Music Venues Are In Crisis – Can Sponsorship Help Preserve Our Grassroots Spaces?

Two grassroots venues a month have been closing across the UK for years. The Music Venue Trust’s latest annual report puts it in hard numbers: 30 grassroots venues shut permanently between July 2024 and July 2025, another 48 stopped putting on gigs altogether, and 53.8 percent of the venues still open made no profit at all last year. MVT is now warning that without a statutory grassroots levy, the next wave of closures lands before the end of 2026. At the same time, festival sponsorship is the fastest growing line on the industry’s balance sheet. Grassroots venues are where DJs get bad and then good, where a sound gets tested on fifty people before it gets tested on fifty thousand.