Written submission from Dr Yorgos Paschos, Prof John Schofield, Dr Jennifer Chubb, Chris Sherrington (LMI0015)

UK Live Music Industry: Market Structure, Competition and Grassroots Music Venues

Submitted by:
Dr Yorgos Paschos (University of York, Humanities Research Centre)

Prof. John Schofield (University of York, Department of Archaeology)

Dr Jennifer Chubb (University of York, Department of Sociology)

Chris Sherrington (York Music Venue Network)

Introduction of Academics and Reason for Submitting Evidence

This submission draws on recently completed doctoral research by Yorgos Paschos examining grassroots music venues (GMVs) as cultural, social, and economic infrastructures embedded within local communities. The research combined qualitative interviews and secondary data analysis across multiple UK case studies and was funded by White Rose College of Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH) (Grant number 2606133) as a collaboration between the University of York and York Music Venue Network (affiliated to the Music Venue Trust).

Dr Yorgos Paschos is a Humanities Research Centre Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of York working on the intersection of cultural heritage, sociology and urban studies.

Prof. John Schofield is Director of Studies (Cultural Heritage Management) and a former Head of Department at the Department of Archaeology, University of York.

Dr Jennifer Chubb is a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology, University of York,  Co-Director of the Science and Technology Studies Unit (SATSU) and  Lead for Responsible Innovation for the Centre for Doctoral Training in Lifelong Safety Assurance of AI-enabled Autonomous Systems (SAINTS CDT)

Chris Sherrington is the Co-Founder of York Music Venue Network.

Executive Summary

The UK live music industry is characterised by significant structural concentration, particularly in event promotion, large-scale venues, and ticketing platforms. While demand for live music remains high, risks and precarity are disproportionately borne by grassroots venues, which operate on extremely low margins while playing a central role in artist development, cultural diversity, community building, and regional access to live music.

Evidence shows that competition is unfair and uneven across the sector (Paschos 2025). Large arenas benefit from scale, exclusive touring routes, and control over ticketing and promotion, while GMVs face rising rents, redevelopment pressure, limited bargaining power, and restricted access to artists. Regional disparities further exacerbate these inequalities, with touring routes and investment heavily concentrated in London and other UK major cities.

Barriers to entry and expansion for small venues and promoters include planning systems that fail to recognise GMVs as cultural or heritage assets, a lack of mandatory heritage or cultural impact assessments, rising property values driven by gentrification, and asymmetric contractual relationships with promoters and artists. These conditions restrict fair competition despite sustained audience demand.

The consequences of these structural issues constitute clear competition harms. The closure of 125 GMVs in 2024 alone has reduced access to affordable live music, weakened local economies, limited pathways for emerging artists, and diminished community cohesion. These losses are not replaced by larger venues, which do not offer equivalent functions or accessibility.

This submission argues that GMVs should be recognised as vital ‘third places’[1] and socially-relevant heritage assets, whose loss represents both cultural and market failure. Current regulatory approaches remain insufficient, as competition policy operates in isolation from planning frameworks and heritage systems. The submission concludes with a set of recommendations within the domains of heritage policy, planning, funding, and governance, aimed at supporting a more secure and sustainable future for GMVs. These recommendations focus on strengthening heritage recognition, expanding community-led protections and ownership models, improving impact assessment mechanisms, and reforming heritage frameworks to better account for lived, affective, and contemporary cultural value.

This coordinated set of measures includes;:

●       Greater formal recognition of GMVs within heritage and planning systems, including through Local Listing and their consistent treatment as Non-Designated Heritage Assets, to ensure their cultural significance is considered in planning and redevelopment decisions.

●       Wider and more strategic use of Assets of Community Value (ACV) designation, supporting community recognition of GMVs and enabling greater protection and potential community acquisition under existing and proposed reforms to the ACV framework.

●       The introduction of mandatory Community or Heritage Impact Assessments for urban redevelopment, incorporating intangible, social, and affective cultural values, alongside existing environmental and economic considerations.

●       Targeted financial support for the everyday operations of GMVs, including core running costs, cultural programming, and community engagement, through public funding streams and heritage-led initiatives.

●       The implementation of industry- or government-mandated ticket levies on large-scale events, redistributing value to support grassroots music infrastructure and venue sustainability.

●       Support for, and expansion of, community ownership and benefit models, helping to secure long-term resilience and protect GMVs from speculative development pressures.

●       Reform of heritage frameworks and guidance, including Conservation Principles, to better recognise lived experience, affective attachment, and contemporary cultural value as legitimate forms of heritage significance.

Protecting grassroots music venues is essential for maintaining a diverse, competitive, and regionally balanced live music market in the UK.

