Wherever you turn in independent music lately, there are hints of exhaustion. It sits beneath the ticket confirmation email, under the merch table, behind every social post asking fans to rally round, buy early, show up, donate, subscribe, share, care harder. The modern punter is no longer treated as a person walking into a small room to lose themselves in sound. They are treated as an emergency relief fund with a tote bag.
Grassroots venues have become the cultural equivalent of a cracked ceiling bucket. Every month, something else drips into it as the wider economy crumbles and politics moves ever further from the favour of independent music. Audiences are expected to pick up the bill by paying for…well, everything. The ticket (ASAP, obviously), the t-shirt, the beer to save the bar… but that’s not enough; subscribe to Patreon for every artist you love, top up every music-related crowdfunder you see, tell your friends, save the scene… where does it end?
That demand has emotional power because people do care; they know what is lost when a venue shuts, and what it’s like for musicians to battle against local promoters just to play in front of 12 people and a bored sound engineer. That care has been monetised, in a time when it’s a stretch to afford ‘luxuries’ without strings of empathy controlling the proverbial purse strings.
The battle to save grassroots music cannot keep being fought at the checkout but it has to move upwards, towards the institutions draining these spaces.
The working class cannot keep subsidising cultural collapse
The most insulting part of the current “save our venues” discourse is the implication that the public have failed whenever a venue folds. Fans are asked to feel guilty for having less disposable income, as though a £10 ticket has magical properties in a country where rent, food, transport and bills have already stripped people back to the bone.
Music Venue Trust’s 2025 annual report stated that the grassroots sector contributes over £500 million a year to the UK economy, while venues operated on average profit margins of just 2.5%. More than half of UK grassroots music venues made no profit at all in 2025, while 30 permanently closed and 175 UK towns and cities lost access to regular professional touring shows.
Are we still to believe that consumer enthusiasm is the problem? Or is it that punters are easier targets in comparison to a fucked up economic model that’s refusing to screw us all gently?
Parliament had already heard the warning in 2024. The Culture, Media and Sport Committee found the average grassroots music venue profit margin was just 0.5%, equivalent to less than £3,000 a year, with venues in smaller communities making an average loss. The same report noted that venues had reached the limit of what could be cut without stripping away music provision or closing entirely.
Still, the guilt lands on the punter. The person buying the ticket becomes responsible for solving landlord greed, tax pressure, energy costs and institutional extraction. It is a neat trick. It keeps anger small. It points the finger downwards, at the fan who stayed home, rather than upwards, at the structures making survival almost impossible.
PRS and the invisible tax on the small room
PRS for Music exists, in principle, for a vital reason. Songwriters and composers deserve payment when their work is performed. Nobody serious should argue against that. The scandal sits in the gap between principle and practice.
Music Venue Trust’s Set The Record Straight campaign has put that gap under harsh light. The campaign says PRS-related charges are being calculated, applied and enforced through a system that often relies on estimated data, incorrect capacity calculations and unclear liability between promoters and venues. MVT says it has already identified more than £666,000 in discrepancies across England, Scotland and Wales, including one alleged £90,000 error that could be enough to close a grassroots venue permanently.
This is where the romance of the small room meets the brutality of admin. MVT says some bills have been linked to maximum theoretical capacity rather than actual attendance or sellable space. A venue with a legal capacity on paper can still spend half the month hosting thinly attended shows, experimental nights, new bands and loss-making culture. Billing based on fantasy attendance is just punishment by spreadsheet.
Then comes enforcement. MVT says five grassroots venues have received County Court Judgments, while more than 50 have faced legal threats linked to disputed or inaccurate fee assessments. A CCJ can wound a venue’s credit, frighten suppliers, crush morale and push operators into the kind of stress that turns cultural work into survival work.
Setlists, black boxes and the stadium subsidy
The second injustice is even more grotesque because it is almost invisible to the audience. PRS collects from live performances, then distributes royalties once it can match performances to songwriters. When setlist data is missing, money can end up unallocated. The Guardian reported that PRS had been unable to identify songs performed at more than 100,000 UK gigs since 2022, with £2.7 million left unassigned in 2019 alone.
MusicRadar’s recent report on Dave Rowntree’s failed legal appeal stated that PRS distributes these unallocated live royalties according to market share, and that the 106,000-plus events affected are mainly small-scale gigs in grassroots venues.
That is the sick joke at the centre of it. A small venue pays. A local band plays. A self-released artist forgets to log a setlist or never understands the system in the first place. The money can then flow into a pot redistributed according to wider market dominance. The grassroots ecosystem pays into a machine that naturally favours those already winning.
Meanwhile, PRS is reporting enormous numbers. In 2025, PRS for Music paid out £1.07 billion to rightsholders and collected £1.24 billion in revenues, with live music collections exceeding £100 million for the first time. That success will be presented as proof the system works. For whom? That is the question.
If a local room is paying into a licensing system that rarely returns meaningful money to the artists on its own stage, then it is fair to ask whether grassroots culture is being treated as an unpaid cash cow for the wider industry.
Consumer action has hit its ceiling
There is a limit to what audiences can repair. But consumer action has become a sedative. It gives people something immediate to do while delaying the harder fight. It turns structural failure into personal virtue. It asks the fan to perform devotion while institutions continue operating with minimal consequence.
Venues cannot simply boycott PRS. The risk is too high. Legal action, licence disputes and closure threats hang over that path. A small venue has no real leverage when standing alone against a rights collection body with national reach, legal teams and deep administrative power. That is why the answer has to be collective pressure, public scrutiny and political intervention.
The Set The Record Straight campaign has moved the argument away from sentiment and towards auditing to ensure accuracy, transparency, fair billing and clear liability. These are basic demands, yet in the grassroots sector they sound almost radical because so much of the system has been allowed to run on assumption.
Government also has a role here. If ministers can regulate utilities, landlords, ticketing practices and other parts of public life, they can scrutinise copyright collection societies whose decisions affect cultural infrastructure.
Everyone has done their part, aside from the institutions with power, money and access. PRS must be forced into a fairer, cleaner, more transparent system for grassroots billing and distribution. Major industry players must stop treating small venues as heritage wallpaper while leaving them to drown in costs. Parliament must stop praising grassroots music in speeches while outsourcing its survival to punters with empty pockets.
Article by Amelia Vandergast
