Grinding it out on tour is increasingly becoming less of a… grind. Ticket prices might be rising, but the number of dates is sharply contracting.
In October, the Music Venue Trust (MVT) reported that acts played on average 11 shows when touring the UK grassroots circuit in 2024. A decade earlier, it was an average of 13 shows; two decades ago, it was 18 shows; and three decades ago, it was 22.
“This has a huge knock-on effect in the programmes that venues can produce,” says Beverley Whitrick, COO of MVT. “But it is also having a massive effect on artists reaching only a fraction of the audiences [they could] as they try and build their careers.”
Towns and cities that were once part of the UK touring backbone are now becoming secondary or even tertiary markets. If acts are not playing these places, argues MVT, their small and mid-sized venues will atrophy.
Matt Hanner, booking agent and operations director at Runway, says, “Once you start cutting those cities out, it becomes quite hard to go back to them because your audience drifts a little bit. You’re not investing in your audience.”
“More and more tours are in major markets only in the UK and Europe”
The net result is a kind of pattern baldness affecting the touring map. Tours might only reach Glasgow and class that as “covering” Scotland or may even treat Bristol as “close enough” to Wales. Scott Kennedy, promoter at DHP Family, says that many tours he puts together now are “three-date UK tours that are just key cities” – often London, Manchester, and Glasgow.
Alex Bruford, founder and MD of ATC Live, argues even the two-date tour is now becoming normalised. “The main album tour for Black Pumas consisted of two shows in the UK – the Eventim Apollo in London and the O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester,” he says. “More and more tours are in major markets only in the UK and Europe.”
The major factor here is, he says, that much of touring is uneconomical and tour support from record labels is increasingly pared back. “We routed a short UK and European tour for a US artist returning after a successful debut album campaign,” he says, by way of example. “The tour was in 500–1,500-cap venues and just 15 shows long, but the initial budget, with minimal crew and production, showed a loss of $50,000, which is impossible for an artist at this level to bear.”
Acts increasingly have to absorb losses over a number of tours. “It’s very difficult to build a long-term touring footprint without going to play in as many cities as you can,” says Bruford. “The artists I work with who keep coming back to tour and include new markets every time are also the ones who are growing in popularity.”
“I’m talking to more artists now about doing tours in smaller blocks, trying to get them home in the middle”
Hanner believes month-long tours are still possible and can support venues and cities that are off the main touring map but this will often involve working with a patchwork of local promoters. “There might be 20 different dates,” he says, “and it might be 20 different promoters.” A key issue here, he feels, is that bigger promoters are much more cautious in their bookings. “They are just being very, you could say, prudent and risk-averse in terms of how they’re approaching these things.”
Within all this is a semantic debate about what now constitutes a “tour.” A run of consecutive days, with occasional breaks? Or measured out in stages, with shorter bursts of activity and longer gaps between them? “I’m talking to more artists now about doing tours in smaller blocks, trying to get them home in the middle and avoiding Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday,” explains Hanner.
This is increasingly the only option for smaller acts who are running full-time or part-time jobs alongside their music career and who cannot take weeks or months off to tour. “With an eight-day tour, you might now look at breaking that up into two runs of Wednesday to Saturday or Thursday to Sunday so they can get home,” says Hanner. “These blocks of time are more cost-effective because you haven’t got off days in the middle where you’re still having to pay for accommodation and van hire.”
“I think people are really focusing on just sticking very strictly to mainland Europe”
The industry is also more keenly aware of acts’ mental health and wants to avoid putting them on the road for long periods of time where they are running on a tight budget and existing hand to mouth. “All of a sudden, it’s gone from something you’ve dreamt of doing to being the tour from hell because you’re all absolutely shattered,” cautions Hanner.
This is a point Kennedy concurs with, suggesting long tours and mounting debts can quickly take their toll on acts. “That’s probably one of the main reasons why bands end up having to quit,” he says. Kennedy points to the DIY punk scene in Germany that can offer a model the UK should look to replicate. A network of small venues in Germany provides a flat or room with bunk beds that touring acts can use, thus lowering their accommodation costs.
