well, you know exactly what I’ll be reading this weekend now :)
UK DCMS special committee decides has advised that by law, all concert tickets have a levy that goes straight to growing grassroots music. Small local venues, up and coming artists, DIY promoters and gigs will receive this support. It could make a huge difference, having a safety net under the grassroots music scene.
The idea of levies isn’t new, it’s been discussed before and was in the news lately for having had a variety of responses: on the one hand, Coldplay were voluntarily taking a £1 levy on every ticket they sold in the UK to give back to emerging music, on the other hand the owner of the Co-Op Live, a large arena in Manchester, called grassroots venues ‘poorly run’ and cited that as a reason not to want to fund them, saying their venue didn’t ‘need’ the artists the grassroots were promoting. In 10 years’ time, all your retiree greatest hits bands will slow down, Gary. Who are you going to book then? No UK artist under the age of 30 has played the Co-Op to date.
So you can see why a legally mandated levy becomes a good idea. If the owner of places that sell 23,500 tickets a night can’t agree to a £1 levy, it’s for the best that it be mandated.
Of course, this is still a DCMS finding, and the government needs to make it law, but we’re past September 2024. It has now passed the voluntary trial period. It’s a case, as the Music Venue Trust said earlier, of when and how, not of if.
I’ll be reading the report properly over the weekend. Looking forward to this.