From the Ferret to Wembley, Who Funds the Next Generation?

The Ferret in Preston has been putting on bands since before quite a lot of the artists now filling arenas had worked out which end of a guitar to hold. For most of that time, however, its future depended on something entirely unrelated to music: whether whoever owned the building fancied continuing to have a music venue in it.

That is the normal condition of a grassroots music venue. The operator takes the risk, books the bands, builds the audience, develops the talent, employs the staff, creates the community and, if everything goes exceptionally well, eventually discovers that the landlord thinks the building would be worth more as twelve luxury flats called The Old Music Rooms. I am pleased to say that The Ferret no longer has that problem because it now belongs, effectively, to the people who love it.

Music Venue Properties, the community ownership scheme we launched in 2022, has so far bought the freeholds of ten grassroots music venues. The money comes from ordinary people buying community shares in buildings they care about. Apparently thousands of music fans understand something parts of the property market have struggled with: if you want a music venue to stay a music venue, owning the building is quite helpful.

Taking the landlord out of the equation solves the significant problem of ownership, Unfortunately, it does not make putting on a new band on a wet Tuesday night suddenly profitable. To tackle that, we need to think about the industry, and what it can do to share the cost of ensuring live music remains in our communities. Which brings me to the £1 levy.

The principle is painfully simple; add £1 to every arena and stadium ticket and put that money back into the grassroots ecosystem of venues, artists and promoters where every arena and stadium artist started. The justification for this is as simple as the solution; nobody arrives in a 20,000-capacity building fully formed. There is no secret factory producing headline acts behind Wembley. There is a pipeline, and at the bottom of it are hundreds of small venues, promoters, artists and festivals taking risks on music nobody has heard of yet.

After six years of work, the UK live music industry agreed to introduce that £1 voluntarily late in 2024, around the same time the UK government said that it expected it to be done and would introduce statutory legislation to do it if the industry could not do it itself. Some companies have embraced it, others have moved, politely, rather more slowly. This has produced some entertaining arguments about margins, ticket prices and who should carry the cost, all of which would be more convincing if France had not operated a statutory concert levy for decades while continuing, against all apparent odds, to have concerts. The question is not really whether £1 is affordable on a £70, £100 or £150 ticket. It is whether the biggest beneficiaries of the live music ecosystem can be persuaded to accept their responsibility for maintaining the infrastructure that creates the artists they ultimately profit from. And if they can`t, what shape statutory legislation to insist on that research and development contribution will look like and how quickly it will spread around the world. 

The ownership project and the levy are really two halves of the same argument; the first solution tackles the asset issue and the second confronts the economics. Grassroots Music Venues need secure buildings, but they also need a functioning business model. Buying the freehold is not much use if you cannot afford to turn the lights on. Equally, improving the economics of a venue is of limited value if somebody can sell the building from underneath it.

What has been striking this year, travelling and talking to colleagues internationally, is how familiar all of this sounds wherever you go. Different countries have different funding systems, planning laws and cultural policies, but the underlying problem is remarkably consistent: Everyone loves the cultural and economic outcomes created by grassroots music, while remarkably few parts of the wider industry want to pay for the infrastructure that creates them. At The Ferret, music fans put their own money in and bought the building one share at a time. At the other end of the business, we are asking an industry selling millions of arena and stadium tickets to find one pound per ticket to help secure where the next generation comes from.

The first of those propositions has proved surprisingly easy for music fans to understand. It remains to be seen if the music industry can grasp the necessity for the second.