Three Little Words

Donation (noun) The making of a gift especially to a charity or public institution.

Contribution (noun) The giving or supplying of something, such as money or time, as part of a shared responsibility.

Levy (noun) The imposition or collection of a required contribution.

I’ve put those three definitions at the top of this piece because the £1 attached to live music event tickets over 5000 capacity in the UK has been called all three of them over the past year, sometimes in the same Instagram post, and the differences between them are not a matter of semantics or taste. In each of the three possible models described by these words, the £1 per ticket concept operates differently.

A Grassroots Donation is a gifted donation which is voluntary and depends on the direct decision of the person giving it, which, in the case of this donation, is the artist.

The Grassroots Contribution concept is of a shared contribution expected of everyone in the group it belongs to, whether or not any individual feels moved to give it, which would apply across the whole industry, promoters, venues, agencies, managers, and yes, perhaps include the artist.

The final option, a Grassroots Levy, would be a legally required, statutory levy, imposed and managed by a statutory authority which doesn’t need to consult anybody’s feelings about it at all.

Those are three very different mechanisms, with three very different sets of opportunities and challenges. Back in 2018, when Music Venue Trust first proposed it, the mechanism the UK arena and stadium £1 concept was built to be was the Grassroots Contribution; a collective, shared, blanket responsibility. Anyone who doesn’t agree is welcome to comment below, but I have the receipts; the statements within the industry, the select committees, the parliamentary questions, the letters between industry and government, the basis of the creation of the LIVE Trust, all of it, was built to deliver a Grassroots Contribution process.

Yet somehow where we have ended up is the first of these possibilities, a Grassroots Donation. And the difference between those two things means that not only is a Grassroots Levy increasingly likely, it is quickly becoming almost inevitable.

Here’s how that Grassroots Donation is operating in practice:

Somewhere inside a major promoter, or agency or management company, a tick box spreadsheet sits alongside the contract for a large scale event. This is the sort of thing I get in trouble for, but also the reason you probably subscribe to this column; the name of the organisation that created that spreadsheet is Live Nation, and they are the key driving force behind the accidental adoption across the industry of the Grassroots Donation, having decided, for a variety of reasons (some stated publicly and some held in private) that as a company they will not commit to any Grassroots Contribution.

The tick box spreadsheet presents the Grassroots Donation as one item on a list of charitable causes an artist’s team can choose to support with a small add-on to the ticket price, alongside things like a rainforest fund or a mental health charity. The controller of the ticket price, let’s stick with Live Nation as the example because between them and their various subsidiaries and wholly owned entities they control over 60% of the arena and stadium market, invites the artist team to tick a box, or tick two boxes, or tick no boxes at all. If the box for the £1 to support the grassroots ecosystem gets ticked, what gets said afterwards, in the press and often within the industry itself, is that the artist has donated to the grassroots ecosystem. It’s worth you referring back to the definitions again, because that presentation of what transpired at a contractual level is not in dispute.

A donation is what has happened in the widely understood meaning of the word, although it’s worth noting that HM Treasury don’t agree that it technically qualifies as a donation in the true meaning of the term. Otherwise they wouldn’t be taking VAT out of it, further lowering the value of this mechanism in its ability to support the grassroots ecosystem. But I digress; we are already arguing about what words mean between donation, contribution and levy, and the disagreement between the industry and the Chancellor on whether this or is not legally a donation is not the most challenging part of this discussion. The much bigger problem is that ‘donation’ was never meant to be the defining word of the £1 concept anyway.

Nobody in the live industry runs any of the other charges on a ticket this way, and there’s a version of this that is, genuinely, properly comical once you stop and consider it for a few minutes. A ticket for an arena or stadium show sometimes carries a facility fee. It sometimes carries a refurbishment fee, sometimes a maintenance levy, or a restoration levy for the building itself. It often carries a fulfilment fee for the privilege of the ticket existing, a transaction fee for buying the ticket with a credit card rather than a jar full of pennies, and, increasingly, a variety of bizarre, seemingly impossible to fathom fees, like the one to ‘print your ticket at home’.

There is not now, nor has there ever been, a meeting anywhere in this industry where the promoter, the ticketing company and the venue operator sit patiently around a table waiting for the artist’s team to confirm whether the refurbishment fee should apply this time, and there is certainly no spreadsheet handed to that team with facility fee, fulfilment fee, transaction fee or the print your ticket at home fee on it. There is no tick box spreadsheet which invites artists or managers to decide which ones they would like to include. And that’s because everybody in the industry understands those fees apply, without asking the artist or their representatives anything, because they’re accepted as the ordinary cost of putting a show on sale. All those fees are, and I want you to dwell on this point because it is the whole argument that has been made since 2018, the cost of playing a show at above 5000 capacity.

The Grassroots Contribution, not the Grassroots Donation, was designed to sit in exactly this category of charges from the first conversations about it in 2018. It has, somewhere between then and now, been quietly moved to the table with the rainforest fund instead. That distinction, the income certainty of a blanket, necessary shared responsibility versus the highly unpredictable revenue arising from an entirely laudable gift, accounts for most of what’s been going wrong ever since.

