2025 could be a game-changer for funding UK grassroots music – but when will we see action and where will the money go?

With the highly publicised ticket levy set to come into action in 2025, this year looks set to be a real game-changer when it comes to fundraising for grassroots music in the UK. But when will we start to see real change and where will the money go? NME asked figures from across the industry.

Last year saw the government back a long overdue call for a levy on tickets to gigs at arena level and above – adopting a ‘Premier League model’ with the top tiers of the live industry paying back into the ecosystem to keep the talent pipeline flowing, as they do in football.

It is hoped that the major companies of the live industry will take it upon themselves to act on a voluntary levy, with a deadline for meaningful decisions set for March before the government steps back in to consider making it mandatory by law.

At a time when the new Labour government have also promised a price cap on touted tickets and an investigation into dynamic pricing after last year’s Oasis reunion tour controversy, MPs have promised a proactive approach to securing a more stable future for UK music and fans.

“You don’t get big venue success tours without small venue innovation and creativity,” the Minister of State for Data Protection and Telecoms Sir Chris Bryant MP told NME. “We’re the first government that have made it very clear that we support the calls for a voluntary levy. If there isn’t a voluntary levy in short order, then we will take action. That would mean a statutory levy which would take time, so I’d much prefer a voluntary levy. I’m quite hopeful that we’ll have something in place soon, and I’m working quite hard on it.

“There’s nothing more special than going to a big arena show of an act that you first saw in a tiny, tiny venue. If you don’t have any tiny venues then you’re never going to have the British success stories that the industry depends on.”

Beyond the levy, Sir Chris said that the government were going to “make sure that every single child gets the opportunity to play a musical instrument in school” and push “a proper creative education” in line with modern culture. “One of the really shocking things is the fall in the number of kids studying music at school, and that the version of music that a lot of kids learn at school isn’t one that enables them to become musicians,” he continued. “Otherwise, you just don’t have the follow-through into the small venues and making sure we’ve got larger venues that can prosper.”

As for gig spaces, the Music Venue Trust – who have reported the “complete collapse of touring” across the UK – have already been gifted ticket levy donations from the likes of Coldplay, Sam Fender and Katy Perry from their upcoming arena and stadium tours. This also comes at a time when MVT’s annual report for 2024 showed that one venue was lost every two weeks last year, with nearly 44 per cent of their venues running at a loss and a near 20 per cent spike in venues in need of emergency help on the brink of closure.

As for the rest of the industry taking action, MVT CEO Mark Davyd told NME of a “a very positive meeting of all of the major players in the music industry” before Christmas where “there was very broad consensus from all of the major promoters and the arenas that there was a will to try and make the voluntary levy happen”.

“It’s not absolutely smooth-sailing, because there are always demands on the ticket price and what artists should be doing,” Davyd told NME. “There is work needed to deliver it, but there was a consensus that this is how everyone would like to progress. Actions are being taken already this year to try and make this a reality.”

Davyd said that the levy would need a “blanket approach” applied to all major tours to be “considered a success”. Without it, he said that the government had been clear that they would “feel obligated to legislate for it”.

“There are no half-measures here,” he said. “We’ve got to try and deliver it ourselves as a music industry, and if that cannot be done for whatever logistical or legal reason, then there will be a statutory levy.”

In the wake of last year’s CMS Select Committee investigation into the state of the grassroots, the LIVE Trust had been set up to deliver any future levy income where it’s needed most. The LIVE Trust will dish out vital funding and act on behalf of the live music industry, which contributes £6.1billion to the UK economy while employing 230,000 people.

Radio DJ and former NME journalist Steve Lamacq is among the founding trustees, who said that they were looking “to provide help to a whole range of people in the live community, be that venues or artists or promoters, which is why we’re looking to build a team that truly represents all aspects of the industry and has an understanding of how we can best distribute our funding.”

Davyd said that the levy would need to dish out at least £13million-£20million each year to be considered “a success”.

