Music venues are a lifeline for the survival of musicians
- TJCUK Team
- 2 hours ago
- 6 min read
Written by Yolanda Charles MBE, Trustee on The Jazz Centre UK
First published Nov 16, 2025 on @yolandacharles on substack
A venue is not just a place to watch & listen to music. It is the way we will be able to preserve musicians' careers and enable people to experience music in an unfiltered, authentic form.
Music venues will become essential for preserving music made by musicians, maintaining a tradition and a fundamental part of society that goes far beyond the just over 100 years of recorded music.
We no longer gather to sing songs. There is no longer a piano in every middle-class drawing room and British public house. Since the popularity of recorded music began its takeover, we have gradually lost the way music brought us together with shared experiences and connection.
We listened together in awe of this new technology in the 1920s, then we stopped singing. We gathered at clubs and parties, then we stopped dancing. We shared albums, we collected them, buying huge numbers of records, and made music into a business of great wealth (for a few), but then we stopped buying. We stayed in our homes listening alone; we didn’t share because we catered for one. We stopped going out unless someone important was in town, and today we give our entertainment budget to one or two artists, with ticket prices impossible for many fans.
Then came AI, and we find the business model is being adjusted to now replace musicians - the former lifeblood of the whole industry.
Many would argue that this is just technology advancing as it does, and you can’t resist because the calculator didn’t destroy the need for humans to calculate, it just “helped” - “is convenient” - “don’t be a luddite,” goes the argument. So many argue in support of this technology, and the latest blow to musicians. But I won’t go into the morality of AI's existence or go in depth about what it is doing to the creative sector.
This essay is about the importance of preserving live music venues.
There is so much more to going to see a concert or gig than just having a good night out or seeing your favourite musician perform up close.
Recorded music and who makes it are fast becoming the domain of non-instrumentalists.
The commodification of sharing music began long before this AI takeover, but now this trend will decimate the careers of many musicians. If society does not act to create a system of support for musicians, we will lose a vital part of the human experience.
Our ability to communicate through human-made music extends far beyond the timeline of technology. It goes back to singing to your child as they fall asleep. What was being sung? Lyrics and stories shared within a community. Songs with meaning that reflected the people from whom the music came. We celebrated with music at ceremonies and used music to send messages and to connect across cultures.
The importance, significance and relevance of the music a society makes cannot be overstated.
If our government wants to allow recorded music made by AI to be scraped from human works, thereby killing our income revenue — many solely rely on royalties and the ability to own IP of their works, the government must invest in the live sector to preserve the traditions, musicians’ careers, and the public’s desire for this history-preserving art form.
Those who actually play instruments, compose, and perform unique works, thereby contributing to society's culture, must be protected from the tech takeover.
The business of making music has been evolving constantly over the past 100 years and is now approaching a point where it is being taken over by those who cannot play an instrument but rely heavily on tech to create their music.
The business of performance is the domain of human musicians.
Those who have worked for years to learn a skill and become adept with their instrument of choice. Those who can tap into the magic of what listening to live music brings to both the audience and the other musicians on the stage. This cannot be replaced and should never be.
There are some experiences that exist not because we are old-fashioned or lack modern skills, inventiveness or access to the latest advancements in technology; some things we do because they are necessary for a life that isn’t only functional but also has joy, beauty, happiness, community and meaning within.
Music is a contributor to this, but our modern world is fostering a replicated, hollow version of ourselves, replacing our experiences of how we listen and what we hear with shallow imitation.
Technology has its uses; we can co-exist with innovation without losing the things we love to do.
Advances in tech can already offer more than we use it for. If an automated system could feed us nutrition so we could survive, would we want that instead of placing food into our mouths to receive the energy for life? Of course not, the idea is abhorrent; to replace eating actual food with intravenous input or to merely survive with a capsule swallowed daily.
Music is food for our souls. Yet we are losing what that gives us by being ‘fed’ recorded music that has less and less meaning and will eventually become dominated by AI output. Our society - governments with their agendas aimed towards allowing the tech sector to take over the arts, and tech companies, uncaring about what they are delivering to the masses, would feed us our experience of music without the beauty of how music is actually made.
Without the live listening experience, we are losing what happens to the body & mind when the physical sound of a voice nearby is sending the song of their soul to our ears.
We cannot lose this.
The facts are that musicians hold up this industry through what could be classed as volunteer work. We work for free out of vocation-led passion, often resulting in being taken advantage of.
We get together, collaborate, write music with much exploration and investment - both in time and money, until we land on the right collaborations and songs, all worked into our calendar of life without pay.
We share, we go out and watch each other play because we are, first and foremost, fans of music ourselves. We are rarely compensated appropriately for our work, and never at the hourly rate that trained professionals expect (with the exception of studio session work, as regulated by the Musicians’ Union in the UK).
Every penny coming in from our work is essential to our survival. Few musicians work today without supplementing their income from doing other jobs. We use that income to pay into the process of creating original works. Because of streaming and AI takeover of recorded music, we are losing those pennies — this change is creating an unsustainable music career for most.
Playing live is becoming the only way to really make a living. We sell merchandise and we gain a share of ticket sales (sometimes gaining a profit, sometimes not covering the costs of putting on the show). One CD purchase far outstrips streaming - 1500 streams is roughly equivalent to one CD sale. Sometimes it works out well, but the smaller venues we need for this life are closing at an accelerated rate.
The live sector isn’t about massive concerts; it’s about the small venues and the accumulated experience and connection we receive.
If those venues aren’t supported, literally funded by governments to exist, like other sectors of business receive subsidies, they will disappear. Of course, the wealthy will always have the resources to stay working effectively “for free”, but where does true talent lie?
Everywhere.
Talent exists in the poorest sectors of society as well as among those with the most resources to nurture it. We will lose all the people who could never choose music as a career, despite having prodigious talent, the will to succeed, and the dedication to work hard.
The Live Music sector must be supported, invested in, and have a publicly funded arm so that predatory businesses like Live Nation, Ticketmaster, and others cannot further exploit a system that needs to support the humans who make the art.
This is urgent.
The AI takeover is going so fast that we have no idea about who we’ve already lost to despair, so many will have decided not to pursue music as a career, or are studying today with a sense of futility about their future. We must protect our young musicians who are studying hard to become the next generation of composers, those who will go on to create new genres and influence the evolution of our society.
Music reflects society, and music shapes it.
AI-created music is here now and we must accept that, but the live music sector must stay healthy, and in fact grow, to allow the preservation of music in its honest, authentic and most meaningful form.
Please consider donating to the MUSIC VENUE TRUST (UK)
Also… try to book a local gig or concert as a gift or for a night out. Your attendance at shows is our lifeline and helps musicians and venues in your communities.
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