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  1. I suspect it’s not unique to the UK. Landlords are demanding ridiculous rent increases in every sector and a small venue that is just about making ends meet, just can’t afford it.

    One answer may be to broaden out the kinds of music that is on offer.

  3. I don’t begrudge artists having somewhat higher ticket prices, it’s the only way for most acts to make any money. And everything is costing more these days, rents, fuel, food, accomodation, vehicle rentals etc

  4. I would quite like to attend a show in Belfast on Sunday at a modestly sized venue (probably 300-400 capacity) – it’s £25, plus online ‘booking fee’ of £3.50-odd. I paused at that point. Can I justify that £28.50? I don’t begrudge the performers their living – but maybe that cash is better in my pocket, because everything is more expensive these days… 🙁

    • Of course it’s all about personal affordability and what you can allocate for an “entertainment” budget. For some big acts you are paying that much in ridiculous Ticketmaster “fees” alone

      • I’ve always preferred performances that happen in pub/club sized venues – and happily, the acts I want to see generally perform at that level. For me, £30 is probably the cut-off point for even an artist I strongly connect with, and probably £20 for an act I’m less fervently interested in. If the economics of the world leave me behind, so be it.

        At the time of writing, I have two tickets (and often, though not always, the combined price of two tickets is involved) to see Altan + support at a 300-400 sized venue next month: £19.50 each. For Altan, I would probably have gone to £25 each, but not beyond.

  5. The twice-monthly pub jazz gigs I attend are £17 (With a discount code it’s £13 for regulars such as myself). Other pub & small club gigs around here that used to be £7-£10 are usually £15 these days. Free pub gigs where the pub/brewery pays the band seem to be a thing of the past.
    There are a few gigs next month that I’d like to go to, all in the £10-£30 range but one of the £20+ ones will probably have to be missed, as funds are currently depleted.
    Anything over £30 would have to be very spectacular indeed to have me buying a ticket. As with Colin, my cutoff point is £30.

    • I bought my ticket for Margaret Glaspy in Cambridge next week as soon as they went on sale in case they sold out. I’ve just checked that there are still 56 tickets left and they’re only £17.60! I guess that just means I’m out of touch! Portland Arms is almost the perfect venue as far as I’m concerned and I’m sure it’ll be a treat but if she can’t easily sell out such a small venue then is there any hope?

    • I just saw they are playing Toronto next month (El Mocambo), tickets are $60 which is about 35 quid. But then I have to include travel costs and probably a hotel room so then we are up to about $300 🙁

  7. I paid £35 to see Glen Matlock at Sub89 (capacity about 300) – more than I would’ve expected, but he’s the only ex-Pistol I’ve not seen live. Originally ro be last April, re-scheduled to November, and then cancelled. He did apologise and cited “Venue and promoter issues”.
    Sub89 did have a number of smaller gigs, but recently it’s just been a slew of tribute bands. Another venue no longer supporting the circuit by the sound of it.

    • I’m have a stake in a reasonably sized independent venue in the U.K.

      The uncomfortable reality is that Tribute shows can, and often far more lucrative than ‘original’ artists.

      We try so hard to have less than 30% Tributes – but the comparatively low costs added to punters buying more beer at Tributes can prove irresistible to venues. Especially when they are struggling.

      It’s often a downward spiral from there.

      • We have a local venue which does a lot of tribute bands but also are trying hard to be a place where established acts or those on their way up can play. We saw Big Country before Christmas for £30 and they put on a good show on the also good in house PA. I know the owner a little and his biggest earners are an 80s covers band which sell out every 6 weeks or so with an audience that spends well at the bar. The band are tight, the singer eccentric and the set list eclectic. Who can blame him for putting them on again?

      • I should have thought that ‘serious’ music fans would accept that tribute acts are often what keep the lights on, like Panto is to serious ‘theatre’.

        • Surely any good venue would have room in its schedule for both acts on their way up (or down) and tribute acts?