Full Written Evidence Submission

UK Live Music Industry: Market Structure, Competition and Grassroots Music Venues

1. Introduction and Research Focus

This written evidence is submitted based on original doctoral research examining the cultural, social, and economic significance of grassroots music venues (GMVs) in the UK. The research investigated how contemporary music venues function as sites of lived cultural heritage, community infrastructure, and creative labour, with particular attention to their position within wider live music markets.

The study employed a mixed-methodology approach, incorporating in-depth interviews, open-ended survey responses, and scenario-driven questions (total number of participants: 95). Four grassroots venues in Northern England were used as case studies, with participants including local communities, audience members, musicians, promoters, and venue-affiliated workers. The research further engaged with planning documentation, heritage policy frameworks, and sector reports, particularly those produced by Music Venue Trust.

Rather than approaching live music solely as an entertainment economy, this research conceptualised GMVs as foundational cultural infrastructure, or ‘third places’. These venues support early-stage artistic development, sustain local music ecosystems, facilitate community belonging, and enable cultural participation at accessible price points. As such, their decline cannot be understood merely as individual business failure, but as a structural issue embedded within market design, regulatory frameworks, and spatial inequality.

This submission responds directly to the Committee’s questions concerning market concentration, barriers to entry, competition harms, and the (in)adequacy of current regulation. It argues that competition within the UK live music industry is shaped not only by market dynamics, but by the interaction between economic power, planning policy, heritage governance, and uneven geographical development.

2. Market Structure and Competition

Evidence from this doctoral research (conducted by Paschos, supervised by Schofield, Chubb and Sherrington) indicates that the UK live music industry operates through a highly uneven market structure, characterised by concentration at the upper end of the sector and fragmentation at the grassroots level. While GMVs are numerous, locally embedded, and organisationally independent, market power within live music is increasingly concentrated among a small number of dominant actors operating across promotion, venue ownership, and ticketing. Large promoters and ticketing platforms benefit from scale, national touring networks, and vertically integrated business models that allow them to dominate multiple stages of the live music chain. These actors are central to arena touring, festival circuits, and high-capacity venues, where financial risk is distributed differently, and revenue flows are comparatively stable.

On the other hand, GMVs operate at the most precarious end of the market. Our research shows that GMVs function with limited financial capacity, narrow operating margins, and minimal negotiating leverage, despite playing a foundational role in artist development and audience formation. Participants consistently described these venues as operating at the financial margins but at the cultural centre of the live music economy, absorbing disproportionate financial risk while receiving minimal structural protection.

This concentration is not only economic but spatial. National touring routes, promotional attention, and industry infrastructure cluster around major metropolitan centres, reinforcing asymmetries between locally rooted venues and nationally operating firms. Hence, regional disparities significantly affect market competitiveness as GMVs face reduced access to touring artists, increased travel costs, and smaller promotional networks, despite strong local demand and music tourism activity. Findings from case studies in Northern England demonstrate that these inequalities are not demand-driven but structurally produced through touring logistics, promotional networks, and metropolitan bias. These include reduced access to touring artists, higher travel and accommodation costs for performers, and limited inclusion within national promotion networks. These constraints exist despite strong local demand and demonstrable music tourism activity in regional towns and cities. Outside of the major cities, GMVs are required to operate under higher relative costs while competing for artists within a system designed around metropolitan logics. The outcome is not a lack of audience engagement, but restricted market access. Regional inequalities, therefore, function as a structural barrier rather than a reflection of consumer preference, limiting cultural provision outside dominant urban centres. As a result, the UK live music market cannot be understood as a single competitive field, but rather as a stratified system in which different players operate under fundamentally unequal conditions.

From a competition perspective, this produces a market in which profits are increasingly consolidated at the top, while risk, precariousness and closure are trickled down onto small venues,  despite their essential role in sustaining the wider ecosystem. Arenas and large-scale festivals benefit from national promotion, high-volume ticket sales, and integration into international touring circuits. In contrast, GMVs operate within localised markets characterised by frequent low-margin events, small audiences, and high fixed costs. Evidence from our research demonstrates that grassroots venues depend not on occasional high-revenue performances but on sustained everyday activity, including live music, community events, and accessible cultural programming. This model generates social and cultural value but provides little financial buffering against economic shocks.

