cohort applies. This is not an argument against that funding; it’s an argument for doing both things at once. The essential short-term work should keep the circuit alive long enough for the structural work to take effect. The only route to a sector that doesn’t require permanent subsidy is one where those costs have been removed – where the artist isn’t sleeping at a Travelodge 40 miles away, where the energy bill is close to zero, and where the rent cannot be hiked by landlords. What the sector needs now is to be able to hold both time frames simultaneously: to fund shows that need to happen this year and the next, and in those neglected places. It also needs to invest in the changes that mean the next generation of touring artists does not need to apply for funding to be able to afford to do it.

Centre Stage: Mark Davyd turns the spotlight on the Music Week Awards' grassroots venue finalists

Mark Davyd turns the spotlight on the Music Week Awards' grassroots venue finalists... The Grassroots Venue: Spirit Of The Scene award provides me with the chance to step outside of industry concerns and political matters, take a pause, and consider 10 exceptional nominees for this year’s Music Week Awards. Camden Assembly is a good place to begin because it already comes with mythology attached. It’s a 200-capacity Victorian pub where Adele and Amy Winehouse learned how to hold a crowd, where Oasis and The Strokes once wrestled their gear through the doorway. The important thing is not that legends played there; it’s that the current owners are still putting local bands on as support for bigger acts. Future Yard in Birkenhead has taken a more radical route. It has looked at the traditional model of a venue and decided to stretch it. As a community interest company, it runs free skills training for young people and is working towards carbon-neutral status. Essentially, it’s a highly effective social enterprise with a stage in the middle of its work. In Glasgow, Slay has carved out a space that feels both joyous and necessary. Since opening in 2022, it has established itself as a vital hub for the city’s LGBTQ+ community, hosting club nights and drag performances from stars such as Bimini Bon Boulash and Jinkx Monsoon that are as much communal ritual as showbusiness. It’s loud, celebratory and unapologetic. More importantly, it’s safe in a way that’s tangible rather than rhetorical, a room where self-expression is assumed to be the standard. On the Isle of Wight, Strings Bar & Venue operates with quiet focus. Run by musicians for music lovers, it sits at the centre of an island that keeps exporting serious talent. When BBC Radio 6 Music chose to broadcast live from its stage, it was recognition that cultural gravity does not operate only in major cities. The Boileroom in Guildford has just turned 20. That’s not a milestone to pass over lightly. Two decades means surviving the 2008 crash, the property developers and a pandemic that shut every door. Its story is important precisely because it’s not unique; it’s the story of almost every grassroots venue still standing. If you want to understand what has happened to grassroots music venues in the last 20 years, look at the Boileroom. Darlington’s The Forum Music Studios has opted for security via community ownership: a share offer to fund renovation, a new carbon-neutral studio and a roof garden. It’s a key example of how the sector is developing new and innovative ways to continue to keep culture alive in our towns and cities. When audiences become shareholders, the relationship shifts. In Stepney, The George Tavern stands as living proof that history is not something you curate behind glass. A Grade II listed pub allegedly mentioned by Chaucer and Dickens, it’s now steered by artist Pauline Forster, who has spent years defending it from property developers. Nick Cave has played there, Kate Moss has posed there. But its real achievement is simpler: it’s still open, still slightly scruffy, still gloriously itself in a city that prefers clean lines and higher rents. Newcastle’s The Globe is less grand but no less essential. It nurtures emerging talent through nights like Aelius Rising, giving artists their first experience of a crowd that doesn’t know them. It’s where confidence is built and mistakes are made in front of people who care enough to listen. Like many others on this list, it is an exemplar of the new model of not-for-profit entities safeguarding grassroots live music. The Half Moon in Putney has been a home for live music since 1963, building a remarkable history along the way. Its stage has welcomed The Rolling Stones, The Who, Elvis Costello (before the glasses), and Kate Bush’s first public performance. Over the decades, it has survived floods, fires and enough local campaigns to test anyone’s patience. It has survived because the community around it decided that Putney without The Half Moon would be absurd. And then there is The Sugarmill in Stoke, the embodiment of what used to be called the toilet circuit – a phrase that sounds dismissive until you realise how many future headliners once queued for its dressing room. Since 1994, it has hosted Coldplay, Muse, Daft Punk, The 1975 and Bring Me The Horizon on their way up. Its 400-capacity stage in Hanley has witnessed both awkward early sets and those moments when you can feel something special transforming from potential into inevitability. Across these 10 venues you can trace an alternative map of the UK. Camden, Stepney and Putney in London, obviously. But our music nation extends its arms around Birkenhead, Glasgow, Guildford, Darlington, Newcastle, Stoke and even the Isle of Wight. Different models, different missions, one shared belief: talent exists everywhere and music belongs to us all.

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