BBC Radio DJ Steve Lamacq has called for the narrative to be changed on grassroots venues as the embattled sector bids to turn the tide.

Lamacq, who has chaired UK trade body LIVE since 2023, made the plea during ILMC’s Grassroots Touring – Early-Stage Strategies panel, which looked at how the circuit can turn on a new generation of fans to the more intimate venue experience.

“I don’t think we spend enough time telling people just how great these venues are,” said Lamacq. “There are a lot of stories about venues closing and the pressures they’re under. It must sound so grim… if you’re a 17-year-old, you’re probably thinking, ‘Well, these places must be shit. They’re all closing, it sounds rubbish.’

“If you change the narrative [to], ‘These places are really exciting, you can have an amazing time,’ then I think we encourage people to think differently about it. It’s a safe, brilliant, exciting, creative environment, and that’s what we should be telling people – that you’re missing out, in fact, if you don’t go.”

Moderator Sarah Slater of Ticketmaster UK began the session at London’s Royal Lancaster by reeling off statistics highlighting how touring in the UK has changed “dramatically” over the past 30 years.

“To put things in perspective, in 1994 an average grassroots tour had 22 dates across 28 different locations,” she said. “By 2024… that number has been cut in half, with just 11 dates in 12 major cities.”

“We’re losing all of the grassroots venues in the communities outside of the big cities”

UK-based independent agent Jule Konrad noted some of the complications that had arisen from that shift.

“When the tours used to be longer, you could go to some of the B/C markets,” they said. “Now, with the smaller bands, we don’t go there because they’re not worth enough tickets, so we focus on the major markets. With the bigger artists, if they get 5k in the bigger cities, they don’t want to play for 1k or 2k in the smaller markets, and we’re losing all of the grassroots venues in the communities outside of the big cities.”

Andreas Moeller, who works as a promoter for Konzertbuero Schoneberg in Germany, said the industry could benefit by emphasising the “community” element of live music.

“It’s more about bringing people together,” he said. “Music is wonderful, and most of us are fans. We’re coming from the fan side of things, and we love to be in these small venues and maybe be part of the start of a career.”

MD of boutique Athens venue Piraeus Club Academy, Sophia Kouroumali is also assistant director at Xlalala Presents, the company behind Greece’s longest-running music festival Rockwave.

“We do a bit of both: grassroots in our venue, which is 400 capacity, and then we try to develop those bands to make it to the next stage and come to our festival, hopefully, which is 30,000 capacity,” she explained. “We’re trying a lot of ways to encourage younger artists to take part and audiences to give them a chance, which is becoming more and more challenging.”

A recent initiative has seen Kouroumali launch a competition for new bands, with a festival slot up for grabs for the winners.

“There’s no social media involved,” she said. “They come, they play. We have five bands every gig… and the audience votes, grading every band from five to one. So we’re trying to encourage people to actively listen. Don’t just come and see your friend’s band, don’t just come and see a band that you saw on TikTok or whatever, come and listen to the music live and be a part of it, and you will be the one deciding if this band performs on a major stage.

“The first gig had 27 tickets [sold], and then the second gig had 116 and now we’re already getting phone calls for the third gig. So people are expressing an interest. We see this paying off hopefully, and it creates an atmosphere that is so adorable, because you see bands from 17-year-olds to 60 playing on the same stage, congratulating each other, discussing their strategies, and their audience is blending so they’re finding their people.”

“You are creating so many problems further down the line if you take away the places where the younger generation can go”

Lamacq rejected the assertion that acts were now breaking on social media platforms such as TikTok, rather than on the live scene.

“It’s not like the Spice Girls played Bedford Esquires,” he argued. “There’s always been acts like that and there still will be, and I think that’s a bit of a red herring. There are still big pop acts and they do it in a different way, but bands with a longer career will start out quite often down at the grassroots, and that’s the point we have to get across.”

He continued: “I think [the government] shy away from the music industry in general because they don’t understand it and they think it’s a big commercial thing. But we have to explain to them how culturally important it is and how important it is in so many other ways, because every time you take away a venue from a town which has nothing else for young people, then where do they go? You are creating so many problems further down the line if you take away the places where the younger generation can go.”

Moreover, Lamacq added the business needed to make sure it has “the ear of the next generation” and was putting on “the sort of music and the sort of events that they want”.

On that note, Kouroumali stressed the importance of spreading the word to the younger demographic.

“Grassroots venues may be culturally important but, to me at least, they often feel like they’re becoming irrelevant to younger generations,” she said. “They learn music through Spotify… and they’re almost unaware of the process, so we’re trying to get the message across that The Beatles started from a grassroots venue, or Shakira, or Taylor Swift, whoever is relevant.

“We’re making it a friendlier place and a more open place… One of our major plans for the next season is to have afternoon shows that can cater for the whole family.”

