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
