What will a return for live music in the UK look like?
When the UK’s live music industry ground to a halt in March, it put the future of thousands of jobs, businesses and lives in jeopardy. Months on, workers are still desperately making up for their financial loss, and asking will there soon be a return to normal operation?
In early March, the area of Thanet in Kent was abuzz with excitement for their Power of Women (POW!) festival – two weeks of events at various locations, focused on female performers. Margate’s independent music venue and record shop Elsewhere was taking part, playing host to gigs by female-fronted acts and a slam poetry to close the festival on March 13.
Concern over public safety regarding Covid-19 had been looming in the background, and turnout for the POW! events had been slightly below expectation, but it hadn’t dampened the excitement. It was still forecast that the slam night would cap the festival in fine style; after all, Elsewhere’s spoken-word events always drew a big crowd, and this one was to be headlined by Birdspeed – the UK National Slam Triple Crown Winner.
But, as show time approached, the venue was sparsely populated by a crowd that emanated a mumbling concern. It was then Elsewhere’s managers could no longer deny that the fear over Coronavirus’ spread had reached tipping point with the general public, even if the government had not yet introduced any official measures to prevent further infections. Suddenly, their packed schedule of gigs, open mic nights, and stand-up comedy events for the coming weeks was in jeopardy.
“Some of the artists were emailing us saying ‘We don’t know whether to go ahead, it feels irresponsible’,” recalls Sammy Clarke, co-founder and owner of Elsewhere. “We felt like it would have been too risky; we felt like not many people were going to show up anyway. From that day onwards, we closed our doors.”
It’s been over 100 days since then, which has seen the venue miss out on revenue from many gigs, including their three-day Caring Is Creepy festival, which was due to feature exciting acts like Porridge Radio and Vanishing Twin, and was expected to sell out.
Versions of this same story were happening at hundreds of venues up and down the country in March; the quiet confusion among proprietors, the lack of clear governmental direction, the ultimate act of making the heart-breaking decision to cancel or postpone everything in the near future, and to close indefinitely. In a matter of days, a billion-pound industry ground to a slow, unspectacular halt.
What’s more, there are still few signs of a return for indoor crowd events in the UK, or any financial support package for the music industry from the government.
At the end of 2019, the industry-funded body UK Music put out their Music By Numbers report, which valued the nation’s live music industry at an all-time high of £1.1bn. It also detailed that in the calendar year 2018, 29.8m fans had attended live concerts, £5.2bn had been contributed to the country’s economy, and the number of jobs in music tourism grew to 45,530. At the time, the biggest concerns for the future of live music were rising ticket prices, increased rents for venues, and the continued battle for gender-balanced line-ups. What was not anticipated was a global pandemic.
With no advance measures having been put in place for a catastrophic event of this kind, everyone involved in the industry has been thrown into serious turmoil. Hundreds of independent music venues, like Elsewhere, are at risk of closure, as they have no revenue and yet must keep up with their rent payments – most of which are at a premium due to their inner-city locations. Tens of thousands of workers that rely on gigs for their livelihood – tour managers, sound engineers, lighting technicians, touring musicians, and more – face uncertainty over their future. Everyone has been forced to scramble around for new sources of income to survive.
With no immediate support coming from the UK government for venues, the charity Music Venue Trust leapt into action at the end of April, launching a nationwide #SaveOurVenues fundraising campaign. This alliance bound together 556 at-risk grassroots music venues around the country, and together they spread the news about their dire situation. Through combined effort, the #SaveOurVenues campaign reached its £1.5m target in a month. “It has been like a true socialist movement,” remarks Clark, who can thank the fundraiser for saving Elsewhere – for the time being.
Mark Davyd, founder and CEO of the Music Venue Trust, describes himself as “stunned” at the speed with which #SaveOurVenues reached its target. “I think somehow we just haven’t correctly understood how much live music still matters to people, and how important live music venues are within their communities,” he says. “These places are special to people; they have a real connection to them.”
While encouraging, this fund is only a short-term measure that will see these grassroots venues into July. The Music Venue Trust has this week written an open letter to the government, co-signed by 561 venue owners, asking for an immediate £50m support package and a reduction on VAT for future ticket sales. They state: “We do not need permanent government intervention to exist. We are not asking to become a permanently subsidised drain on the public purse. We do not need the government to step in and tell us how to run our venues. We need government to take two simple steps and leave us to work out how to do the rest.”
