The Endangered British Music Venue

A couple of weeks ago, UK Music, the trade association that represents the British music industry, published a study analyzing live music activity in Bristol, a city of 300,000 in the west of the country. Working with Bucks New University, students armed with clipboards and iPads took to the town for a night, cataloguing a single, average night of live music across the city. Extrapolating their results over an entire year, the study estimated that Bristol’s live music industry generates £123 million per year and over 900 full-time jobs. Yet despite this sizable economic impact, of all the venues surveyed, half of them were under threat of closure. One stalwart, The Fleece, is caught in a long-standing battle over noise with the developers of a block of flats built next door.

The owner of The Fleece, Chris Sharp, was one of a group of music venue owners and industry leaders to meet with the U.K.’s Minister of State for Housing and Planning, Brandon Lewis, in January. British recording artists account for one out of every seven recorded music purchases worldwide, according to the British Phonographic Industry, and yet the industry is facing a crisis. It is not a crisis of developing talent or producing high-quality content, but one of spaces and places. These are the smaller venues that have incubated Britain’s future stars for decades, and act as cultural hubs for Britain’s towns, cities and high streets.