Wolf Alice‘s Joff Oddie joined industry leaders at a government hearing into the state of UK grassroots music, where it was warned that not enough progress was being made in saving venues and new artists.
The UK music scene continues to face the “complete collapse” of touring with huge areas going without live music, one venue closing every two weeks, and the uphill struggle for artists affording to exist, let alone play live.
The number of artists touring across the UK and abroad has fallen by as much as 74 per cent compared to pre-pandemic figures.
The proposed £1 levy on gigs at arena level and above – designed to feed back into the grassroots for artists and promoters as well as venues and festivals – continues to gather steam, but debate surrounds its speed and where the pressure should be applied for more action.
Featured Artists Coalition (FAC) member and Wolf Alice guitarist Oddie spoke at the Parliamentary Culture, Media and Sport Committee hearing this morning (Tuesday May 13). He argued that it was “callous” that ticket companies would add up to 20 per cent of hidden fees to tickets but resist the £1 levy that would “essentially secure their future as a business” as well as feeding back into the talent pipeline of the UK.
Looking at the perilous state of the touring circuit in the UK, he said that “cost is a big issue”.
“The big thing that I’d like to communicate and get into your heads is that when my band Wolf Alice were doing the grassroots touring scene 12 years ago, it was unbelievably tight,” he said. “For years, it was a loss-leader – and that’s typically how it goes. We would sleep on people’s floors when we were outside of London. Most of the people we worked with were doing stuff pro-bono in the hope that if we did start making money later on, then we could commission management, agents, soundmen. I put my student loan into financing a tour.”
He continued: “So 12 years ago the numbers didn’t stack up, and now it’s unbelievable. All of the things that artists pay for pre-tour – rehearsal space, manufacturing merchandise, musical tech equipment, making stuff tourable, hire costs, production costs, travel, van hire, crew costs, session musician fees, fuel, accommodation, per diems, management commission (typically 20 per cent net), agents fee (10 per cent gross), venue merch commissions, accounting fees, storage – it’s a huge amount of things that artist have to pay for in order to go out on the road. We just about made it work.
“I can honestly say, I’m not sure how Wolf Alice would make it work today.”
Highlighting “real risks in sending people out on the road in really tight shoestring budgets”, Oddie then spoke of when Viola Beach were killed with their manager Craig Tarry when their tour vehicle plunged into a canal in Sweden.
“It was a bunch of young people out on the road to make a journey, they couldn’t afford a driver, they couldn’t afford a hotel and they had to get there,” said Oddie. “We’ve all been in that position as people on the road. We have a duty of care and a moral responsibility to not put young people in that position.”
With music venues closing, the rising costs of being an artist and the loss of touring opportunities brought about by post-Brexit complications, Oddie warned that “one of the things we risk is that music becomes a middle and upper class sport”.
“We’re already seeing that representation decline,” he offered. “There are all kinds of statistics showing that’s gone down of the last 15-20 years – especially for people outside the south east of England.
“It’s costly to build a career, and the build a career you need to go on the road. Once you get past a point, there is money to be made in the industry. Music is big business, but if we don’t fund that from the beginning then we aren’t going to get big artists.”
Oddie added: “Unless we feed the pipeline, we’re just going to have people going to see US pop stars at Wembley.”
FAC CEO David Martin also urged more investment into grassroots music, arguing that “it drives artists’ careers, it drives the audience pipeline, and it drives [money to] all of those things that the artist pays for.”
“We know that the artist always returns more than its investment,” he told the committee. It’s really important to note that most of the UK’s musical movements that have gone global have come from the working class and the underground in the last 60 years. It is essential that there is access to this sector and this culture.”
Martin spoke of how the vast majority of grassroots tours lose money in the UK, and that’s only likely to get worse without help as “costs are going up and inflation is having an impact.”
Looking at the issue of Brexit and touring, Martin echoed that it was essential that developing artists are able to easily play in Europe to build audiences and maintain a sustainable career.
“Europe is our nearest neighbour, it’s our largest market by far,” he argued. “It’s very important to the development of new talent. Wolf Alice will probably get around that, and certainly Elton John will get around the barriers we face now, but Ed O’Brien from Radiohead was on my board at the time when he sat in front of this committee when we were talking about streaming.
“He said, ‘We would jump in a van as Radiohead, drive into Europe, drive around and play 11am slots at festivals, and that’s what made us Radiohead’. That’s really difficult now. We’ve been saying this for a long time.
He added: “You don’t see the results until five or 10 years later. Here we are, surprise surprise, no UK artists in the top 10 best-selling albums or singles worldwide, no UK artists in the streams of Spotify in the last year, and no UK artists in the top 10 artists listened to in the last year. That’s not happened for decades. We’re seeing this biting now.”