Beyond the venues, there is a much bigger problem that remains unsolved when it comes to supporting those musicians and crew members who find themselves redundant while the live music industry ceases to exist. It is more difficult to launch a crowd-funded campaign for so many individuals, as the public does not build up a relationship with them as they do with venues, and the sums needed are much greater. This was proven when the charity Help Musicians UK set up a fund of £2.5m for out-of-work musicians, which ran dry within five days. Furthermore, a survey by the Musicians Union that found that nearly two in five members were not eligible for government furlough, and one in five of its members believed they would have to move permanently to jobs outside the industry to survive.
The onus is with the UK government to set up a specialised fund, akin to the €150m that the German government has apportioned to help the recovery of its live music industry. However, the government has not given many positive indications that this is forthcoming, and its recently-formed Cultural Renewal Task Force did not feature any representatives from music, suggesting it is not high on its priorities.
It seems then that the uncertainty and financial deficit for workers in the industry is set to remain for an indefinite time, meaning most have had to find other ways to make ends meet. Some have even had to make the difficult decision to take this moment to switch careers entirely.
Mark McNeill is a tour manager who had a “packed schedule” for the summer, working with the likes of Tom Misch, Friendly Fires, Ella Eyre and more. Because he is officially self-employed through his own limited company, McNeill was not eligible for the furlough scheme. He did receive a grant from the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme, but it was far below what he was due to make from tour managing through the busy festival season, and now he finds himself grounded and working as a delivery driver for Argos to make up the loss.
“I understand the government had a really tough decision to make in the way it was going to compensate the self-employed,” McNeill says. “But they’ve left out a pool of very talented people who are going to eat into and ultimately spend all of their savings during this period.”
One of these skilled workers is Simeon Rodgers, who usually makes a living as a live sound engineer and Ableton programmer. He was supposed to tour with Tom Misch, Yussef Dayes and Elderbrook this year; instead, he has been forced to take up landscaping as a way of filling his coffers. “Seven and a half hours a day of digging holes in the ground and breaking up concrete is quite a different thing to what I’m used to,” Rodgers says. “It’s a quarter of the money for four times the work.”
Rodgers has only found himself physically capable of doing three days a week of this labour, and has had to find other ways to subsist. He sold some studio equipment and synthesizers via eBay, but because there were so many others in the same situation the market was flooded, meaning he had to sell for what he describes as “pants money” – around half or two thirds of what he considered. Rodgers also had to relinquish his rented studio space, and he and his girlfriend would have been forced to move out of their flat in London’s Haringey had their landlord not shown sympathy and offered a 50 per cent reduction until the situation stabilises. Others will not have been so fortunate.
Many people have decided now is the time to switch lanes entirely. Junior Alli-Balogun is a percussionist who has been on the road consistently since 2009, and was supposed to be on tour this year playing with Friendly Fires, Theo Parrish, Lianne La Havas and more. He has not received any grants or been put on furlough, and he’s now taken stock and decided to move into a career in music supervision. While this sounds like an adjacent step, it is in fact a completely different role to being a touring musician; one that involves working with music publishers and doing “a lot of legal work”.
“I think if the industry was going to come back this year then I’d probably still be involved in what’s available,” Alli-Balogun says. “But if it’s going to be what a lot of people predict, and it’s next year, then I’ll be fully engrossed in my new endeavours.”
While optimists are still hoping for a return in autumn 2020, this projected restart for touring in 2021 is an opinion shared by many in the industry. This poses questions about how the industry can sustain itself in the interim and what events might look like on their return.
Recent developments towards drive-in gigs and ticketed livestream events, while encouraging, are yet to fully spark the passion of music fans due to their lack of immediacy and atmosphere. On top of that, these media only employ a fraction of the industry, and do not help independent venues or lesser-known artists, meaning they are not going to salve the larger damage being done.
The only thing that is going to truly begin to restore the industry is the return of live music to independent grassroots venues. The notion of socially-distanced concerts has been continually raised in discussions in the industry between venues, artists and promoters, but has gained no traction. While venues would be delighted to have people in the building and spending money on drinks, it is not something that works for the other parties involved.
Daniel Monsell, managing director of Rockfeedback and FORM, live music promotion companies that usually put on 500-600 events a year in the UK, is opposed to it. “I personally don’t feel there’s anything good about the idea of social distance gigs,” Monsell states. “I prefer to sit out and wait for it to come back properly, because I think it’s just not the right experience for anyone – and it’s not economically viable for anyone involved either.”
The economics are the true stumbling block for the idea of social distanced gigs. Live music events run on very fine margins, needing to sell at least 70-80 per cent of tickets to ensure everyone is paid. Even if the UK government halved the social distance rule from 2m to 1m, as has been suggested, promoters would still not be able to sell the requisite number of tickets to pay the artist, crew, venue, bar and security staff, and take a cut for themselves.
