Bands are skipping more towns and cities on tour
Many UK towns and cities have seen a drastic reduction in live music because bands and singers are playing half as many gigs on tour as they did in the 1990s.
Artists are playing 11 shows on an average tour on the grassroots circuit this year, compared with 22 in 1994, according to new figures from the Music Venue Trust.
Those figures also “reflect what we’re hearing about the mid-capacity and arena level” tours, said Jon Collins, chief executive of the live music trade body, Live.
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy told a music industry conference on Friday that “too many parts of the country have become cultural deserts” after more than a hundred music venues closed last year.
“That is the chance to live a larger, richer life, that should belong to us all, denied to a generation,” she said. “And pop is getting posher.”
Singer-songwriter Sam Duckworth, who has performed as Get Cape Wear Cape Fly since 2005 and is now working with the Music Venue Trust, said there is “a spiralling crisis” for all but the biggest artists, venues and promoters.
“My first major tour was 54 dates. There’s no way I could do a 54-date tour now,” he said, speaking to BBC News at the Beyond the Music conference in Manchester.
“What it really means is that [fans in] certain parts of the country have now either got to travel long distances or hope to be the one non-major city on a tour.
“So not only are we seeing a crisis in economics, we’re also seeing a crisis of access. There are vast swathes of the country where your only option is to travel an hour and a half.
“But then you factor in that the cost of everything has gone up. The train tickets have gone up. The ticket prices have gone up. The cost of your life has gone up.”
Costs have risen sharply for artists and venues as well as fans, he said.
“Maybe one of the industry secrets that we need to debunk is how much it costs to put on a gig.
“If you have a band of people and everybody needs to get paid, you have a van that needs to be fuelled and everybody needs to stay in a hotel, you suddenly get to a point where it’s costing thousands of pounds to put on a gig.”
The venue and staff costs also need to be covered, he added.
“So everything’s gone up, and if tours are running at a loss, the best way to stem those losses is to do less shows.
“People still want to do shows. It’s still important to do shows. But the way a lot of artists are breaking even is by simply reducing the number of gigs they’re doing.”
The Music Venue Trust said its members normally sell about 20 million tickets per year in total, but that the figure is expected to drop to 15 million this year.
There has been a “dramatic decrease in the total amount of live music in our communities” and an “increasingly small number of places [are] included on the touring circuit”, it said.
Mr Collins, who also spoke at Beyond the Music, said: “We hear tales of international artists skipping the UK or saying, I’ll play London because it’s London, but instead of doing six shows in the UK, I’m going to do two.
“When it comes to programming tours, you’re thinking, does it make sense to play Manchester? Does it make sense to play Birmingham? If I do those two, does it make sense to play Leeds and Liverpool, or are they just too close and actually we’re just going to have to get fans to commute across?
“So the risk is that we end up with a truncated touring route, which becomes a spine of the country – London, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow – and then large swathes of the country are missing out on seeing those artists.”
Coldplay bucked that trend by choosing to play in Hull next summer. But Hull’s Craven Park Stadium and Wembley Stadium in London will be the only UK venues on the band’s 2025 world tour.
Businesses like hotels, bars and taxis in other towns and cities miss out on income when bands don’t visit, and overseas acts often don’t hire British crews for shorter UK tours, Mr Collins said.
He wants the government to cut VAT on gig tickets from the full 20% rate. It is 10% or below in countries like France, Germany and Italy.
“That is a weight putting a false ceiling on the number of shows that we could be doing, the number of tours that could be happening, the number of festivals that we could be offering up to people,” he said.
A HM Treasury spokesperson responded: “We do not comment on speculation around tax changes outside of fiscal events.”
The Music Venue Trust is also calling for a £1 levy on all arena and stadium concerts to support grassroots venues.
Earlier this year, a House of Commons select committee said that if the music industry could not reach an agreement to introduce such a subsidy by September, the government should make it a legal requirement.
That deadline has now passed, and the Live trade body is in the process of establishing a trust to distribute funds, but Mr Collins said reaching an agreement within the industry has been “complicated”.
“There are differences of view across the sector about the legality and viability of a standard scheme,” he said.
In the meantime, he called for more artists to follow another initiative taken by Coldplay, who will donate 10% of the proceeds from their Wembley and Hull shows to the Music Venue Trust.
Such a scheme already exists on a local level in Halifax, where ticket sales for The Piece Hall, an outdoor venue that can hold up to 6,000 people, help to subsidise five other, smaller venues.
In the first year, each of those venues is set to receive at least £6,500 from the proceeds, which they intend to use on modernising their facilities.
Nandy told the conference that the government is “deeply concerned about the closure of live music venues and the huge challenges that face existing venues right now”, and said the issue is “absolutely at the top of our agenda”.
She said she wanted to make it easier to turn empty buildings into community-owned venues, among other initiatives to improve access to music education and instruments.
She didn’t mention the ticket levy, but a spokesperson for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said: “We are encouraged to see the music industry exploring a voluntary levy to support talented musicians throughout their careers, from grassroots to the main stage.”