Looking back to the levy, Martin argued that it shouldn’t be based on a system of voluntary artist-led donations. While the LIVE Trust has raised over £500,000 in funds from levy donations from the likes of Pulp, Katy Perry, Sam Fender and Mumford & Sons, voices at today’s hearing argued that progress was slow. It would be eight to 12 months before that money was received by the grassroots, and only eight per cent of arena and stadium shows above have implemented a levy donation in the last six months.
Music Venue Trust CEO Mark Davyd pointed out the scale of the funding gap.
“Of nearly 6million tickets that have been released since the December 18 ministerial meeting when we all agreed that it was going to be on every ticket, 92 per cent of those tickets don’t have it,” he told the committee. “‘What’s gone wrong?’ should be the question, rather than ‘Look how well we’re doing on the eight per cent’.
“It is a difficult part of the year, but when we had that meeting the decision was, ‘There won’t be very many tickets released in this period’. Nearly 6million tickets were released – that sounds like quite a lot to me. Only eight per cent of them having the levy seems like quite a low ambition target.”
Davyd pointed out that continue at that speed would see a full blanket levy finally in place by 2032, and that it wasn’t enough.
“I would like to move the conversation on to asking what didn’t happen when an arena show doesn’t implement a levy,” he said. “If it happens, who made it happen? It’s the role of everyone in the supply chain to say, ‘What’s happened to this £1?’ Everyone agreed to it.”
Davyd further explained that venues were facing “a very tough year” and that recommendations beyond the levy were being ignored by the government – including “very damaging” business rates, taxes increasing on venues by £7million, and no action on VAT with the uK experiencing the highest rates anywhere in the world on new and emerging music.
Without action, he said, the rate of venue closures would increase dramatically in 2025 and return to one per week. Davyd said that the government accepting their recent report and levy recommendations slowed closures as “injected hope into the sector, but hope won’t pay the rent.”
The CEO and former venue operator said that the UK was “not acting fast enough” and that other countries were already investigating and enacting recommendations made in recent MVT reports.
“We’ve made it too tough to be an artist, a manager, a sound engineer,” he said. “We do not have the conditions – especially in our working class communities and areas of the country that have fallen out of having ready access to culture. What are we saying to those people? We’re saying, ‘culture’s not for you’. We need to be opening venues that have rehearsal spaces, recording studios, accommodation, so there’s a music hub in every community. We’re really falling behind on this.”
He continued: “With the amount of money that would be raised by a blanket levy, they are things we can think about. This year alone, there are already 22.3million tickets on sale for gigs at arenas and stadiums in this country. That’s £22.3million we could be spending right now.
“There are different opinions about priorities of investments. I’m going to say that within £22.3million, every great idea we’ve got could be funded.”
Hailing venues as “the ignition engines of the night time economy experience” as well as the “research and development” arm of UK culture, Davyd said that the government and wider industry should be doing much more and much quicker to allow the grassroots to thrive.
“There are too many people in the industry that see this [levy] as some sort of charitable donation,” he added. “It’s not charitable – it’s simple R&D. The way the music industry is conducted now, we don’t have enough commitment to R&D on the live side of the industry.”
Jon Collins, chief executive of the LIVE Trust, said that “a lot” of progress had been in the levy during “a very hectic year”.
“We’re not complacent – further, faster is the mantra,” he said, revealing that they’d been pushing for more huge companies to engage and get involved and that their aim was “mitigating the risk of people at a grassroots level”. Meanwhile, Marit Berning from Music Managers Forum said that grassroots touring was largely unprofitable and scores of managers had been moving to other countries were there was better funding and infrastructure as well as opportunities.
To end the hearing DCMS minister Sir Chris Bryant MP also said that he’d have “preferred us to have achieved a lot more by now” in terms of the levy, but substantial progress had still been made.
“I said to Harry Styles when considering his next tour, ‘I know it’s not always up to the artist and it might be a whole series of people making the decision, but please sign up’,” he said. “We’ve said that we want it to be a voluntary levy because it’s quicker to achieve. Everything that has to require statute takes forever and a day. I don’t know when the next King’s speech will be, so I don’t know when we’d be able to legislate. I don’t think we’d be able to do it via secondary legislation.
“The feeling in the meetings [with The LIVE Trust] is that there are some things we still need to accomplish – we still need to get the charity up and running – but I’ve honestly been impressed by how quickly we’re getting there.”
He called upon the “big players” such as Live Nation to “step up a bit more”, adding: “I just want everybody who’s considering a big tour in the UK coming up in the next year or so to sign up, then we’ll have millions of pounds going to smaller grassroots venues.”
Today also saw MVT team up with Featured Artist Coalition, Outernet, the Metro and Universal Music to launch a Tube map to celebrate London’s iconic grassroots music venues and the artists who made their name playing the capital’s circuit.