For a long time, running a grassroots music venue as a not-for-profit was treated as something faintly embarrassing. A bit worthy. A bit earnest. The organisational equivalent of saying you’d moved back in with your parents “just for a bit” while you worked things out. It was what you did when the commercial model had failed, when the sums no longer added up, when the dream had gone slightly sour. The implication was always the same: this was a retreat from ambition, a consolation prize for people who hadn’t quite cracked it.

That story no longer holds, and the reality has flipped so completely that it’s starting to look like the old commercial model was the strange experiment all along, and this is the correction. What’s happening now, quietly but unmistakably, is that venue operators across the country are choosing to move into not-for-profit structures not because they’ve given up, but because they’ve finally worked out what they’re actually running. And once they do that, something unexpected happens. Things start to get a little easier. Not immediately, not dramatically, but in ways that matter when you’ve spent years operating at the edge of viability while being told that this is just how business works.

There is no champagne moment where the clouds part and the spreadsheets suddenly glow with good news. There is paperwork, lawyers, accountants who inhale sharply through their teeth, and the slightly unnerving experience of explaining to people that no, you haven’t “become a charity”, and yes, the bar will still be open. But once the dust settles, once the new structure beds in, once everyone stops waiting for the other shoe to drop, the purse strings loosen just enough to notice. Tiny changes to taxation. Marginal shifts in business rates treatment. Access to bits of funding that had previously been politely out of reach. None of it revolutionary in isolation, but stacked together it creates something that has been almost entirely absent from grassroots venues for years: breathing space.

And it’s in that breathing space that the real human impact shows itself. Because venue operators who haven’t paid themselves properly in years, sometimes decades, do something quietly extraordinary. They pay themselves a wage. Not a windfall, not a bonus, not a reward for heroism. Just enough to be able to say, usually with a mixture of pride and disbelief, “I earned minimum wage this month.” That sentence shouldn’t be shocking. In any other industry it wouldn’t even be worth mentioning. In grassroots music, it lands like a plot twist, because it reveals how warped the old normal had become.

These are not people who were failing. They were running busy venues, putting on hundreds of shows a year, employing staff, training sound engineers, giving first breaks to artists, anchoring nightlife in towns and cities that would otherwise go dark at 9pm. The idea that all of that labour, risk and responsibility was routinely rewarded with nothing at all somehow became normalised, usually under the banner of resilience. What the shift to not-for-profit does is strip away the fiction that this was ever sustainable, and replace it with something closer to honesty.

It’s important to be clear here, because this is where the conversation often gets muddled. Nearly all of these venues are not becoming full-blown charities. They are becoming Community Interest Companies. That distinction matters. CICs are still trading organisations. They still sell tickets. They still sell beer. They still have to make the sums work. What they stop doing is pretending that the primary purpose of the venue is private extraction. Once that honesty is in place, everything else starts to line up. Surpluses are reinvested rather than quietly absorbed. Decisions are made with longevity in mind rather than short-term survival. Conversations with staff become easier, because everyone understands what the venue is actually for.

There is also a psychological shift that doesn’t show up neatly in charts or tables, but you hear it again and again from people who’ve made the move. People sleep better. They stop having the same circular argument with themselves at three in the morning about whether one more risky show might finally turn things around. They stop internalising failure in a system that was never designed to reward what they were doing. The relief is emotional as much as financial, and once you’ve seen it, it’s very hard to unsee.

There’s an unavoidable absurdity running through all of this. For years, we have told people running cultural infrastructure that they should behave like normal small businesses, while loading them with expectations that no normal small business is asked to carry. Be commercially ruthless, but culturally generous. Keep ticket prices low, but cover ever-rising costs. Compete in a free market, but absorb losses on behalf of the entire industry. Somewhere between “This Must Be the Place” and “Once in a Lifetime”, we decided this was a perfectly reasonable way to organise things.

The move to not-for-profit is, in many ways, venues quietly opting out of that particular piece of magical thinking. It isn’t anti-business. It’s pro-reality. It’s a recognition that if your core activity is culturally valuable but structurally loss-making, then designing your organisation around private profit is not ambition, it’s denial.

Community ownership often follows naturally from this realisation. Once a venue accepts that it exists for a public purpose, the question of who owns the building stops being abstract. Short leases, speculative landlords and precarious rent arrangements don’t sit comfortably with a mission built around long-term cultural value. Owning the freehold, or placing the asset into community hands, becomes less about ideology and more about self-defence. It slows things down. It allows planning. It turns a venue from something that extracts value from its neighbourhood into something that is protected by it.

None of this is a silver bullet, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Not-for-profit status does not fix broken touring circuits or magically rebalance the economics of live music overnight. It does not replace the need for proper policy reform, fairer taxation, or industry-wide contributions to the ecosystem that underpins everyone else’s success. And it absolutely must not become an excuse for government or industry to step back and say, “Well, they’re charities now, they’ll cope.”

If anything, the opposite is true. The rapid move towards not-for-profit and community ownership models should be read as a warning flare. It is the sector telling us, as clearly as it knows how, that the commercial environment no longer protects what it depends on, and that people have adapted because they had to.

This is why it feels increasingly inevitable that not-for-profit will become the dominant model for cultural programming at grassroots music venues, and before long the accepted industry standard. Not because it is fashionable, or virtuous, or neat, but because it aligns structures with reality in a way the old model never did. It allows venues to exist as what they actually are: pieces of cultural infrastructure that generate enormous public value, even when they struggle to generate private profit.

There is one final point that needs to be said plainly, even if it makes people uncomfortable. Anyone currently operating a grassroots music venue as a sole trader needs to stop and rethink immediately. That doesn’t mean switching to not-for-profit overnight, but it does mean recognising that unlimited personal liability is not a badge of honour. In our experience, sole traders are by far the most exposed, the most personally at risk, and the most likely to disappear quietly when things go wrong. Too often, when a sole-trader venue closes, it doesn’t just take a stage with it. It takes someone’s savings, their mental health, and a chunk of their life.

The sector has spent years celebrating resilience without ever asking who was paying for it. What’s happening now is that venue operators are refusing to keep absorbing that cost alone. They are choosing structures that protect people as well as places, that prioritise continuity over heroics, and that give cultural spaces a chance to exist beyond the exhaustion of individual sacrifice.

Grassroots music venues were never just businesses. They were never just stepping stones. They were places where people learned who they were, what they could do, and who they might become. The fact that so many of them are now choosing to formalise that truth, rather than pretending otherwise, is not a retreat from ambition.

38% of the Grassroots Music Venues in the UK are now registered as a not-for-profit organisation. The sector is growing up.

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