If independent venues continue to struggle in 2025, should we even bother saving them?
Local music venues saved my life. I wouldn’t be alive today without them. Not so long ago, I wasn’t Music Editor of the world’s largest independent culture publication; I was an electrician’s hand, and I was failing to see a viable, successful future. But before we begin the new year with morbidity, it wouldn’t have been suicide that stopped me from seeing the bright and cheery beginning of 2025—it would have been calamitous electrical incompetency that cost me my rightful place scribbling away on the internet.
Sadly, much of the scribbling I have done about the modern day has taken on a lamentable tone. But that’s hardly a surprise. After all, ‘permacrisis’ was declared ‘Word of the Year’ back in 2022. It’s been equally apt ever since. The music industry – particularly its grassroots foundations, the same ones that saved me from a fate of blown fuses – has embodied this unfortunate stasis of perpetual problems with unerring veracity. So, is it finally time to give in? Must the same old show really go on? What use is it bailing out a sinking ship that is drifting ever further from safe shores?
That line of thinking has largely been reflected in previous government policy through catastrophic cuts to the arts and education. The argument that many politicians have made in recent times is that, at this stage, it is almost belligerent ignorance to keep trying to save a floundering live music industry. The claim is that the arts should sustain themselves, just like every other business in the capitalist system. If over one-third of live music venues are loss-making, then why shovel further cash into a bottomless hole that clearly nobody cares about?
Perhaps the world has simply moved on from drinking bad beer in dingy rooms and listening to overly loud music. When my nearest high street reopened after Christmas sans the local cobblers, there was no vehement call for the powers that be to reinstate the shoe doctor, but rather a sense that the shop’s days were numbered anyway in an age of fast fashion. It was simply a victim of good, honest capitalism, where survival of the thriftiest prevails.
So, why should the government step in and disrupt this economic Darwinism with grants, loans and bailouts when music enters the fray? Surely, these spaces have the same duty to save themselves or shut up shop as the not-so-dearly departed cobblers. Why should the government place its money on the losing bet of the arts when the NHS is in dire need of the scarce pennies in the same purse?
Well, that’s like Harold Shipman refusing to operate on a patient who has written him into their will. There is a vested interest at play. Saving independent venues would be an act of sensible socialism, and such acts are increasingly a thing of the past in the UK. Live music venues are not just ‘businesses’ – which is the mode in which they are currently being presented – but establishments that provide a service every bit as vital as the only four remaining strongholds clinging to any kind of funding: the NHS, schools, policing and the army.
How depressing and dystopian is it when the only services deemed absolutely necessary by the state are the ones that keep us alive, ready us for work, stop us from killing each other, and aid us in killing others? Independent venues might not be as starkly self-evident with their societal provisions, but they offer a wellspring of inspiration, chances for social mobility, togetherness, entertainment, local networking and a vast range of other benefits that no community can flourish without.
We constantly bemoan how divided and embittered this scissored isle has become. It’s time we started viewing the culture that brings us together as just as vital as it was when The Cavern Club harnessed The Beatles and gave birth to our proudest invasion.
Besides, the UK music industry isn’t loss-making at all—it was worth a record high in 2024, with fans spending £2.4 billion on music. This whole “loss-making” racket is merely a case of a purposefully skewed perspective that lands any deficit on the door of undermined venues and willfully neglects the turnover beyond their own books that they are actually responsible for.
Sam Fender honed his craft in the same venues that changed my life. Without them, he wouldn’t be a musician. Therefore, he wouldn’t be bringing in another £15 million to the northeast’s beleaguered and neglected economy this summer… just as he did in 2023. “Sam’s concerts next year will be sold-out shows attracting audiences of over 50,000 each night, which will deliver a multi-million-pound boost to city centre hospitality and leisure businesses and create a major buzz in the city,” Stephen Patterson, chief executive of NE1 Ltd, explains.
Fender himself highlighted the link between the millions he brings into the economy and the grassroots spaces that gave him a chance to do so by offering £1 from every ticket sold on his last tour to the Music Venue Trust. Sadly, this link seems to be willfully omitted in the minds of the powers that be who cut all connections between the £2.4 billion that music is worth in the UK and the profit sheets of the independent venues at the foot of it all.
