Music Venue Trust's Mark Davyd examines the hidden, systemic costs of live music...
There is a version of the Grassroots Levy story that ends well and a version that ends badly. The difference between them is not the money raised; it is what the money is used for.
The LIVE Trust has started distributing funds this year and the early signs are very encouraging. The UK Artists Touring Fund, the money flowing to the Association Of Independent Promoters and the Association Of Independent Festivals are all doing what the sector urgently needs. They are getting artists on the road and giving promoters enough confidence to take risks. Every organisation running those programmes deserves credit for moving quickly and for understanding that the cost of delay is measured in venues that close, artists who quit and audiences who stop coming. What follows is not a criticism of those programmes. It is an attempt to say what they are probably already saying to each other, but in public.
Let’s start with what we know works and what its limits are. Music Venue Trust’s own Revive Live and United By Music programmes have put more than £4 million directly into supporting artists to tour over the last few years. That money did what it was designed to do: it got artists on the road who would otherwise not have been able to afford to leave their postcode, and it got shows happening in rooms that would otherwise have sat dark.
In delivering it, we learned that funding only the artist is not enough; they cannot get a show off the ground without a promoter taking the risk and a venue being able to absorb costs.
The funding had to evolve to cover the full gig ecosystem, rather than just one component.
Those programmes have direct successors now in the wider funding landscape and our own work. The Liveline Fund, the MVT’s national touring programme, includes a guarantorship model that makes individual shows viable for the artist, venue and promoter. It also provides dedicated support for tour routing into the places that have fallen off the map entirely. In Q1 2026, we delivered over 100 new shows in these places. Other funds and organisations are working on the same issue.
But MVT has also just published longer-term proposals: a portfolio of programmes that address the structural costs sitting beneath the touring crisis. It is worth being clear about what the schemes’ objectives are, because they bring a different kind of thinking.
Off The Grid installs solar generation and battery storage directly into venue buildings at no capital cost, permanently reducing energy costs with the aim of minimising the bill. Elsewhere, Raise The Standard places professional-grade mics, backline, PA and lighting into venues through a centrally owned virtual warehouse, so venues no longer bear the cost to own, hire, repair or replace the tools that make shows possible.
Stay The Night, meanwhile, converts unused space into artist accommodation, saving touring acts up to £600 per night; Feel At Home does the same for backstage spaces. On top of this, Venue MOT works through the financial, licensing, lease and operational pressures that quietly undermine sustainability. Finally, Own Our Venues takes buildings out of commercial ownership entirely and places them into community-based ownership through Music Venue Properties.
The logic connecting all of these is the same: the money a fan spends on a ticket should end up in the pockets of the people who deliver the show – the artists, the crew, the promoter, the venue team. Right now, a growing, unsustainable portion ends up somewhere else: with the hotel chain, the energy company, the commercial landlord. Those aren’t relationships that subsidies can fix, because subsidies pay those bills – and the bills remain. The long-term solution is to structurally remove those costs from the operation, so that the money circulating through a show stays in the ecosystem that created it.
Every penny spent on artist touring is important, but it does not reduce the underlying costs. The successful applicants go on their subsidised tour. They come back. The costs are the same. The next cohort applies. This is not an argument against that funding; it’s an argument for doing both things at once. The essential short-term work should keep the circuit alive long enough for the structural work to take effect.
The only route to a sector that doesn’t require permanent subsidy is one where those costs have been removed – where the artist isn’t sleeping at a Travelodge 40 miles away, where the energy bill is close to zero, and where the rent cannot be hiked by landlords. What the sector needs now is to be able to hold both time frames simultaneously: to fund shows that need to happen this year and the next, and in those neglected places. It also needs to invest in the changes that mean the next generation of touring artists does not need to apply for funding to be able to afford to do it.
