Christopher BarrettMusic Venue Trust (MVT), which represents hundreds of UK grassroots music venues (GMVs), has launched its 2024 Annual Report, highlighting the ongoing challenges facing the sector.
Among the key findings was a decrease in the number of live music shows last year, down 8.3% since 2023, accompanied by an even steeper decline in ticket revenues which were down 13.5% over the same period.
MVT said grassroots venues staged 162,000 live music events, comprising almost 1.5m individual artist performances, to a total audience of just under 20 million last year. The data was garnered from a survey of the 810 members of the MVT-associated Music Venues Alliance (MVA), which collectively employ more than 30,000 people.
The report found that 33% of the GMVs are registered as not-for profits, a 29% increase in not-for-profit registration since 2023. On average, the venues operated on a profit margin of just 0.48%, with 43.8% of them reporting a loss in the last 12 months.
MVT said that one of the most concerning trends to have emerged from the report was that the UK live music industry has seen the number of locations on an average tour fall by half over the past 30 years – with an average tour in 1994 including 22 dates and the equivalent tour in 2024 consisting of only 11. It said cities and towns such as Leicester, Edinburgh, Bath, Hull, Windsor, and Stoke on Trent have dropped off the primary route over the last few years and for some areas, like Scotland and Wales, this means swathes of the country have been cut off altogether, resulting in people having to travel further or simply being unable to access live music at all.
Music Venue Trust CEO Mark Davyd said, “The 2024 Annual Report recognises that after 10 years of work by MVT a very broad consensus has been built among politicians, industry, artists and the public that grassroots music venues must be protected, supported, encouraged and nurtured. In 2025, we have to see that consensus bring forward positive, practical interventions in the real world.
“Venues, despite all the very welcome good intentions and acknowledgements they are receiving for their vital work, are still closing, still under extreme and totally unnecessary financial pressures, still failing to be recognised, as everyone agrees they should and must be, when government designs policy, taxation, and legislation. It isn’t good enough to keep saying how much we all value them, we’ve got to practically do something about it. We need action not words.”