'We are invisible': Music Producers Guild calls for government backing for recording studios

In one of his first acts as Prime Minister last month, Andy Burnham announced an additional 20% business rates cut for pubs, clubs and live music venues in England. The reduction, which will come into force from April 2027, was welcomed by the live music sector. But industry figures have urged the government to go further and extend the same support to recording studios. The Music Producers Guild (MPG) has been making that argument for months. Last October, the organisation called on the government to recognise UK recording studios as eligible for reduced business rates under the Retail, Hospitality and Leisure (RHL) scheme. In the following Op-Ed, MPG executive director Matt Taylor sets out the case in detail... Somewhere in the Treasury building, the Exchequer Secretary is drawing up a list to fund Andy Burnham’s business rates cut for the 32,000 pubs and grassroots music venues. It’s a simple list of those who “make a positive contribution to local communities” and those who don’t. Businesses that don’t will face an increase. Nowhere on either list are recording studios. We are not positive or negative. We are invisible. Recording studios are unique places. They are spaces that can’t be replaced. Unlike grassroots music venues, they are purpose-built, engineered from the ground up. We can’t simply move our sign, name, décor, team, and equipment to recreate it on a different street. Our whole sound, vibe, personality and history come from the bricks that house us. But to the Treasury, they are just like any other building, with the assumption that they can get through any storm. Maybe this is why support always lands where the music is played, not where it is made. Studios have been shouting into a hurricane for some years now. Since 2013, UK Music says, the sector has grown almost every year, with a record £8 billion in 2024, up from £6.7 billion two years earlier. But look at what's driving it. The record years are the ones with the big arena tours; the flat years are the ones missing British hit records. The growth is in the room where music is played, not the room where it's made. Recording studios are unique places, they are spaces that can’t be replaced Matt Taylor, Music Producers Guild Britain has built an industry that exports the making of the thing it congratulates itself on selling. I went through the Official Top 40 to see how many records were made in the UK, taking four snapshots of the same week. In 1996, 53% of the chart was recorded in British recording studios. By 2006, it was 43%, by 2016 it was 30%, and last week it was 25%. This is also amplified by the BPI’s own figures, which show that UK artists now account for under 10% of global streams, down from 17% a decade ago. The hit records are still being made, just not in the UK. This is bigger than the Top 40, just like British music is bigger than the charts. But it’s the first cough before a fever. We’ve seen over the past 30 years, when a flagship studio closes, the work doesn't move down a rung. It leaves. And what goes with it isn't just the hits. It's the rooms, the engineers who learn their trade, the next generation. It’s the attraction of outside talent, it’s the creative networks, the genre innovation that we’re famous for. The studio sector plays an important role in the local music communities they serve. People assume our studios are out of reach for emerging artists, but you’ll find they are the bread-and-butter work keeping the places open. Just like with venues, artists peg their growing success to the level of studio they can record at. We have the most music-literate PM ever, and it’s his region, the North-west, which has the most studios outside London. He can name the albums, name the studios, but produced a venue relief that completely ignored us. On February 11 this year, the Exchequer Secretary, when being questioned by the Treasury Committee about recording studio rates, acknowledged there were “big challenges with the business rates system”. Later in the session, he went on to say that there is a unique situation for some businesses: “floor space might be really high, but its turnover could be really low”, concluding that it “wouldn’t be appropriate to value it based on its floor space”. Studios sell time in a building. So there is a natural cap on their revenue and therefore turnover, and they are unable to pass the increase on to clients. However, he was talking about venues and pubs. You can’t have one without the other. Somewhere in that building, Dan Tomlinson is still writing his list. There is time to add recording studios to it. Not as a favour, but to apply his own principle. He is the minister responsible for the Valuation Office Agency, the body that sets these values. He doesn't need a review or a consultation. He needs to add one line. Make us visible. PHOTO: Mike Banks

Centre Stage: Mark Davyd on what new PM Andy Burnham can bring to the grassroots sector

MVT’s Mark Davyd ponders what new PM Andy Burnham can bring to the grassroots sector Andy Burnham is a proper music fan. But whenever the conversation turns to his specialty subject – the importance of grassroots music – he has a habit of reaching for his second love: football. He is an Evertonian of long standing and no illusions, a man who will list the game’s faults at length and with feeling, which is exactly why it means something when he holds it up as the model. “I could pick many faults with football, but it’s pretty good [with] its talent development,” he said back in October 2024. “I think music needs to take a leaf out of its book.” When someone who loves a thing enough to publicly catalogue everything wrong with it still insists that we all need to consider and copy one part of it, that part is worth looking at. His support and understanding for the grassroots doesn’t end there, though. Let’s take a broader look at what Prime Minister Burnham has put his name to as an overview of his likely policy approach to music. In June 2024, he backed the whole CMS select committee grassroots prospectus, including the levy on arena and stadium tickets and the targeted VAT cut, his stated way to halt the rising tide of closures. By July 2025, he was defending venues as cultural infrastructure that must be shielded from development, with the ‘Agent Of Change’ principle [which puts the onus on property developers to put measures, such as soundproofing, in place to allow existing venues to continue to operate and co-exist] falling inside his remit as Mayor of Greater Manchester. By April 2026, he had put the fans at the centre of the grassroots debate. It would be convenient to argue that it is easy to declare things you cannot do while serving as a mayor, but Burnham has demonstrated a keenness to actually get things done in the music sector. He built a Music Commission with real operators on it, and when the 6 Music Festival came North, it did not disappear into a single warehouse. It spread across Band On The Wall, Yes, and a ballroom in Eccles – all framed around the venues, not the broadcaster. For the grassroots, this is the best hand we have been dealt in a decade. The new Prime Minister has an entire shopping list of measures to support the grassroots: the Agent Of Change principle, reduced VAT, the grassroots levy, business rates relief and a tax relief to keep open pathways for engineers and lighting technicians. All of these policies and proposals are in Mr Burnham’s inbox: planned, drafted, costed and nodded through by everyone who agrees, and yet none of it done, because agreeing is free and doing is not. A PM who already agrees is the closest this sector has come to perhaps finally getting things actually done in 12 years. There is one final factor which could be the tipping point in approach this time. In June, Burnham set out his economic stall, and it contained an approach that is central to the debate about grassroots music. He has said he wants to protect the family-owned businesses he calls the heart and soul of the country, to reconnect Labour to working-class Britain, and back the independent operator against a system that has spent a generation punishing it. He was talking about the high street, but he could have read out the membership list of the Music Venues Alliance without changing a word. The grassroots levy that Burnham supports is, in 2026, still voluntary. And voluntary has, sadly, turned out to mean what it usually means: that it is paid by those who were always going to pay and swerved by many of those it was meant to reach who would rather not pay. The gap between the promoters who have stepped up and the far larger number treating it as somebody else’s bill is exactly what a politician of Burnham’s instincts is built to close. I have watched policy in this corner for 12 years and it teaches you to treat political warmth as a highly perishable good that rarely survives the sticky embrace of promotion – and certainly not to the highest office in the land. But Burnham has, for some time, been the political exception I keep expecting to disappoint me with words but no action on this issue and, so far, he has not. Whether that commitment and action will last as he walks from a mayor’s office to the one room in Britain built to dissuade him of the need to intervene is currently anyone’s guess. The promoters at the top can rally behind the voluntary version of the grassroots levy immediately on terms they get a say in, or they can wait and explain themselves to an unsympathetic and unimpressed Government that will, almost certainly, stop asking nicely.

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