“The important question is: ‘What will this do?’ That’s where minds should be focussed – not just in the short-term to get bands back out on tour, but how do we change the structure towards making touring more affordable for every artist?” he went on.

“Subsidising every artist who should be able to tour would be beyond the scale of what’s available, but intervening in the costs and looking at sensible things like accommodation and making more of existing spaces within music venues. That’s the European model and it’s something we need to look at. We need to bring down the costs of touring, the costs of a venue keeping their doors open due to the price of electricity or rent or tax, and to create a new ecosystem.”

He continued: “The test will be: how many tours are there, how long are those tours, and where are they going to? What this is really about is access to high quality live music in every place across the country.”

With the government’s imposed business rates and the VAT on tickets creating “crippling obstacles”, and the time taken for the levy to kick into action, Davyd said that UK venues “won’t be out of the woods in 2025”.

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“For 2026, I’d go as far to say that we can see a brighter future for venues, artists and the touring circuit,” he stated. “This year will still be hard, but thanks to the generosity of Coldplay, Sam Fender, Katy Perry, Enter Shikari, Frank Turner, Mr Scruff, Alien Ant Farm, there will be some financial support available and we’re going to try and deploy that in a way that means that as many venues as possible can make it through 2025 into the period when we expect this levy to start to make a real difference to venues, artists and promoters.”

Davyd added: “2025 is going to be a difficult year and there’s no point in pretending otherwise, but it is taking place in an atmosphere where everybody understands the problems and are trying their best to resolve them.”

In 1994, the average length of a tour of grassroots venues around the UK was 22 shows with 28 locations on the primary and secondary circuit. After decades of decline – growing more steep in recent years – the average length of a UK tour is now around 11 shows with only 12 locations on the primary and secondary circuit.

As a result, vast areas of the UK that were once hotbeds for live music are now left short. However, stadium and arena shows in major cities are thriving and making record profits. This is symbiotically exacerbated by the cost of touring, with a recent study from Ditto Music showing that 70.6 per cent of independent UK acts have never toured, 84 per cent of unsigned artists simply can’t afford to.

Without resolution, Davyd outlined a profound closure of the talent pipeline – admitting that we were already seeing the results of the UK live music scene “excessively rewarding a lack of risk-taking, a lack of ambition and a lack of support” and that major labels and streaming giants needed to step up and invest too.

“This lack of investment has a long-tail impact for everyone involved,” he said. “Not just the grassroots artists, venues and promoters, but eventually it will hit the biggest festivals, labels and everybody because music should be a constantly progressive culture.

“As we can see, it has increasingly become a very retrogressive culture where the aim is to shift units by artists who made their records more than 50 years ago. Mortality will take over in the end, regarding everything becoming a hologram.”

He added: “It’s not over and done. Somewhere in the UK there’s a young kid about to get out their laptop or guitar or whatever and create something that no one has ever heard before that’s got the potential to be a massive point of contact for millions of people. What are we doing to make sure that kid’s work ends up somewhere and that they’re allowed to develop?”

David Martin of the Featured Artists Coalition has been making it loud and clear that any money raised by the levy to be accessible to music creators, as well as venues.

“Whilst it is clear that there are different perspectives within the industry on how to tackle the crisis, the Minister [Chris Bryant] has tasked the industry representatives with demonstrating they can collectively introduce a £1 levy from arena and stadium shows to support grassroots artists, promoters and venues – with the objective that this will become blanket across all shows,” he told NME.

“The critical word here is ‘levy’. A grassroots music fund cannot be dependent on voluntary artist donations. Such an opt-in ad-hoc system would create uncertainty and the potential for an uneven playing field for artists on British soil. Furthermore, it places the burden of decision-making on individual artists rather than sharing it across the industry.”

