‘It’s harder to sell tickets’: Grassroots music venues struggle to make profit

Small venues are incubators for the UK’s thriving music scene. They’re the places where acts such as Ed Sheeran, The Last Dinner Party and Olivia Dean cut their teeth.

But more than half of them (53%) failed to make a profit last year, according to the annual report of the sector charity Music Venue Trust (MVT).

Thirty live music venues closed in 2025, including notable clubs such as the Liverpool nightspot Zanzibar and Leicester’s The Shed, which gave early exposure to Kasabian and nurtured the city’s punk and metal scene.

In total, 6,000 jobs, representing almost 20% of the workforce, were lost across the sector.

But there was some good news: The number of people attending gigs at a grassroots level rose by 13%, with 21 million fans checking out shows in 2025.

Average ticket prices barely budged, rising just eight pence from £11.48 to £11.56.

And the rate of venue decline slowed to 1.2%, the lowest level since 2018.

“It’s definite progress compared to every other year since covid,” said Music Venue Trust CEO, Mark Davyd. “There is a feeling of the cavalry being in sight now.”

In total, there were 801 grassroots music venues in 2025, down from 810 last year – as closures were offset by new concert halls and lapsed venues returning to the music scene.

Owners said financial pressures were the biggest reason for shutting their doors, with the rise in National Insurance payments adding about £15 million to the sector’s wage bill, said the MVT.

The average profit for a grassroots venue was just 2.5%, a figure the charity described as “critically low”.

“Even that profit figure is hiding a sad reality,” said Davyd, “which is that a lot of those venues are describing a profit when they have not paid themselves so far.”

“The cost of living crisis had a massive impact,” agreed Kathryn McShane, director of the Black Box in Belfast.

It becomes “harder to sell a £25 ticket when there are other costs to consider”, she explains, and the soaring cost of arena shows is eating up a lot of music fans’ “cultural spend for the year”.

In 2025, the 240-capacity venue staged shows by indie heroes like Gruff Rhys, King Creosote and Throwing Muses – as well as the last-ever show by US folk singer Peggy Seeger.

But McShane says the number of bands who can afford to cross the Irish Sea is slowly shrinking.

“Given our location, you can’t just jump in a van, you know, you need to book a flight or a boat to travel to our venue. But those costs are increasing to the point where, for a lot of artists, it’s no longer sustainable.”

To make up the shortfall, Black Box has started opening its doors during the daytime – hiring it out for corporate events, workshops, book readings and community groups.

“It’s definitely becoming trickier to keep everything ticking over,” said McShane, suggesting that larger concert venues should step into help their local affiliates.

“If we look at sport, for example, it’s kind of a given that large teams give back to their community, and I think that that’s something that would be extremely beneficial to the arts sector and the music sector, both regionally and nationally.”

That’s an idea that the MVT has already thrown its weight behind.

Their solution is a £1 levy on tickets for all arena and stadium shows with more than 5,000 capacity – which could raise up to £25m annually for the grassroots venues facing closure.

Major artists including Pulp, Coldplay, Wolf Alice, Katy Perry, Enter Shikari and Ed Sheeran have already adopted the scheme; while Sam Fender donated all of his £25,000 Mercury Prize winnings to the fund.

Venues including the Royal Albert Hall and the O2 Arena have also signed up, and the government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) says it “fully supports” the rollout

In its report, the MVT admitted that none of the money raised so far had been distributed, but said the scheme represented “a major opportunity” to reverse “a decade of cultural retreat” from local, live music in 2026.

Speaking to BBC News, Davyd said he was “in a bizarrely optimistic position” after years of decline; and called on the government to assist the grassroots scene by scrapping VAT on concert tickets.

“Look, live music at this level is almost frankly doomed not to make any money,” he said. “But what’s interesting is the amount of money it will eventually make for the country when those artists move on in their careers.

“So we view this is as a research and development activity, and it needs to be respected as that by government.”