New figures counsel a lot of the UK is turning into a ‘touring desert’
New figures from the Music Venue Belief have revealed that the touring circuit has been shrinking attributable to bands more and more skipping cities and cities.
As reported by Music Radar, artists and musicians are enjoying roughly 11 reveals on common on the grassroots circuit in 2024 versus the 22 that was performed in 1994. The statistics come from business stakeholders, promoters and artists alike.
The state of affairs has been described as a “spiralling disaster” for all except for the largest artists and promoters by Sam Duckworth – the Noughties singer songwriter Get Cape Put on Cape Fly – who works for the Music Venue Belief.
Duckworth additionally spoke on the Past The Music convention in Manchester final week and shared: “My first main tour was 54 dates. There’s no method I might do a 54-date tour now. What it actually means is that followers in sure components of the nation have now both bought to journey lengthy distances or hope to be the one non-major metropolis on a tour.
“So not solely are we seeing a disaster in economics, we’re additionally seeing a disaster of entry. There are huge swathes of the nation the place your solely possibility is to journey an hour and a half. Then you definitely consider that the price of all the pieces has gone up. The prepare tickets have gone up. The ticket costs have gone up. The price of your life has gone up.”
The Music Venue Belief additionally revealed that often its members count on to promote roughly 20 million gig tickets yearly however this yr, that quantity is predicted to drop all the way down to about 15 million tickets, signifying that everybody within the business is struggling.
“We hear tales of worldwide artists skipping the UK or saying, I’ll play London as a result of it’s London, however as an alternative of doing six reveals within the UK, I’m going to do two,” Jon Collins, Chief Govt of the reside music commerce physique Reside mentioned.
He continued: “In relation to programming excursions, you’re considering, does it make sense to play Manchester? Does it make sense to play Birmingham? If I do these two, does it make sense to play Leeds and Liverpool, or are they only too shut and really we’re simply going to must get followers to commute throughout? The danger is that we find yourself with a truncated touring route, which turns into a backbone of the nation – London, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow – after which giant swathes of the nation are lacking out on seeing these artists.”
Final yr, the Music Venue Belief shared their full report into the state of the sector for 2023, displaying the “catastrophe” dealing with reside music with venues closing at a price of round two per week.
Lately, Coldplay introduced particulars of giant stadium reveals in London and Hull for subsequent yr – marking the band’s solely UK and European reveals of 2025 and promised that 10 per cent of their proceeds could be donated to Music Venue Belief.