There is an additional force at play here in Europe where more and more markets are being sidelined because acts cannot afford to get there. Aino-Maria Paasivirta, head promoter at Fullsteam Agency in Finland, says Finland was never a priority market for many acts until they got to a certain level, but now the Nordics as a whole are being deprioritised. “Historically, it’s been that tours have ended in Stockholm, and Finland has always been a little jealous of that,” she says. “But now I’m hearing that not even Stockholm gets all the shows. I think people are really focusing on just sticking very strictly to mainland Europe.”
She caveats that metal and hard rock bands have always prioritised Finland. “It’s coded in the DNA of those genres that touring and live music are the way to experience that music. If you don’t have a fanbase that gets to see you live, you don’t really exist in the same way as you can with pop music.”
“We’re losing money until we’re at arena level”
Finland is not quite as sensitive to high ticket prices as other European markets but that could change. VAT on tickets increased from 10% to 14% at the start of January, and this is seen as a hammer blow against the live industry. Increased ticket prices could mean the small number of international acts that do tour Finland might not be able to tour there to the same extent.
Tom Schroeder, EVP of Wasserman Music in the UK, says developing acts are increasingly only playing Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Berlin on European tours, but often only three of those four. He says Amsterdam might be “a vibrant city and a strong ticket-selling market,” but the money is often not there until acts get to the larger venues.
“We would go there, and we would do a 250-cap show,” he explains. “We would then go back and do a 500-cap show, then a 750, then a 1,500, then a 5,000, and hopefully up to 12,000 and beyond. We would do every single step of that, but we can’t do that anymore. We’re losing money until we’re at arena level.”
Schroeder says the only way to do a city such as Amsterdam is to have a solid commitment from local promoters that the act can leapfrog their way up through the venue sizes. “There have been lots of discussions over the last two years about this,” he says, “We’ll come and do the 250 [cap venue], but you [the promoter] have to have a vision, and you have to have a marketing plan that would be to move on and skip the next steps and go to 1,500. If you can’t get us to those levels quickly, we can’t build in Europe. Certainly, with an overseas act, like an American act, they can’t make the budgets work at all.”
“Because it costs so much to put on a show these days, it only takes a couple of wrong dates to really put the whole tour negative”
There are also wider social and cultural shifts where younger audiences, traditionally the bedrock for new acts, are not going out to gigs as much as previous generations. This is partly down to financial concerns (the average UK student debt now is £44,940 according to Student Loans Company data acquired by the BBC in March 2024), but also the pandemic, which caused habitual shifts among young music fans where attending gigs is not the rite of passage it once was.
The harsh economics of touring are such that the longer the tour runs for, the higher the debt can become or the greater the risk of it going awry can become. “Because it costs so much to put on a show these days, it only takes a couple of wrong dates to really put the whole tour negative,” says Jon Collins, chief executive of LIVE. “That’s why they’re really sweating each decision and rationalising things down.”
There are things the industry feels can be done to help it grow and to de-risk the economics of touring. Collins says a key lobbying point for LIVE is to get the UK government to reduce the 20% VAT rate on tickets and move in line with much of Europe where the rate is at least half that. The body is also pushing the charitable LIVE Trust initiative to help key players here.
“The venue to host, the artist to play, and the promoter to take the risk to put it on are all under huge pressure at the moment”
“One of the key objectives for the LIVE Trust is going to be to enable artists to tour,” says Collins. “The venue to host, the artist to play, and the promoter to take the risk to put it on are all under huge pressure at the moment, particularly at the grassroots level. If we can provide support to each of them, that’s going to enable more activity.”
Alongside this, MVT is lobbying to try and get the new Labour government to reverse its recent budget decision where it plans to cut the 75% business rate relief for grassroots venues to 40% from April 2025. It estimates this will burden grassroots venues with £7m in additional premises taxes.
Schroeder argues, however, that the industry as a whole has to understand that touring – and therefore the length of tours undertaken – has changed. Looking at the average touring route 20 years ago and comparing it to today is not quite comparing like with like.
“The way artists used to be discovered is that they would go and play shows at grassroots venues, and they would build a fanbase like that,” he says. “That still happens, but at the same time, what an artist does on TikTok, on Instagram, and on Discord is also incredibly important. When they do a show, wherever it is in the world, that content on their socials gains fans, too. It’s not the same as it used to be.”
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