175 towns where the tour no longer stops

Music Venue Trust says 175 UK towns and cities that still have grassroots venues no longer receive regular touring shows — the clearest sign yet that the live music map is quietly shrinking even where the rooms survive.

The venues are there. The bands aren't coming. That's the picture in Music Venue Trust's latest research: 175 towns and cities across the UK that still have working grassroots venues no longer get regular touring shows. The map of live music isn't just losing rooms — it's losing routes.

The mechanics are grimly logical. Touring costs have exploded — vans, fuel, accommodation, crew — while fees at the grassroots level haven't moved. So tours consolidate into fewer, bigger cities where the sums work, and the mid-sized market town with a perfectly good 250-cap room drops quietly off the itinerary. Every skipped town is an audience that stops going to gigs, and a scene that stops producing bands.

MVT's answer is to spend the new levy money on the unglamorous stuff that actually decides whether a tour routes through a room: Raise The Standard is upgrading sound, lights and backline so bands don't have to truck in their own; Stay The Night puts touring artists up overnight; Feel At Home fixes the backstage basics. Make the 250-cap room cheaper to play and the routing maths changes.

For fans, the takeaway is simple and a bit uncomfortable: if you live in one of those 175 towns, the thing that gets you back on the touring map is bodies through the door of the venue you still have. Buy the ticket. Bring a mate.