Will $1 on your ticket help save Australian live music? A UK model is much more ambitious
- Written by: Sam Whiting, Vice-Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow in Music Industries and Cultural Economy, RMIT University
The Australian Music Venue Foundation launched this month to advocate for and potentially administer an arena ticket levy to support grassroots live music venues. Funds would be raised through a small levy, approximately A$1 per ticket, on the price of tickets to large music events, over 5,000 capacity.
The foundation is partly modelled on the United Kingdom’s Music Venue Trust, a charity and advocacy body founded in 2014 that has advocated for a big ticket levy.
While the proposed levy would certainly help to level the playing field between grassroots music venues and the big end of touring, the Music Venue Trust was founded on much more radical principles and ambitions than simple redistribution.
Socialising live music
Although the Music Venue Trust has moved into advocacy and policy work, such as vocal support for the big ticket levy, the trust’s original and continuing mission is to socialise grassroots music venues. This means they work to help venues transition away from for-profit models and towards alternative ownership structures.
The trust’s “Own Our Venues” campaign spawned Music Venue Properties, a charitable landlord funded by the broader music community. The scheme has now purchased five grassroots venues around the UK, leased on the condition they continue to run as live music venues.
The goal is to take the profit motive out of running a venue. Surplus is reinvested into venue spaces, ensuring their long-term sustainability.
As the trust’s founder and CEO Mark Davyd states, “[the community] is the best person to own a venue”.
We don’t want money going to private landlords, we want it in the cultural economy because that’s the way we generate more great artists and give more people the opportunity to be involved in music.
Acknowledging that such radical ambitions require funding, the trust have been long term advocates for a big ticket levy. However, this advocacy has always accompanied their greater goal of socialising live music venues.
The trust have helped to change the broader cultural understanding of grassroots venues in the UK. Between 2014 and 2022, the proportion of music venues in the country run as not-for-profit ventures increased from 3% to 26%.
The Australian context
Melbourne’s Gasometer Hotel and Brisbane’s The Bearded Lady are the latest small, but culturally significant, live music venues to face closure. The number of venues licensed for live music in Australia is falling, with the greatest reductions in the small-to-medium range.
The recent parliamentary inquiry into the live music industry found costs like insurance and rent have risen sharply in the last five years. Meanwhile, income from alcohol sales – a core revenue source for smaller venues – has dropped in connection with changing youth culture, the cost-of-living crisis, and excises hitched to inflation.
Surveys of young people and other groups affirm that Australians value live music, and most people would like to attend more. The most commonly cited barrier is cost, followed by distance from appropriate venues, especially in regional areas.
An arena ticket levy was a key recommendation of the inquiry, with the committee recommending government agency Music Australia should manage the funds.
The committee proposed a levy could enable Music Australia to fund:
performances with minimum pay rates for musicians
capital improvements to venues, such as sound-proofing or disability access
festivals promoting regional, all-ages, First Nations and community participation.
Neither the Labor government nor the opposition have indicated a position on this recommendation, which would require legislation.
The industry proposal
The Australian Music Venue Foundation is asking big music businesses to opt in to an industry-managed ticket levy to fund grassroots live music.
While there has been advocacy for such a voluntary arrangement in the UK, this is yet to come to fruition. The UK government’s deadline for the arrangement of a voluntary scheme by the end of March is approaching, opening up the alternative scenario of a legislated mandatory levy.
Australian advocates believe they may have the relationships to create a different outcome, arguing all industry players have a stake in a healthy music ecosystem.
In the proposed Australian scheme, the recipients and use of funding would be decided by a board of industry professionals. This raises questions around potential conflicts of interest. The foundation has applied for charity status, which requires transparency around operations and finances. However, there are broader questions about priorities.
If the scheme gets up, the foundation will need to consider whether to restrict its support to Australian-owned, independent venues of a certain size. Alternatively, funds may be available to venues that are part-owned by the same major, for-profit, international companies paying into the scheme.
To replace the proposed government levy, the foundation would also need to find ways of supporting access to live music for regional, all-ages, First Nations, and other disadvantaged communities, as recommended by the inquiry’s report.
To ensure benefits flow to artists, venue support could also be made conditional on paying a minimum performer’s fee, something venue’s have previously opposed.
The foundation could promote social objectives such as performer diversity, patron safety, and environmental sustainability, but there are no guarantees of this under an industry-led scheme.
These examples demonstrate the issues that can arise when economic redistribution is managed within an industry, rather than by government.
Lofty ambitions
The Music Venue Trust has successfully argued for grassroots music venues as a public good, worthy of longterm community and public investment as well as a structural approach to support.
Through their work, they have provided a new narrative for live music in the UK, supporting innovative ownership and operating models that go beyond the default of a commercially-leased space run as a for-profit small business.
Ambition and innovation has made the trust much more than another industry association advocating for the interests of a particular group of businesses. The Australian Music Venue Foundation should aspire to similar heights if it is to have the same level of influence and impact.
Authors: Sam Whiting, Vice-Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow in Music Industries and Cultural Economy, RMIT University
