The UK’s live music industry has bounced back from pandemic lows in a big way, according to a new report released Tuesday by the trade group Live music Industry Venues and Entertainment (LIVE).
The report, which analyzed the U.K. concert business in 2024 across 55,000 concerts and festivals, found a striking bounce back from a 2020 low of £0.6 billion ($800 million) in revenue across the industry to £6.7 billion ($8.9 billion) last year, a recovery “so impressive that spend last year was over £2 billion ($2.6 billion) more than in 2019, the last full year before COVID,” the report reads. Citing setlist data from PRS for Music, LIVE estimates there was a gig every 137 seconds in the UK last year; the country’s capital city of London accounted for 28.9% of total activity.
Pop stars were the biggest beneficiaries of the growth, with the genre accounting for 32.1% of spending over the country’s top 2,000 gigs, “more than the two next most valuable genres [indie and rock] put together,” they write, representing a year-over-year revenue increase of 4.7%.
Taylor Swift “had a lot to do with that” in 2024, the group writes, with some estimating Swift’s contribution – she played four cities in the country – to the total being £1 billion.
So-called grassroots venues had a more difficult time – “the grassroots crisis is real,” the report reads – and indeed, one in four late-night venues there have closed since 2020, The Guardian has reported.
To address that situation the LIVE Trust was established last year to “deliver funding where it is needed most to help all in our sector thrive.” To accomplish that, the LIVE Trust is currently developing a program to redistribute revenue, on a voluntary basis, from arena and stadium shows (those with a capacity over 5,000) to grassroots venues in the country. The Music Venue Trust, a trade organization representing grassroots venues in the UK, found in its own 2024 report that “significant work is still needed to prevent a continued decline of the [grassroots] sector.”
The industry employed over 234,000 people in 2024, with four out of five of those jobs defined as “casual,” i.e. that employee being freelance, temporary and/or self-employed. “Casual staff numbers are now much higher than they were in 2019,” they write, finding that 56% of freelancers in the industry have found it difficult to secure employment and 48% reporting jobs being cancelled with less than a week of notice.
LIVE represents a federation of 15 live-music industry associations representing over 3,000 businesses, 35,000 artists and 2,000 backstage workers.
“Venues and festivals of all shapes and sizes, operated by world-class teams and showcasing world-class established and emerging talent, will continue to delight audiences for decades to come as long as industry and government protects and nurtures the ecosystem,” LIVE CEO Jon Collins wrote.
