Britain’s live music industry is currently on a knife’s edge. Ever-increasing costs are making it nearly impossible for the small artists who form the backbone of the industry to record, produce, and bring their music to audiences, while the spaces created for live music to thrive are also falling victim to the volatile economy we find ourselves in. 2023 saw yet another year of tragic closures of music venues up and down the country, with 76 venues permanently closing between February 2023 and September 2023 according to Music Venue Trust, with 42.1% of these closures coming as a result of financial issues.
But while there are those who are suffering, there is an undisputed arrogance by some of those at the zenith of the industry. Nothing perhaps illustrates the hilarity of this arrogance more than the creation of the Co-op Live Arena, a £365 million venue that has been marketed as Britain’s newest, and most premier arena experience. Nestled in the Etihad Campus next to the City of Manchester Stadium, it (barely) manages to crown itself as the UK’s biggest indoor arena.
For those otherwise unaware, you would think that a city such as Manchester, a city that has often found itself highlighting the musical talent it has managed to produce over the years, would be surely deserving of an arena of such stature. However, this would be the case if the arena wasn’t found a mere 2.5 mile drive away from Britain’s (now) second biggest arena, the AO Arena. So, despite all of that money being spent, Britain’s newest arena is set to provide room for an extra 2,500 people compared to it’s predecessor, something that would maybe be excusable if the AO Arena was set to be demolished, or closed down, except it isn’t, so what was entirely the point?
As news emerges this week of yet another delay to the arena’s opening, with A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie‘s show being cancelled due to a technical fault on the 1st of May. A slew of artists, including Olivia Rodrigo, and Keane have announced that shows set to be held there are being postponed, pending new dates. While hometown heroes Take That have even made the decision to shift all of their upcoming Manchester dates to where they would usually find themselves playing – the AO Arena.
Haunted by the irony of the comments made by former executive director Gary Roden, who told the BBC that small venues were “poorly ran”, and that the suggestion of a £1 levy per ticket towards small venues put forward by Music Venue Trust would be “too simplistic”. It’s safe to say that the arena’s lacklustre start to life is symbolic of its materialistic, ego-driven creation in the first place. A frail attempt at drawing attention away from the chasms appearing throughout every aspect of this country’s live music industry.
What remains is a bitterness in the mouths of the paying customer. There are those who will have purchased travel and accommodation, booked time off work, maybe even have paid for childcare, in order to go and experience one of life’s greatest pleasures, all for it to be marred because of the desperation to rush this project into the beady eyes of PR folk by executives who have been counting their chickens long before they have hatched.
Last summer, Bill Cummings spoke about the disjointed pipeline from bottom to the top, especially for female artists, while Katie Macbeth spoke similarly this year about the stale nature of British festival line-ups. Two key issues facing the British music industry, and both are (at least partially) solved by a more determined effort by those at every level of the live music industry, but especially those at the top, to support and invest in the smallest of stages that can be found on our shores.
The reality is that the Britain truly does not need more 20,000+ capacity arenas, it needs an unwavering amount of support for the venues that are formative to each town and city’s night life and gig culture throughout Britain. According to the This Is Music 2023 Report, 2022 saw a whopping 37 million people generate ticket revenue, an all-time high, and it’s only set to increase as the years pass, which means that now is the time to invest, and put an end to the financial disparity that small venues suffer from.
Co-op Live’s disastrous first few attempts will later become a footnote in the venue’s history as time goes by, but as we lose more and more small venues with each passing month, will we end up with anyone left to play there?
