Inside live music’s summer of boom and bust

The likes of Oasis and Beyonce have defined a summer of big gigs. But does this mask a splintering of music tastes and the crash of smaller music economies? Fergal Kinney reports.

Bucket hats galore as the Gallaghers reunite after long last. Pic: Helen Fisher

In summer 2025, one music story has dominated the news agenda like no other: the Oasis reunion. And why not? The live return of Oasis, after sixteen years absent from stages, can be viewed as a truly exceptional event: a long-running family feud resolved in a high-grossing, big box office event. For those with tickets – or those refreshing secondary market resale sites in hope of securing one – it’s the exceptionality that drives up the value. Would you want to gamble on the Gallaghers being sufficiently harmonious to tour next year?

But while there is plenty that is exceptional about Oasis:Live 25, in many ways it’s a typical 2020s event, emblematic of one of the decade’s biggest trends. Live music is in the midst of an unprecedented boom. Live Nation reported that concert revenues increased by nearly one-third in 2023, with Goldman Sachs hailing “insatiable growth” in the live sector, which it predicts to continue through the next decade. Though a global trend, it is being felt sharply in the UK, with live music contributing over £6bn to the UK economy for the first time ever last year.

But for anyone working in the British music scene, there is a cognitive dissonance to numbers like this. The live music boom is taking place at the same time as a generational collapse in the bottom and middle tiers of the music economy.

Oasis might be thriving, but the conditions for the next Oasis to rise have arguably never been more challenging in Britain’s post-war history. Live music has become a tale of two sectors: but how has this split happened, and why?

The bust

“The average profit margin of a grassroots venue is 0.48 per cent,” explains Jay Taylor, English regional co-ordinator at the Music Venue Trust, an organisation that advocates for small venues in the UK. That statistic, Taylor argues, is “chilling” for the sector’s ability to adapt to financial stresses.

“The provision of live music, generally, is a loss making activity across the sector now,” he adds. In the 2020s, venues have found out exactly how vulnerable they are to unexpected economic nightmares.

The 2020s began with silence. Pandemic-era experiments with seated, lower capacity shows – working around a constantly changing framework of tiers and restrictions – were barely a sticking plaster on a catastrophic 2020 and 2021. As pandemic restrictions calmed, UK venues were the last to open. Many did not open at all: by 2023, 125 venues in the UK had abandoned live music for good, with more than half of that number simply shutting permanently. This included the esteemed Moles Club in Bath – which opened in the 1970s – as well as Liverpool’s Melodic Distraction, and Velvet Music Rooms in Birmingham.

“In our annual report for 2024, the leading reason for venues being forced to close was financial inviability from increased rents, increased energy prices, changing business rates reliefs, supply costs going up and discrepencies in PRS licenses,” says Jay Taylor, a co-ordinator at the Music Venue Trust. Customers are spending less at the bar – due to both customers having less money and changing habits around alcohol – which is cutting of the sector’s key forms of subsidy.

In 2023, Guardian journalist Daniel Dylan Wray began hearing the same thing from UK artists about what all of this was meaning for their incomes. “You were seeing spikes across the board for everything,” says Wray, “petrol, hotels, food, hire of buses. It was increased costs across the board, but fundementally a stagnation in what (artists) were recieving as income.” This became, in Wray’s term, the “cost of touring crisis.”

In a Guardian investigation, Wray found that even ostensibly successful artists playing to multiple thousand capacity rooms were losing money on tours. Budget sheets reviewed for the article, on condition of anonymity, showed that almost all tours, from 150 to 2,500 capacity shows, made losses.

“Only one was making a profit, and that was a solo artist,” he explains. “Every band was losing money, and it was becoming increasingly unsustainable.” This issue is exacerbating austerity-era shifts in who gets to make music in Britain. “Only those are the very, very top are being able to do that.”

In the 2010s, the promise of streaming for artists was that they could use the platform as a shop window to build their brand, and that recording losses could be recouped by lucrative touring. By 2025, with both recorded music and live music failing to return profit, British musicians are experiencing nightmare conditions that the industry has not yet managed to find any solution for.

“You could argue that cultural changes have taken place, going out to see a band as a means of discovery, we tend to discover music at home on Spotify and then buy a ticket for something we like,” says Wray. “Because everyone’s skint, they will already back things that they already know, and that is increasingly difficult for bands to break through in that hit the road mould.”

The boom

Away from Britain’s smaller rooms and clubs, at the exact same moment, something at the top was stirring. The pandemic had become an atomised and lonely moment for many, and it is unsurprising that audiences seemed to crave something that brought about the exact opposite of that experience: big live music events.