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Ticket Levy, Found Festival & Other Good News From The UK Grassroots Sector
It’s been a tough year for the UK grassroots sector, but change is finally on the horizon. The Music Venue Trust (MVT) has been urging the top-end of this business for years to come up with a way to reinvest some of its profits back into the grassroots circuit. It’s a plan the UK government officially backed in November, initially leaving it up to the stakeholders at the high-selling level to voluntarily implement a ticket levy. Should it turn out that securing the future of the grassroots sector through such a levy wasn’t enough of an incentive, the UK government will step in and come up with a mandatory solution.
In a letter to the UK’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee from Nov. 27, Creative Industries Minister Chris Bryant wrote “on the timetable for implementation, we want to see a voluntary levy on arena and stadium tickets come into effect as soon as possible for concerts in 2025. To meet this timeline, we want to see tangible progress across the music industry by the first quarter of 2025. We urge the live music industry, and in particular the biggest commercial players who will have the biggest impact on the success of an industry-led levy, to focus on driving swift progress.
“We welcome the leadership shown by artists such as Coldplay, Sam Fender and Katy Perry in donating a proportion of their upcoming tour revenues to support the grassroots sector.”
Bryant was referring to Coldplay’s announcement that 10% of the band’s proceeds from six concerts at London’s Wembley Stadium, and two at Hull’s Craven Park Stadium in August 2025 would be donated to the UK Music Venue Trust; as well as Katy Perry’s pledge to donate £1 from every ticket sold on the UK dates of her “The Lifetimes Tour” to the country’s grassroots music venues.
It’s a pledge realised in partnership with the venues she’ll perform in, which includes AO Arena Manchester from ASM Global’s portfolio. The global live entertainment giant just announced it was expanding its partnership with the MVT first established in 2023, and pledged “continued support for grassroots music venues around the country,” according to a press release announcing a new support scheme.
Other ASM Global UK venues including OVO Arena Wembley, first direct arena Leeds, P&J Live Aberdeen, Utilita Arena Newcastle, and Connexin Live Hull will raise awareness and funds for MVT’s work through December and January, when visitors will be able to donate on bars and concourses inside the buildings. They can also donate when buying tickets via venue websites, giving them an easy way to support the cause.
It’s not just the independently run venues that are struggling, but the festivals as well. In the UK alone, more than 70 festivals have announced a postponement, cancellation or complete closure in 2024 – double the amount in 2023.
Since the start of February, the country’s Association of Independent Festivals (AIF) has campaigned for a temporary lowering of the sales tax charged on festival tickets from 20% to 5%. A reduction of this kind would have saved most of the events that have closed this year, according to the AIF, however, urgent intervention from the government has not yet materialized.
There’s good news coming from the independent festival sector, too, as the total ticketed capacity of AIF’s 146 member festivals has reached more than 1 million – 1,150,945 to be exact – “a tremendous rise from the Association of Independent Festivals’ humble beginnings in 2008, when five festival organizers put aside their differences and began talking about issues affecting the independent festival community,” according to the association.
To put the 1-million-capacity figure into perspective, AIF has combined the daily capacities of Live Nation’s major festivals in the UK – including Reading & Leeds, Isle of Wight, Latitude, the Great Escape, Creamfields, Download, TRNSMT, and more – which stands at 880,500. “We believe the UK is experiencing a cultural renaissance driven by independent festivals,” said AIF CEO John Rostron.
Case in point: the launch of Found Festival in 2025, a new boutique, family-oriented event in Buckingham, England, with a capacity of 2,000. It’s especially encouraging, because its founders had to put a stop to another event, Towersey Festival, after 60 years, celebrating its very last edition Aug. 23-26.
See: Towersey Festival UK Says 60th Anniversary Edition Will Be Its Last
Pollstar reached out to Found Festival co-director Mary Hodson, who said, “the decision to end Towersey was heartbreaking, and we always wanted to find a way of being able to bring a festival experience to our loyal Towersey fans while extending the reach to a new audience – but we had to find a way to make it sustainable.
“We felt, that by launching something new, with a new brand, a new feel and a new direction – along with the familiarity of some of the Towersey favourites – we could spike the interest of a new following and continue to create unique cultural experiences to enrich our audience’s lives. Found Festival will take many of the things we loved about Towersey but package them up along with loads of new ideas to create something unique and really special,” she explained.
Found Festival takes over the dates and site of Towersey Festival, which moved to Claydon Estate in 2022. Pollstar wanted to know, how Hodson’s team designed the new event to account for the post-lockdown economy, in other words: to make a new event work in an environment the old one couldn’t.
Said Hodson, “for a long time, we thought this would be impossible. We couldn’t find a way that would give us the financial (and emotional at times!) boost to kick off something new. We applied for an Arts Council Grant and were lucky enough to get some funding from them which really helped us to drill down into what a new audience might want and how we could broaden our cultural offering.
“Then, after much deliberation, research and procrastination, we took the opportunity to partner with viagogo, who have been working with grassroots music by supporting venues, emerging artists programs, and now independent festivals. We believe in what they’re doing, in terms of investment in the right things, and the programs that they have been running for several years have been really successful and really made a difference. Without the support from viagogo we would not be able to produce a festival at all.
“While these financial injections have helped, we still needed to remodel the entire offering. We are very aware that one of the reasons for decline in audiences is due to the cost of attending a festival so we were mindful to keep our costs as low as possible to ensure our ticket prices still reflect incredible value for money. Having said that, we pride ourselves on providing a highly professional, clean, safe and beautiful environment.
“We believe that buying habits have changed and headliners are not drawing people to a festival of our size. What people want are experiences, connection, discovery. Found is all about musical and cultural discovery, inspiration and time to reflect. Our programming brings ‘head-turners’ in favour of headliners with a guarantee of eclectic, quality and inspiring acts from the world of music, literature, comedy, circus and craft. Offering a packed programme of experiences for all ages on a site small enough to take it all in, with a small audience, means we can offer a festival experience which is relaxed, easy to navigate but guarantees to provide a melting pot of experiences and entertainment you’d be hard pushed to find anywhere else.”