Martin added that the levy needed to be blanket and built into the ticket price to avoid unnecessary burden on artists via voluntary donations, and that more transparency was needed on where the money would be going. This comes as the FAC –  in partnership with the Musicians’ Union (MU) and the Music Managers Forum (MMF) – announce the UK Artist Touring Fund “to ensure revenues allocated for grassroots artists from a new ticket contribution on large-capacity live events can be effectively and transparently distributed”.

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“We have no way to predict what it will look like,” he said. “We need to know how it’s going to be distributed and how it’s going to get to artists, especially if we’ve got artists paying in. It should be a levy rather than a system of artist donations. I would like to see happen is a £1 blanket levy on all gigs above a 5,000 capacity very quickly with that funding going to the Live Trust and distributed between venues and artists in parity, with some of the money going to promoters as well.”

He continued: “I honestly don’t think we solve the problem by propping up venues that people are nostalgic about, and I say that as someone who’s nostalgic about venues. What people get hung up on is that once you get into any level of depth about this conversation, the problem that we’re trying to solve gets forgotten about.

“The problem that we’re trying to solve is: it’s expensive to tour, it’s expensive to go out, if people push the ticket price up to cover the cost then it is disproportionately high and fans have no money in their pockets.”

The FAC CEO also said that “young fans are finding it very hard to get out and see the artists that they love” and that “the demand for recorded music from UK artists is very high at the moment, but they have no live footprint”. The FAC have met artists with 10million monthly listeners who still can’t afford to tour.

“Ultimately, that’s the problem: we’ve got to sustain the supply chain and audience growth,” he went on. “We’ve lost that generation that were hid during the pandemic, and we need to reignite that connection between new audiences and live music, and we need to enable new artists to get out on the road.”

Pointing to Spotify’s most globally streamed artists of 2024, Martin said that the increasing lack of UK names was a sign of the talent pipeline already suffering – and not for a lack of talent.

“I’m not saying this is doomsday, it’s fixable but this should be the canary down the mine to the UK music industry,” he admitted. “What is the whole ecosystem able to do together to stimulate activity? Large arenas and promoters need to have that foresight. You’d expect them to.

“We should all be very concerned. The UK’s share of the global music market has reduced from 17 per cent to 10 per cent in the last seven years. How many UK artists topped the overall Official Charts last year? These should be red flags for the industry. If you want venues to do well, make sure you’ve got performances in them and that you’re stimulating new audiences. Do you want promoters to do well? Make sure there’s a demand by allowing artists to build new fanbases.”

Martin ended up by saying that the UK needed to urgently tackle issues around money made from streaming, the grassroots levy, the impact of Brexit on touring and the regulation of AI.

“Right now, we need growth and easy wins,” he added. “I think the UK is enormously underachieving against its potential. I know the demand that’s out there and the quality of artists we have. Anybody that says ‘There’s no good music out there anymore’ is frankly full of shit. There is so much good music out there, it’s just very difficult for it to cut through and it’s not very well supported in the UK.”

John Rostron is CEO of the Association of Independent Festivals. Last year, they saw the loss of 78 festivals after a huge spate of cancellations and postponements. “That’s double the number from 2023 and means that over 200 festivals have gone since the pandemic,” he told NME.

“That is the worst number on record for lost events, and all but two of those are independent festivals. The majority of festivals in the UK are independent, and they’re the ones most at risk as they don’t have the same deep pockets of the transnationals that can ride through problematic times.”

He continued: “Now in 2025, the margins are so tight and the cashflowing of those events is so hard, supply chain terms are the toughest they’ve ever been, advancing of money from ticket companies is far more cautious. You’ve now got successful events that will sell well or sell out and will make money, but the amount of money they make is so marginal that it’s no longer worth the stress of running that event through the year because any margin of error – bad weather, a burst water money, internet dropping out for a few hours on the bars – can be the difference between making or losing money.”

Rostron added that festivals were still feeling the tail-end of the impact of COVID on the regeneration of new audiences – creating a “pressure cooker” environment alongside the effects of Brexit, the cost of touring, and infrastructure costs.