However, it has to be noted that large venues and festivals cannot replace the function of GMVs as the latter provide intimate performance environments, opportunities for artistic experimentation, and repeated audience engagement that are structurally absent from large-scale commercial settings. They function as the primary sites of talent development, scene formation, and local cultural participation. As a result, competition between arenas and GMVs cannot be understood as a simple hierarchy of scale. Instead, the market relies on functionally distinct but economically interconnected agents, with the sustainability of the entire live music ecosystem dependent upon the continued viability of its grassroots infrastructure

3. Barriers to Entry and Expansion

One of the most significant barriers facing GMVs is the urban planning system. Many venues operate in areas undergoing regeneration, where rising rents, redevelopment proposals, and land-use change threaten long-term viability and equal competition. According to our research data, 39% of small venues and 15% of all venues report being significantly impacted by the closure of other venues in their areas. This underlines the existence of a strong local music ecosystem grounded on the co-dependency of local venues as well as a domino effect where the loss of one venue can severely impact this ecosystem. Additional threats include noise complaints, which affect 7% of small venues and 9% of all venues. Such complaints often arise due to gentrification and urban redevelopment, a point that is analysed later in this section. Furthermore, 40% of GMVs are threatened by the increased number of festivals that tend to draw audiences and revenues from smaller venues.

Operational costs are another threat, with 60% of GMVs struggling to meet the cost of labour and artists, while heightened competition between venues and promoters negatively impacts 40% of GMVs. Trying to put these threats into context and provide a framework under which they can be explained, it seems that many GMVs, especially in cities, are situated in areas which face or have faced the risk of redevelopment and gentrification. State or market-led gentrification, accompanied by a flow of neoliberal, hegemonic ideas about the uses of public spaces and buildings, is closely related to displacement. Gentrification is the process whereby a neighbourhood is affected by an influx of private investments to redevelop and rebuild homes and businesses, attracting those who can afford the raised property values while displacing existing residents. Despite the introduction of the Agent of Change principle by Parliament in 2018, GMVs such as the George Tavern in London, the Night and Day Cafe in Manchester, and the Crescent Community Venue in York have all faced noise complaints and have been caught up in complex legal proceedings to keep their business open. Hence, factors such as redevelopment, disagreements with landlords, noise complaints, rising property values, rent and energy costs are all intertwined, creating a nexus of problems that put GMVs under pressure, and often under threat of immediate, permanent closure. This demonstrates the limited effectiveness of the principle in practice. Notably, the Agent of Change principle is not enshrined in primary statutory law in the UK, but instead operates through guidance within the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). While intended to protect established venues from the impacts of new, nearby developments, the principle lacks a strict and universally enforceable legal definition, resulting in inconsistent interpretation and application by local planning authorities.

Moreover, research findings indicate that GMVs hold aesthetic, historical, and affective value for local communities, functioning as third places of lived experience. They are also often considered important places in terms of their communal heritage. This can either be because they exist within historic buildings, or in conservation areas, or because gig-going itself is an activity that people regard as part of their identity. However, existing heritage systems remain oriented toward traditional, material assets, failing to recognise living cultural practices (Harrison, 2010). This absence of recognition creates a structural disadvantage by excluding GMVs from planning protections routinely afforded to other community ‘heritage’ assets.

In addition to that, research and sector evidence indicate that large-scale promoters and festivals frequently impose exclusivity clauses on artists, restricting their ability to perform at smaller local venues within a defined geographical area or time period. These contractual practices limit artists’ freedom to work with independent promoters and directly reduce programming opportunities for GMVs, particularly during peak touring seasons. As a result, grassroots venues are structurally excluded from accessing talent, reinforcing market concentration and further undermining their ability to compete on equal terms.

All these pressures lead to the precarious conditions that many GMVs face at the moment. Evidence from our research indicates that the closure of GMVs reduces access to affordable live music, particularly for lower-income audiences. The loss of local venues diminishes cultural choice and diversity, particularly outside major cities. Furthermore, GMVs serve as essential entry points for emerging musicians, enabling skill development, audience building, and professional networking. Their decline weakens the touring pipeline and restricts pathways into the wider music industry. Finally, GMVs operate as social and cultural hubs, fostering belonging, inclusion, and well-being. They provide spaces particularly valued by young people, students, and LGBTQ+ communities. Their loss erodes social infrastructure and community identity, effects that are not replaced by commercial arenas. In 2023 alone, 125 GMVs closed across the UK (Music Venue Trust, 2023), demonstrating the scale of this harm.

4. Current Regulations

Current regulatory approaches addressing the live music industry focus heavily on price transparency and consumer protection, particularly in the ticketing market. This includes government action to clamp down on secondary ticketing abuses. While these measures are broadly positive, particularly from a consumer protection perspective, they remain limited in scope when evaluated against the deeper structural and spatial inequalities that characterise competition in the live music market.