“After the pandemic, people are reluctant to go out. They’re staying in a lot more”

Kouroumali added that the venue was also considering loyalty programmes and ticket offers to entice fans.

“What we’re going to start implementing, hopefully sometime before the end of this season, will be a 1+1 ticket, so you can get a ticket for one gig and then get the second one for half price. Maybe that will encourage people to go out more because another thing – and I think it’s more general than just grassroots venues – is that after the pandemic, people are reluctant to go out. They’re staying in a lot more.”

Lamacq ended with a rallying cry extolling the virtues of grassroots venues, saying there was an irreplaceable magic to seeing an emerging band play to 200 people at the start of their career.

“The best Catfish And The Bottlemen gigs were at Southampton Joiners, Clwb Ifor Bach and wherever else I saw them on that tour,” he said. “The band at their absolute hungriest, not a care in the world. It was fantastic and spontaneous and hot and thrilling – tell people that.

“There’s nothing wrong with big stages and big productions… and it’s lovely when you see 60,000 people come together for one jubilant night at an arena. But it’s also amazing when there’s just two of you, or even if you’re on your own, and you take away that memory of that night. That’s the best thing about grassroots venues for me.”

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Dynamic ticketing took centre stage during ILMC’s Ticketing: At What Price? panel, as leading executives debated whether the growth of market-based pricing in the US will be replicated in other major international markets.

Chaired by Kilimanjaro Live promoter Steve Tilley, the session brought together Eventim Norway and Sweden’s Marcia Titley, Ticketmaster UK’s Sarah Slater, AXS’ Chris Lipscomb and Arnaud Meersseman of AEG Presents.

Recalling going to see Bruce Springsteen at New York City’s Madison Square Garden last year, Tilley admitted he was prepared to pay “whatever it costs” to get into the show. However, Meersseman pointed out the practice was less established in territories like France, which made it harder to compete when booking top acts.

“We’re being pushed more and more by artists to incorporate dynamic pricing,” he said. “To them, it doesn’t make sense on a financial level to tour Europe compared to the US, where dynamic pricing is widely common.”

Meersseman speculated there would be “massive pushback” against the practice across France. “It’s also a question of accessibility, and fans are likely to end up wondering whether gigs will only be reserved for the rich in the not-too-distant future,” he warned.

Lipscomb added that dynamic pricing is already happening in several European markets, including the UK, and predicted it will increase in prominence sooner than most think.

“Ten percent of all UK shows may already be sold under dynamic pricing. In a couple of years, I’d expect that number will increase by 30%-40%”

“Ten percent of all UK shows may already be sold under dynamic pricing,” he said. “In a couple of years, I’d expect that number will increase by 30%-40% and maybe even rise higher to 70%-80%.”

The discussion segued into the secondary market, with Titley noting that while countries like Norway and Denmark put laws in place to prevent resales above face value, dynamic pricing was necessary to “drive higher revenue”.

“Ultimately, it’s all about protecting the fans, and I believe in combining tech and legislation to eradicate those excessive profit margins,” she said.

Ticketmaster has successfully introduced its own fan-to-fan resale service in the UK, and Slater said: “There are plenty of safe, face-value resale sites to sell your tickets to in the UK. We’ve heavily pushed the fact that tickets are transferable, but we always encourage customers to only buy from authorised sites.”

Sam Shemtob, director of Face-value European Alliance for Ticketing (FEAT), made a brief cameo to explain the role that the EU Digital Service Act will play in combating illegal ticket listings.

“If the ticket is being sold by a trader, that needs to be listed right at the front in a clearly accessible manner, and ticket resale sites will now be banned from using design tricks that manipulate consumers into decisions, such as “pop-ups” or giving prominence to specific choices,” explained Shemtob.

“Nailing the on-sale is absolutely critical, but marketing the shows via a long-term campaign with the artists up until the actual event is just as important”

Shemtob, who is collaborating with the European Commission on how to streamline a complaints mechanism for fans and promoters, launched ‘Make Tickets Fair’ last year — a campaign to educate and empower fans to avoid being ripped off by ticket touts.

“The platforms will also be required to make it clear throughout the buying process that the tickets listed are provided by a third party,” he said. “If a platform fails to do this and fans are led to believe that the tickets are provided by the platform itself, the platform can be held responsible for any tickets listed in contravention of national laws.

“All of these sites need to have a clear and simple complaint mechanism.”

Another major talking point was the perception that tickets must be bought as soon as they go on sale.

“Obviously, nailing the on-sale is absolutely critical, but marketing the shows via a long-term campaign with the artists up until the actual event is just as important,” Slater said, citing the concert industry’s shift towards post-sale engagement, which includes events integrations in collaborations with Spotify and TikTok, as well as creative marketing strategies to keep fans engaged.

“Most people think that if they can’t get tickets within the first hour, they’ll end up being scammed when attempting to purchase them at a later time,” added Meersseman. “It all ties to what we discussed earlier about properly educating customers on the ticket sale process.”

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