Who are gigs really for anymore?
As ticket price soar and grassroots venues disappear, live music is drifting out of reach.
There was a time when seeing live music felt like participation rather than privilege. A ticket meant entry into a shared experience: a room full of strangers singing the same words, sweaty and euphoric, briefly equal. Increasingly, that idea feels nostalgic.
This week, reports of Harry Styles tickets reaching £700 or more through platinum pricing reignited a familiar debate about affordability in live music. For many fans, this didn’t come as a shock. It felt like another reminder of how exclusion has quietly become part of the system. When three-figure ticket prices are treated as standard and four figures as an acceptable extreme, something fundamental shifts about who live music is actually for.
This isn’t about “cancelling” Harry Styles, I paid his prices myself earlier this week. But right now, he’s the clearest example of how the upper end of the live music economy works. His tour has also highlighted the industry’s growing reliance on gestures of mitigation, including the promise that £1 from each ticket sold will be donated to grassroots venues.
Grassroots venues desperately need funding, and that matters. But it’s worth asking whether symbolic contributions can ever balance out a system that increasingly prices fans out altogether. When tickets cost £700, a £1 donation begins to feel less like structural support and more like a moral offset: acknowledgement without accountability.
What makes this moment especially uncomfortable is its timing. The pricing controversy has unfolded during Independent Venue Week, an annual campaign intended to celebrate grassroots music spaces across the UK. These venues, often operating on razor-thin margins, are closing at an alarming rate. Rising rents, energy bills and declining footfall have pushed many beyond viability, leaving communities without the rooms that once anchored local music scenes.
Independent venues are where live music has traditionally been most accessible: low ticket prices + new artists = low stakes for audiences but high energy in the room. They are also where many of today’s arena-filling artists learned how to perform to a crowd. Losing them is more than a logistical problem and is a cultural one; these spaces aren’t interchangeable, and once they’re gone, they rarely come back.
The contradiction at the heart of the current moment is stark. At the bottom of the ecosystem, doors are closing. At the top, prices are soaring far beyond the reach of many fans. Somewhere in between, the idea of live music as a shared public culture is thinning out.
Defenders of platinum pricing argue that these systems simply reflect demand — that tickets will always find their “true market value”. But culture isn’t meant to function like the stock exchange. When access is governed purely by who can afford it, participation becomes conditional. Fandom becomes transactional. Live music shifts from something collective into something to be acquired.
The cost isn’t only financial. Trust between fans and the live music industry is wearing thin. Gigs are starting to feel less spontaneous and more like something to aspire to. Social media sharpens that feeling: being there becomes proof of access, a status marker as much as a source of joy.
The real risk isn’t that some people pay more for better seats. It’s that a generation starts to believe live music isn’t for them, not even occasionally. Without grassroots venues as easy entry points, and with arena tickets becoming increasingly out of reach, a gap opens where casual discovery and lifelong fandom once thrived.
Independent Venue Week exists to remind us that music scenes are built slowly, from the ground up. They rely on affordable tickets, repeat visits and communities that can keep showing up. An industry that prices people out at both ends risks hollowing itself out, an industry that dazzles at the top but is fragile everywhere else.
This isn’t a call to cancel artists or to pretend large-scale touring isn’t expensive. It’s a call to think harder about what we are willing to treat as normal. When live music becomes a luxury instead of a shared experience, something essential slips away. And it is rarely the people setting the prices who feel that loss first.
Live music has always been about more than what happens onstage. It is about access, intimacy and the sense that culture belongs to everyone in the room. The question now is whether the industry still believes that, or whether it has quietly decided that some rooms are only meant for the people who can comfortably afford to get through the door.
My first Substack of the year!!! Shoutout to all of the grassroots venues and to all of the Harry Styles fans that have spent hours in TM waiting rooms this past week x