A critical limitation of current regulation is that it treats ticketing symptoms (e.g., resale price gouging) rather than the underlying market structure that enables firms with significant market power to shape pricing and distribution terms. For example, ticketing reforms do not affect contractual access, exclusive platform deals, or the relative bargaining power of promoters and venues. While the Competition and Markets Authority has enforcement powers, these are reactive and focused on consumer outcomes, not on addressing the distribution of market power or structural barriers to competition that disadvantage smaller venues.

Further, the government’s recent push for a voluntary ticket levy reflects recognition of systemic vulnerability within the sector. Creative Industries Ministers have called on the live music industry to adopt such a levy to safeguard grassroots venues and the broader ecosystem, which the government acknowledges are undervalued cultural assets, central to local communities and artist development. However, this approach is industry-led and voluntary. The Culture, Media and Sport Committee has recommended that a levy be implemented on a statutory basis if voluntary industry consensus is not achieved in a timely fashion. The government’s own inquiry response supports this as a rapid and effective mechanism, but also makes clear that it expects industry action to proceed first, signalling a regulatory reticence to impose mandatory measures despite clear evidence of structural inequalities within the music industries.

              Regarding the tax-related side of regulations, the state policy has not fundamentally altered tax structures that disproportionately burden live music activity. For example, VAT on live music tickets remains at the standard rate (20%), which does not differentiate based on venue size or community value and imposes a comparatively high cost on consumers and promoters relative to other European jurisdictions. Sector organisations have long advocated for a targeted VAT reduction, especially for grassroots venues. Parallel regulatory reforms around business rates aim to provide relief for small and medium gig spaces, but these broader measures are not tailored to the specific operational and structural fragilities of GMVs.

Finally, regulations beyond the live music sector, such as planning and land-use frameworks that directly affect GMVs remain largely inadequate. Planning policy in the UK does not systematically recognise GMVs as cultural assets deserving special consideration. Although some local authorities have incorporated Heritage Impact Assessments into redevelopment decision-making, these tend to prioritise traditional, material heritage and fail to capture intangible cultural value or community significance. Planning systems, therefore, allow redevelopment pressures such as rising rents, urban regeneration schemes, and displacement to proceed with minimal mitigation for venues that are widely recognised by local communities as culturally and socially vital. This absence of heritage recognition for GMVs means planning and development regulation remain blind to a form of market failure that is the erosion of the grassroots cultural infrastructure.

Overall, a central weakness of current regulatory approaches is their disjointed nature. Competition policy, planning regulation, heritage governance, and cultural policy operate as separate domains, despite jointly shaping market outcomes within the live music sector

5.  Recommendations and Next Steps

Based on the research findings, the following measures are recommended:

1. Encourage local communities to recognise the heritage values of GMVs through Local Listing: By nominating venues as locally significant heritage assets, communities will ensure the heritage value of GMVs is considered within planning-related decision making.
2. Promote the use of Assets of Community Value (ACV) designation for GMVs under the Localism Act (2011), providing communities with a formal mechanism to recognise and protect the social and cultural significance of grassroots music venues. ACV status can offer an important, though currently limited, safeguard by triggering a moratorium period when assets are listed for sale. Recent proposals under the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill[2] seek to strengthen this framework by introducing a genuine community right to buy and extending the moratorium period to up to 12 months. If enacted, these reforms would significantly enhance the effectiveness of ACV designation as a tool for securing the long-term sustainability and community stewardship of GMVs.
3. Introduce mandatory Community Impact Assessments (HIAs) that include intangible, social, and affective cultural value, similar to Environmental Impact Assessments.
4. The increased recognition of GMVs as Non-Designated Heritage Assets to help provide consistent national guidance that recognises venues as contemporary heritage sites.
5. Continue to seek out and apply for financial support through targeted funding streams to maintain everyday operations, cultural programming, and community engagement, for example, through Arts Council England, National Lottery Heritage Fund, and Historic England’s Everyday Heritage initiatives.
6. Support government-mandated levies on large-scale events, redistributing value toward grassroots infrastructure (Music Venue Trust, 2024).
7. Support and where appropriate expand Community Benefit Ownership models, such as Music Venue Properties, to ensure long-term resilience.
8. Review Historic England’s Conservation Principles (2008) to better incorporate affective, lived, and contemporary heritage values (e.g. under an expanded definition of communal values) that are attached to GMVs.

6. Conclusion

Grassroots music venues are not peripheral cultural spaces but foundational infrastructure within the UK live music economy. Their decline represents not only cultural loss but market failure. Protecting GMVs is essential to sustaining competition, regional balance, cultural diversity, and consumer access. Coordinated policy intervention across competition regulation, planning, and heritage governance is necessary to ensure a resilient and equitable live music ecosystem.