          Personally speaking, I’d rather go and see someone in a smaller or mid-sized venue than an enrmo dome like London’t O2 or Dublin’s Croke Park. Have been to each of the two venues once (Springsteen both times) and will never darken the door of either of them again

      • What’s wrong with tribute acts? They’re not my thing but if it keeps the lights on then they’re surely a good thing. The problem comes when the venue management/ownership decides that they’re about making as much money as possible and eschewing the evenings where up and coming bands can have their day in the sun. Lucky for me, my local small venue (Bedford Esquires) seems to be all about the music and is proud of the ever lengthening list of big bands that once played there,

        • The biggest problem with small venues is the fickleness of punters.
          If you’re only just breaking even and you can only get decent houses for tribute bands where punters at least know what they expect to hear, then tribute bands are what you will have to book to keep the thing going.
          Post-Covid particularly, people just aren’t very inclined to come out and see new-arrival bands they don’t know anything about.
          Artists might eventually attract a following through sheer persistence, but until then promoters/venues can’t afford to keep booking unsupported artists, no matter how good, for nearly-empty houses. Constantly losing money when you’re operating on a shoestring.

          • I think that may be true for many venues but in others the owner is there because they want to promote new talent. In those cases, the tribute bands pay the bills. One gig I wet to last year at Esquires was pretty much a full house in the smaller ‘Room 2’ while upstairs in the bigger room was a Guns’N’Roses tribute band (that could occasionally be heard bleeding through!). Surely that’s the best of all worlds.

  8. Just back from a visit to a folk club I’ve not been to one for years. Tickets £7 I should have counted up how many were there.
    The only problem was the extra noise from the rehearsal rooms the venue had upstairs, however venues have to do what they can to survive so probably a necessary evil.

  9. There’s still a lingering long-Covid effect to gig-going. In 2017, 18 and 19, I averaged a gig a fortnight (in my 20s it was 5 or 6 a week). In 2023, I went to 4 gigs. And I caught the ‘flu at the fourth. None of them were anywhere near full.

    I’m immunosuppressed, which puts me in the minority, but I’m not the only one. I probably won’t go to any more until after Easter, when the risk of catching some else’s cough or sneeze is reduced.

  10. From todays Times, it seems like some help from an unlikely source…..

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/building-a-music-venue-empire-with-mumford-and-sons-enterprise-network-f3l8x75kb

    It’s probably paywalled so here’s the text….

    Why Wait?’ Mumford’s Ben Lovett is building a live music empire
    The band’s keyboardist Ben Lovett opened his first venue in London after becoming frustrated with touring in the US. He now has five sites and employs 750 people

    Ben Lovett is used to high-pressure situations. As part of the Grammy award winning band Mumford & Sons, he has headlined Glastonbury festival, played for President Obama at the White House and appeared on the US prime-time talk show Saturday Night Live with the Hollywood actor Jason Momoa.

    When his first music venue, Omeara, opened near Borough Market in southeast London in October 2016, even he was not immune to opening night nerves. He had called in favours from childhood friends in an effort to get the venue ready and was still painting the bathrooms “at the 13th hour” before the doors opened for the first time.

    “I still feel the nerves I had talking to the team that night,” said Lovett, 37, who plays keyboards and accordion in Mumford & Sons. “I had a salaried team of about five people and then fifteen different bartenders and I gathered everyone in a circle. My voice was shaking and I was like, ‘Here we are. This is a big moment for me and my family. Let’s go and be the best venue in London.’ ”

    The Venue Group (TVG) was, and still is, a family affair. Lovett’s brother Greg is chief finance officer and brings experience from his time in the hospitality industry, latterly as finance director for the private members club Soho House in North America. Their father, David, is TVG’s chairman. He had previously led the restructuring practice at the accountancy firm Arthur Andersen before co-founding the consultancy Alix Partners in Europe. Together thethree invested about £1.5 million to get Omeara off the ground.

    Lovett is used to juggling music and business. Mumford & Sons’ debut album Sigh No More, released in the UK in 2009, achieved double-platinum status and went on to sell more than 7 million copies. By 2012 they were regularly described as one of the biggest bands in the world. Behind the scenes, though, Lovett was also running an artist label business called Communion that he had started when he was 19 with two friends before the band hit the big time. It built on previous ventures he had started as a teenager in his bedroom, including, somewhat surprisingly, an IT recruitment company called Java Connect.

    The money-making wheezes were a way to support his passion for music, Lovett said. “My dad’s work ethic meant that when I said I wanted to go and pursue my life as a musician, he was like, ‘Cool, but you need to pay for stuff while you’re doing that.’ Lovett opted to start his own ventures rather than get a job because it offered more flexibility. “I was keen to be autonomous so I could choose when I could go to rehearsals and recording sessions. It’s hard to do that when you’re in a full-time job.”