As for the levy, Rostron said that the AIF had “engaged and had really great conversations about the need of that money to support the whole ecosystem – including grassroots festivals”.

“If you just sort venues out, it’s no good if festivals are collapsing,” he argued. “It’s all part of an ecosystem. We’ve got programmes that we’re setting up for when the levy arrives, but there won’t be any meaningful contributions from that until autumn 2026 at the earliest.

However, even with the levy in place, UK festivals would not see any real benefit until 2027 due to their seasonal nature.

“The levy is agreed on fixed shows over 5,000 capacity on a voluntary basis, but most of the big shows for this year have been announced,” said Rostron. “There might be the odd one announced with the levy added, but we’re not going to see many until next year and the money won’t come in until the show is reconciled – which will be autumn 2026 before our festivals return in summer 2027.

“The problem we have now is in that gap between now and next autumn, so we’ve got to get through two more seasons with no support. We’ve been involved in the levy conversations and it’s been understood and accepted that this should benefit venues, artists, promoters and festivals – but the question is now what can be done to support us in the next two years?

“I told a minister that we lost 70 festivals last year and we’re not going to be OK in just hoping for 2026; we need government support to help with that gap. It’s very positive and welcome, but it’s also not going to be enough. We can’t lose another 114 events.”

In the meantime, Rostron said that the best way for music fans to support festivals was to put a deposit down on a ticket to an event to secure them going ahead, and to “write to their MP and say, ‘I’m worried about my favourite festival – what are you doing about it?’”

“We’ve done everything that we can in this world, it’s just tumultuous circumstances around us,” he ended. “We need a VAT reduction or some temporary fiscal support. It’s now up to the government to change that for the better. We don’t need a lot.”

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Michael Kill is CEO on the Nighttime Industries Association – who reported last year that if venues continue to close at the same alarming rate, UK nightclubs will be extinct by 2029.

“We put that report out to really give the government and understanding our fragility,” Kill told NME. “The decline suggested that this was our direction of travel. We have without a doubt seemed to turn a corner – particularly in the second half of last year. People are now focussed with a greater understanding of our perilous situation and they’ve come out to support the best they can, given the economic climate.”

With 2024 proving “better than we could have thought” for the UK’s nightclub scene, Kill said that he was going to be pushing the premise that “the industry needs to take back control of their recovery” as “the government are not competent enough to support us” after “a hellish five or six years”.

“We’ve got huge challenges, we know what they are, and we’ve got to learn to pivot and work together and actually create some positive outcomes,” he argued. “This is all about taking back control and people understanding that they don’t want to lose the institution of the British nightclub. We’re going to use our resilience to break through these challenges and re-establish ourselves on our own steam.”

Kill also said that it was essential that nightclubs are also able to access money from the levy  as they’re “essential for the electronic music scene”.

“The levy is a great initiative, but it needs to address the ecosystem – not just the top and bottom,” he said. “How do we address supporting grassroots electronic music given that there aren’t as many shows on the scale on the likes of Taylor Swift? A lot of the biggest voids and issues are with the mid-sized capacity venues. We do loads of work to help grassroots music venues, but how do people refine their craft if there are limitations on that next level of venues?

“I would hope that there’s a broader consideration around electronic music. These cultural businesses need a share and position in this initiative.”

Meanwhile, the scene faces another “extremely challenging year” with the NTIA looking to “fortify nightclubs as institutions” and protect them from landlords in the hope that there will be support from the government in the spring budget. “We are still going to see losses, but it feels like there’s a bigger support from the public for nightclubs and culture in general,” ended Kill.

The clock is ticking for the major players to prove that they are serious about investing back into where new music is really born in the UK.

Sir Chris Bryant MP added: “The UK creative industries represent £125billion to the economy, they’re far more significant than many other industries in the UK and we need to take them just as seriously. I’m passionate and determined about this.

“Very soon, you will see that we’ve made progress.”

Read more on the current crisis facing music venues from the MVT’s annual report launch featuring Kate Nash in Parliament here.

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