GIGCO Has Big Plans for The Future of Live Music: Supporting Small Venues

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GIGCO

5 min readOct 24, 2022

Small music venues face big pressures which were amplified by the recent pandemic. Countless have closed their doors and, if no action is taken, many more will follow. GIGCO is connecting artists and venues, to protect our vibrant music scene and your local venues.

The global music industry was hit hard during the pandemic. Lockdowns resulted in the loss of live music and, without a safety net in place, one-third of all jobs in the UK music industry were lost.

Read on to find out how small venues have been affected, and what GIGCO are doing to help them get back on their feet.

Lockdown losses

In what felt like endless isolation, we found ourselves questioning what we missed most about life before the lockdown, and most of us came to the same conclusion: social events. For music lovers, that means gigs but, with the pressures of the pandemic, grassroots venues are now £90 million in debt, and over 500 venues are on the brink of closing their doors for good.

Support for the live sector is especially important, since the UK and EU’s failure to agree on visa-free travel is hitting touring musicians hard, and live music revenue fell by 90 percent during the pandemic. Government schemes didn’t do enough to support those in an industry that’s three-quarters self-employed, through a collapse that everyone saw coming.

Virtual venues

Public support during the pandemic for crowdfunding movements like #SaveOurVenues tells us that this isn’t just a concern for artists, promoters, and venue owners. Virtual gigs were set up as temporary placeholders for the real deal, but the intimate experience of live music in person is like nothing else. Zoom’s no place for a stage dive, and you can’t share a post-gig pint with the band around a virtual bar.

Supporting artists from the ground up

Hometown venues are the proving grounds of aspiring artists that are looking for a space to get creative, develop their sound, and find their musical feet. Smaller venues are vital if the next generation of artists is to be as successful as the last and, with every small venue that closes, an untold number of local bands and aspiring artists lose their opportunity. For so many now-established artists, their first hometown gig is an important stepping stone on the path to success. Local lad and two-time Brit Award winner Sam Fender was discovered by his now-manager at the Low Lights pub, just down the road from GIGCO HQ in North Shields. No matter how big they make it, every musician starts small.

Keep music LIVE

Recent surveys found that 75 percent of the public felt proud of the UK music industry, and it’s no wonder, given that the UK is the second largest exporter of music in the world. So small music venues deserve to be front and center in the cultural conversation.

The UK is home to a number of small world-famous venues, like Glasgow’s King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, where Oasis were signed in 1993, and the Forum in Tunbridge Wells, where artists like Adele and Green Day cut their teeth on tour before making it big on the world stage. These 300-capacity venues inspire pride in their local communities and are now popular destinations for music tourists from around the world. In 2019, Music by Numbers reported that music tourism alone — that’s the total spent by non-residents at gigs and festivals in the UK — brought £4.7 billion to the economy. But the pandemic devastated the music tourism industry, and they chose not to include a section about it at all in their 2021 review.

Shaken not shutdown

Small venues can be a springboard for new artists, but they can also be the cornerstone of a community, and recent studies prove what music lovers have known for years: that shared listening improves your mood.

It’s impossible to measure the extent to which the last couple of years have disrupted the music industry, and how well the UK will recover culturally from the pandemic is unknown.

Small venues need to be protected.

That’s where we come in.

Make every venue a music venue

Small venues are the strongest stitches in the fabric of our vibrant music culture, and GIGCO wants to see that foundation take on even greater strength in the face of potential collapse. Our mission is to connect artists, venues, and fans — cutting costs and the need for third-party intermediaries in the process. GIGCO puts people and parties directly in touch, so that venues can see which artists are available, and artists can see which venues are looking for musicians to book.

Instantly deployable smart contracts developed on the Solana blockchain make bookings secure, protecting artists, venues, and fans against no-shows and cancellations. Plus, venues won’t have to worry about the risk of booking artists that don’t attract fans, because users can buy tickets via the app and give venues an estimated number of attendees. Grassroots venues can open their doors knowing that they’re protected, so your next gig could be in a local record store, bookshop, or restaurant.

What’s On?

GIGCO’s first feature will be a What’s On guide of all live music events, no matter how big or small. It will help venues, especially smaller venues list all their events so that music fans can find live music all around them. We understand that listing events and using socials like Facebook and Instagram for marketing purposes has very little or no organic reach these days. Long gone are the days when Facebook events could be easily placed into the feeds of music fans, and fans could share them.

We hope venues will jump on board with this initiative and eventually see the value of listing gigs themselves. All the most advantageous tools for promoting events available on social media platforms will combine into a music-specific social app.

The future of live music is just around the corner.