A Grassroots Contribution means it always happens unless somebody actively objects; it’s standard practice, the cost of doing business in the UK. A Grassroots Donation assumes it doesn’t happen unless somebody actively asks, and in an industry built on managing access to artists and curating carefully what does and doesn’t reach their desk, too often the opportunity to support the grassroots ecosystem simply gets lost in a lot of conversations about cable lengths and a lighting gantry. What results from that isn’t a refusal to accept the importance to the UK of a thriving grassroots sector. What results instead is an unintended, but entirely predictable, silence. A Grassroots Donation mechanism is not built to default toward inclusion; it was built to require an active, individual act of generosity that somebody else first has to think to invite and then someone else has to think is worth supporting.

The addition of the international question to this already dysfunctional mix sharpens this whole issue considerably. A UK based artist, presented with the opportunity of a Grassroots Donation, might understandably feel some ethical pull toward a cause framed as supporting the rooms they came up through, even operating inside a donation model that offers no structural reason or requirement to say yes. An international artist arriving to play a UK arena has no equivalent historical pull. If they didn’t come up through the UK grassroots circuit and didn’t tour it, nothing about a charitable tick box gives their team any particular reason to choose it over the rainforest fund, or over nothing at all. Ask an international act to donate and there is no obvious answer to the question of why this cause rather than any other on the list. Tell them, as France does, that playing a French stadium comes with a fixed cost attached to every single ticket regardless of who’s on stage, and the question of why never gets asked, because there was never a choice to argue about it in the first place.

Every promoter operating in France, whatever passport the headliner carries, pays 3.5% of the ticket’s face value into the fund that supports French grassroots venues, promoters, festivals, and artists, and does so without complaint, because there is nothing to complain about; it’s simply what the show costs. And so you are clear on this, those promoters in France are exactly the same companies that have pushed in the UK for a Grassroots Donation system that simply isn’t delivering what was planned.

A blanket contribution from every show was always meant to be the model. The UK industry’s own version, a Grassroots Contribution agreed as a Voluntary Blanket shared responsibility and calculated at £1 on every ticket sold for a UK show above five thousand capacity, was designed to deliver a minimum of £20 million a year, treated across the board as a standing cost in the same way the PA system or the venue’s security detail is a standing cost, not as a personal decision belonging to whoever happens to be topping the bill that night. It was conceived as the industry’s replacement for a Research and Development investment function it used to perform itself and largely stopped performing once labels and promoters consolidated into global businesses with no room left on the balance sheet for absorbing years of loss on an unproven act playing a two hundred capacity room. That pound was never intended as charity toward the grassroots venues, promoters, artists or festivals that carry that risk for free. It was reinvestment in the pipeline that keeps producing the artists worth putting into arenas and stadiums in the first place, funded by the part of the industry that now profits handsomely from the far end of that pipeline while contributing almost nothing to the start of it.

None of this is about whether individual artists want to help. Most of them, on every piece of evidence available to this sector and to me personally, do. What the industry built instead was a mechanism that depends on that goodwill being actively solicited and then voluntarily exercised, tour by tour, through a system whose default setting is, frankly, that nobody gets around to asking.

If this doesn’t change, a Grassroots Levy is coming, and it will not arrive in the gentle shape some people in this industry appear to be assuming or are content to wander into accidentally. A Grassroots Donation, no matter how sincerely and with such fantastic supportive intent delivered by the artists and their representatives who have chosen to make one, is never going to reach the scale that a properly understood and delivered Grassroots Contribution would deliver.

One of the most basic rules of fundraising it that a contribution applied by everybody as a matter of course always, and I mean always, raises more than a donation solicited from anybody who finds themselves in a charitable mood. In considering where we are and where we can possibly get to with a Grassroots Donation mechanism and not the Grassroots Contribution that was designed from the outset to be the default, the government is eventually going to get out its calculator, compare what is being raised with what it was said could be raised, and very quickly realise that the gap between a Grassroots Donation and a Grassroots Contribution is a vast chasm of closed venues, cancelled tours, and bankrupt promoters and festivals. And comparing what can possibly be delivered by a Grassroots Donation or a Grassroots Levy? Well, good luck trying to explain that decision to communities whose last remaining venue just closed down.

Let’s be specific about what that gap is. If every ticket that can possible contain the Grassroots Donation in the UK in 2026 is sold it would raise £6.7 million. If a Grassroots Contribution system was in place, and every ticket that could possibly contain it was sold, it would raise £24.6 million. People in the industry like to talk about reduced capacities and tickets not sold, so let’s knock that down to a simple £5 million and £20 million. And then let’s consider what a Grassroots Levy, option 3, actually looks like financially.

When a government legislates because an industry has proved it cannot manage a pound on its own, there is no reason whatsoever to expect that government will legislate for a pound. France did not set its Grassroots Levy as a flat fee. It set it as a percentage of the ticket price, one that rises as ticket prices rise, and that costs an industry built on ever more expensive arena and stadium tickets a great deal more than the sum it has spent the best part of a decade insisting, voluntarily, it could not spare. And on that model, adopted in the UK, if a Grassroots Levy was put in place, with the same rules, it would raise an estimated £80 million.

Opting for a Grassroots Donation process, refusing to treat this whole process as a Grassroots Contribution, delivering £5 million when you said you would be delivering £20 million, while all the time the government knows it could be generating £80 million, is not protecting the industry from an unwanted Grassroots Levy.

It is guaranteeing that one is coming.

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