Europe is closing. “Brexit means Brexit,” reiterates PM Theresa May, buying time until the negotiations for this apparent “hard Brexit” are hammered out. In this political purgatory, businesses are left floundering, unsure about what it will actually mean for them. For British bands touring on the continent, the uncertainty about one of their only certain means of income could not have come at a worse time.
It’s not just bands, agents and tour managers voicing worries about the miasma of ambiguity. Sir John Sorrell, the founder of the Creative Industries Federation, has recently argued that touring acts could be driven off the road due to visa and carnet costs in a post-Brexit Europe. (Carnet is a system governing transportation of equipment across borders without having to complete customs declarations on every item, but they could run up to £2,000 a year.) These will all slash the margins of an artist’s primary source of income. Sorrell said the creative sector is “a key driver of wealth and global success” for the UK. “To imperil that would be to imperil our wider economy.”
Touring agents and managers that I have spoken to off the record in recent months all revealed enormous uncertainty about what will happen to British acts playing shows and festivals across Europe in the aftershock of Brexit. They are trying to put a brave face on things but most are fearing the worst – namely the closure of opportunities and escalating running costs that could make touring utterly unsustainable.
“I think the biggest thing for me as a production manager would be the addition of a carnet for every show outside the UK,” Joel Stanley, production manager at Production Value, told live industry trade magazine IQ in March. “Currently we only ever have to show proof of ownership with the bond and have it stamped in and out if we go outside of the EU – mainly Switzerland – but [post-Brexit we’d need a carnet] even for a one-off show in France.”
Agents and touring artists are already dealing with the aftermath of the decline of the CD business. In the boom years, labels would underwrite shows with tour support and regard this as a marketing investment to break new acts that would then go on, ideally, to sell lots of records, thereby covering that development cost. That is now evaporating to the point where 20-date European tours are being truncated to 10 or eight-date jaunts around Europe, with days off a rare thing because days off mean no money is coming in.
The net effect could be that acts will just focus on a handful of big European cities – but if they all do that, the shrunken market will quickly become over-saturated and everyone will lose. Add in the possibility of requiring a work visa for every European country and costs could spiral before acts have even played their first show of a European tour. This is already making it hard in other major markets; the same system in Europe could be catastrophic.
“Getting visas is an absolute minefield and it costs a lot of money, and it’s the reason that a lot of people don’t get to tour America,” Colin Roberts of Big Life Management told Pitchfork in June. “Even going to a country like Japan where visas are quite easy to get, I know how difficult it is having to factor in the cost and the time to acquire a visa.”
The government loves to pay lip service to the export power of British music, braying and gloating from boxes at the Brit awards about how proud they are of our globally successful artists. Britain, since Beatlemania, has been the second biggest exporter of music globally after the US. There is a huge amount of money at stake here for both artists and the UK economy. A study by UK Music this summer found there were 10.4m “music tourists” coming to the UK in 2015 and their direct and indirect spend was £3.7bn. These are people drawn to the UK because of the live market, its successful music exports and its diverse grassroots scenes.
On top of this, the BPI reports that British acts accounted for one in seven albums sold globally in 2014, with their record sales generating approximately $2.75bn that year. So there are really two issues here: the outbound earnings of the acts on the road, and the inbound earnings that come from the UK being seen as a global force in music.
There is an argument that just because the UK has successfully exported the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Radiohead, Coldplay, Adele and so on, it will just keep doing so forever. It won’t. It needs support and infrastructure at all levels (not just for superstars).
It’s an industry truism that the old model of touring as a loss leader to sell albums has been inverted – records are now loss leaders to promote tours. But if you garrotte the touring opportunities, then everyone down the pecking order suffers, and those at the very bottom suffer first and hardest. Couple this with the systematic closure of key grassroots venues around the UK – something the Music Venue Trust was set up as a registered charity in 2014 to lobby against – and things are starting to look very bleak indeed for the future of British live music.