Amelie Snyers is general manager of the London venues EartH in Stoke Newington and Village Underground in Shoreditch; successful businesses that usually bring in £6000 and £4000 respectively on a gig night (and Village Underground often makes £12,000 on a club night). The closure of these two venues has seen a vast shortfall, meaning that 21 of the 25-person full-time staff has had to be put on furlough since March, and will have to remain that way until live music returns – if the scheme lasts that long.
Understandably, Snyers has been investing herself in trying to find ways in which live music might make a safe return sooner than 2021. She has been in contact with managers of venues across the continent as they collectively try to muddle their way through, and has been intrigued by another initiative: “In Denmark they’ve suggested allowing some ticket buyers, chosen by a lottery, into the venue, while the rest can watch on a stream, which would make it both safer and more financially viable.” This seems like a promising innovation, but again comes up against the wall of government restrictions in the UK, at least for the time being.
Whether concerts return next month or next year, higher levels of safety and hygiene are going to have to be implemented, which of course incurs another cost for the organisers. In her discussions with other venue managers, Snyers has heard of a new role of Covid Officers – specially trained security-come-health-and-safety people hired to manage the situation. “They would attend events and make sure that everyone respects the guidelines,” Snyers explains. “It might be a requirement of running gigs.” Their responsibilities might include ensuring that people wear masks, reducing physical contact where possible, and maybe even administering temperature checks on the door.
Even if all the new safety requirements are met and live music is given the go-ahead to make a full return, the expectation is that we are unlikely to see sell-out crowds immediately, as public confidence will take time to build. A recent survey conducted by Festicket of their users – regular festival and concert attendees – found that 31 per cent would be prepared to return to gigs immediately after lockdown is lifted. This figure rises to 82 per cent who say they would feel comfortable to attend a sold out show within six months of the removal of restrictions, while one in 10 say they will not attend a gig or festival until there is a vaccine.
Of course, it is easier to answer these questions positively when it’s just theoretical. It is likely that, when gigs do return, people will hang back and wait for reports from the ‘guinea pigs’ who have decided to take the risk. They will want to know if cleanliness has improved and discover whether infections spike due to mass gatherings, before they decide they are truly ready to return to packed rooms.
This is certainly being anticipated by promoters like Rockfeedback. “People’s confidence is shaken, and right now they can’t even bear to be on the same side of the street as each other,” Monsell says. “Time is going to tell how impacted our easing back in will be. It could be really difficult for us; we’ll have much lower sales because of that.”
This means that, to begin with at least, live music events are unlikely to sell the requisite tickets to break even, which might force a change in the financial model. There have already been leaked memos from large multi-national promoters, including Live Nation and AEG, suggesting that they will be making changes in order to shift the financial risk away from themselves. This includes reducing artists’ and agents’ fees and adding clauses stating that artists will incur a heavy financial penalty should they cancel a gig due to poor ticket sales.
For smaller companies, who have less power, they will be forced to make tougher decisions about how to decrease their outlay. “I am concerned about the cost of travel and practicalities of American artists coming in,” says Monsell, whose promotion companies Rockfeedback and FORM rely heavily upon tours from international acts. “They may have come over previously two or three times a year, but it may decrease to one or two times – and that’s going to have quite an impact on what we’re used to.”
Thus far, the UK government has not given the live music industry its deserved attention, leaving tens of thousands of people within it to fend for themselves, waiting – without much indication – for concrete messaging about changes in safety regulations, and how and when touring can resume function. Any hope that they will receive specialist financial compensation from the government has dwindled after months of inaction, but has not died.
A series of petitions that demands a clearer plan of action for guiding the events industry out of lockdown has put the government under serious pressure, and has forced a debate in parliament on June 25. The aim is to ensure the government puts in place sector-specific plans and financial support systems for each individual industry. This means that they must not attempt to manage the entirety of the arts or events as one body, as theatre, music, film production, sports and everything else will need completely different measures.
Music, a crucial contributor to the nation’s status as a cultural leader – not to mention its economic input – must be shown the respect it deserves. The government must treat musicians, technicians, managers, promoters, venue owners, and everyone else as specialist workers. Horace Trubridge, general secretary of the Musicians Union, put it succinctly in his recent address to the government’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee: “Our position as a cultural leader on the world stage is envied all around the world for the size of this country, but we will not retain it unless we can keep these people in the profession.” We can only hope that this message is getting through.
