#TBF26 Q&A: Protecting and progressing grassroots venues

The Music Venue Trust represents 801 grassroots music venues across the UK and has spent 12 years protecting the sector.

According to the organisation’s chief executive and founder, Mark Davyd, this year is the first when it has had enough resources and partners to move away from defence and into something more purposeful.

MVT is now building programmes that are designed to change the economics of running a grassroots music venue permanently.

Ahead of TheTicketingBusiness Forum 2026, which will take place from April 27-29 at Manchester’s Emirates Old Trafford, we spoke with Mark to learn more.

TheTicketingBusiness: What projects are you currently working on?

Mark Davyd: “The main focus is a set of investment programmes we launched at Venues Day this month, developed with LIVE Trust and funded through the Grassroots Levy pilot.

“Each one targets a different cost that venues have been absorbing for years without any realistic prospect of fixing; energy, equipment, artist accommodation, backstage conditions, financial literacy, the collapse of touring in large parts of the country.

“The model is central delivery with no capital cost to venues, because the whole point is that these are problems individual operators can’t solve from their own margins.

“We’re also running Everywhere At Once in June, 500+ venues across one weekend powered by the National Lottery, which is the public-facing moment.

“The investment programmes are the structural work underneath it.”

TTB: What are your aims for 2026?

MD: “To find out if we were right. We’ve argued for years that what this sector needs is permanent infrastructure change rather than emergency funding, and now we’re in a position to test that properly.

“Some of it will be straightforward. Some of it will run into complications we haven’t anticipated; listed buildings, complex leases, operators who are too stretched to engage with a new programme however beneficial it is.

“On the policy side, the voluntary levy has a June deadline, business rates relief needs to go further, and there’s a serious case to be made to Treasury for a dedicated tax relief for grassroots venues.

“I want all of that to move. But the thing that will define 2026 for us is whether the investment programmes land as designed or teach us something we didn’t know.”

TTB: What’s the next challenge for you and your team?

MD: “Delivery across a membership of 801 venues that spans every nation and region of the UK, every type of building, every kind of operator.

“Central infrastructure sounds clean as a concept until you’re working through the specifics of a particular venue in a particular building with a particular lease and an operator who has three other things on fire that week.

“We’re also not operating in a vacuum; the policy environment needs constant attention, the levy is at a critical point, and the relationship between what we’re building on the ground and what we’re arguing in Westminster has to remain coherent.

“It’s a lot to hold at once, which is probably how it’s always been.”

TTB: What is the most exciting development in the industry for you right now?

MD: “What we announced at Venues Day, but the excitement isn’t really about the announcements.

“It’s about the shift in what’s possible. For most of the last decade the conversation about grassroots venues has been conducted almost entirely in the register of loss; what’s closing, what’s under threat, what government isn’t doing.

“We’ve made that argument because it needed making and it’s produced real results.

“But it has limits, and one of those limits is that it frames the sector as something to be preserved rather than something worth investing in.

“The programmes we’ve launched treat venues as infrastructure and proceed accordingly.

“Whether that reframing sticks is the more interesting question, and we won’t know the answer for a while yet.”

Explore the future of ticketing with Mark Davyd and hundreds of other industry leaders at #TBF26 at Emirates Old Trafford, Manchester, from April 27-29.

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