But it doesn’t stop at Fender and the likes, either. I didn’t weave myself into the intro of this piece as an act of first-person indulgence but rather to show just how wide-ranging the positive impacts of live music are on a community. I grew up in a village where child poverty levels now exceed 50%. The window of opportunity through conventional routes in such places is minuscule, but music venues help to pry it ajar. These sacred spaces are not just places for future music stars to practice but hubs that can inspire people and communities in myriad ways.
Funding them favourably would not pull vital pennies away from the NHS and education systems but rather irrevocably aid them. A young kid might see the next Kraftwerk and be inspired to redouble their efforts in IT class and become a wealthy computer scientist. Likewise, a terrible labourer might see some post-punks make a DIY go for it, take a leap themselves towards fields that suit their strengths, and go on to become an editor of a successful culture magazine.
There is currently a mental health crisis in the UK, with one in four people likely to be affected in England this year. Perhaps I might have been adding to that statistic if I had been stuck in the rut that the circumstances of my upbringing had decreed, but thankfully, cultural spaces like Cobalt Studios helped to change that. There are no doubt countless others who are indebted to such spaces who can’t be tied to the profits and losses sheat of such venues that are constantly under threat.
This is not the way with every country. Recently, a German band played Cobalt Studios, and someone asked me, “If the music industry is so cash-strapped, how can this niche little band from Germany afford to come here and play on a Wednesday night in front of 100 people at £8 a ticket with a free meal included?” The answer is simply because they are German. Their government believes in the power of culture, and this is reflected in the draft federal budget for 2025, which provides an increase from €2.15 billion to €2.2 billion for the Federal Fund for Culture and Media.
Initiative Musik, a key component of Germany’s Federal Fund for Culture, provides direct support for touring bands. A microcosm of the success of the schemes can be seen from the fact that the same friend who asked the aforementioned question is heading off on holiday to Berlin in the spring, inspired, in part, by the Cobalt Studios performance, proving the initiative to be a cyclical, self-funding success story.
The same can be said for similar schemes in places like the Faroe Islands, where a fund of 500.000DKK is set aside to support culture, the equivalent of £1,000 for every person in the entire population (which would equate to £68 billion in the UK). It’s lavish, and of course, you can’t entirely transpose the two situations, but it symbolises an outlook that has rejuvenated life in the region and elevated its economic fortunes.
This is how music can and does function as a vital cog in local and national ecosystems. They make places better. These small venues are linked to local breweries, catering companies, electricians, stagehands, bands and broomstick makers; they provide fun, safe spaces, chances for social mobility and nights you will never forget; they create movements, call for change, quell crime and bring character to our towns and public spaces. They are run by people who want what is best for their community and those clubbing together to help out. Isn’t that how it should be?
Isn’t that what a well-functioning society should be encouraging?
Through goodwill, a sense of awakened DIY possibilities, and the visible propensity of positive subversion to the norm, they certainly transformed my potential fortunes from that of a homeless drug addict to that of a drugless home addict. It’s a humble victory, but if allowed to flourish and fostered correctly, these sacred spaces can do that for countless more.
In fact, it is a measure of how far we have lost sight of this virtue of live venues that the main argument cited in favour of saving them is the possibility that they can produce another money-making Sam Fender. Once again, reducing their purpose to tangible economic engines, while Fender’s rags to riches narrative conveniently becomes individualised as part of the ‘anyone can make it’ myth—a myth that sinisterly ignores the systemic barriers he overcame and nullifies the independent institutions that helped him do so.
So, why are independent venues so under threat?
The problem is that they are also often buildings that would make for cracking inner-city flat blocks that could be rented out at exorbitant rates. Thus, music venues are not in the grips of an inevitable permacrisis but structured neglect. So, they will continue to be billed as places that lose money until they do, indeed, become flat blocks or mini supermarkets owned by TNCs.
Presently, an immediate profit that supports the powerful is deemed far more favourable than a sustainable long-term investment aimed at equality and opportunity. Repurposed flat block renovations provide the quick-buck former with virtually no trickle-down, while the latter, well, that’s passed off as naive idealism from a bygone age in an era when alternative futures are kiboshed by the strong arm of power operating purely in their own best interest.
The glorious alternative that shakes us free from the same old rhetoric is the possibility that we stop seeing venues as for-profit businesses altogether. Perhaps even seeing them as tax-exempt in the same way we view the monarchy and religious institutions. Lives and communities would be enriched as a result, and ironically, the economy probably would be, too.
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