    As it turned out, Communion Music, which Lovett said he started to “shine a light on talented, overlooked artists who weren’t fitting the perfect mould of the day”, began to really take off at a similar time to Mumford & Sons. “I was living off Communion income when I was 19 and 20. Then, as the band started to ramp up, I could dial [Communion] down a bit.” Lovett’s two co-founders in the business, which also became a concert promoter and record label, ran the show. It has represented musiciansincluding Ben Howard, Michael Kiwanuka and Gotye.

    Although he is no longer involved in running Communion, its offices are in the same Southwark building as TVG. He had the idea for a venue business when becoming frustrated with the US touring options for his UK artists. Whereas in the UK artists can play any venue, regardless of the promoter they choose to work with, across the Pond venues are locked into agreements with certain promoters. This meant that touring unknown British acts in the States was nearly impossible.

    “It was Christmas and we were sitting around having a drink late at night next to the fire in this rental house in upstate New York and I was reflecting on this with my dad, who as I said is a problem solver, and Greg, my brother,” Lovett said. Putting their minds together, they started to “try and figure out the economics of running a venue”. They knew it wasn’t simple. “There are two things that people say you should never invest in: venues and restaurants. But they also say you should never put accordions and banjos in a band, so I quite liked the challenge.”

    He was right to be wary. The charity Music Venue Trust, which represents hundreds of local music venues, said this week that 2023 had been the worst year for closures in a decade, with 125 spaces closing or stopping hosting live music in the past 12 months.

    Lovett said his edge was curating the space around the auditorium to include quality food and beverage outlets. “We found that venues as an economic model in their own right, without any of the ancillary income streams, are difficult to make work.” Omeara is part of the Flat Iron Square of bars and restaurants, which include Cluck Farmyard, a fried chicken outlet, and Breddos Tacos. What began as a 9,000 sq ft space now covers a sprawling 45,000 sq ft area and has helped to regenerate the local area, Lovett said. “Businesses were moving closer to us to be near by and we noticed on residential offerings they would say it was ‘near Flat Iron Square’. The economic impacts are huge.”

    It also caught the eye of Shain Shapiro, a specialist in the night-time economy, who happened to mention Lovett’s work to planners in Huntsville, Alabama. Later, Lovett jumped on a plane and met the mayor. He told him: “‘If you give me an opportunity, we’ll build you the best amphitheatre anyone has ever built.’ And he was crazy enough to say yes,” Lovett said, adding that TVG had been chosen over Live Nation, a multibillion-dollar revenue entertainment group. The 8,000-seat venue, called The Orion, opened in Spring 2022, and it has since hosted the American rapper Snoop Dogg and Jack White of White Stripes fame.

    The other element of what Lovett hopes will be a winning formula is creating spaces where artists enjoy playing. He said that venues under 500 capacity in the UK rarely had showers. “It’s one of the reasons why most people think musicians are scruffy: we haven’t got any other option.” Nor do they have comfortable backstage areas where artists can unpack and relax. There are other small touches, he said, such as making sure that bar staff are fully trained to respect that “the artist is king”. “The lights are low on the bar, and when they’re making drinks they’re not slamming the drink into the ice well and disrupting for the rest of the audience that moment that they’re having with the artist.”

    Today the group has five sites — three in London and two in the US — and 750 staff. Group turnover was £17.2 million in 2022, up £7.5 million on 2021, but the company is loss-making because of development “into new markets” and further expansion in the US, where more sites are planned this year. Lovett said that more than 2,500musicianshad performed on TVG stages, including the US singer-songwriter Sarah Kinsley, who performed at their King’s Cross venue this week. More than four million punters have been through the group’s doors. Further expansion is under way, fuelled by a $47.75 million investment in late 2021 from investors including the American musician Ryan Tedder, Lovett’s bandmate Ted Dwane and seven partners from the US private equity firm KKR.

    Lovett is still fully engaged with Mumford & Sons and the band has just released their first new single since 2019, a collaboration with the US singer and rapper Pharrell Williams. But he also spends time every day on TVG. “If you’re going to take on the responsibility of being the leader of a business at this scale, there are no shortcuts,” he said. “I think people do focus on the idea that this must have been a folly, or an ego trip, or a hobby of some sort. But it couldn’t be further from that.”

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