The Post-Enshittocene Music Manifesto – Full Episode 3 Transcript

Cold Open — Where the Singalong Actually Happens

If you recall, in Episode 1, we dreamt of a return to an environment where, with a few guitars and some bravado, you could play a gig and have the audience sing along. That already sounds like such a distant dream, in a world saturated with synthesisers and DJs.

More to the point — where are the live, local gigs for bands, these days? People don’t drink the way they used to. It’s harder for pubs to pay bands, when the bar itself barely breaks even. The scale of live music has grown beyond all imagination. Increasingly, we either attend arena-sized, pyrotechnically-enhanced audiovisual spectacles, or we forgo live music altogether. We expect extravaganzas. We expect the sound to be perfect. We expect a comfortable evening of entertainment — not the glorious free-for-all that used to characterise a live gig.

And, increasingly, live music is falling under the control of a very small number of vast corporations. Ownership of venues, ticketing and touring services is concentrating. Once-vibrant local scenes are being squeezed for every last penny, and so are audiences. It’s a profitable enterprise, for those conglomerates — but it comes at the expense of the artists, the audiences, the smaller venues, and the people trying to organise the tours.

The anthropologist — the late David Graeber — put it best, in an interview about basic income. All rock bands, he said, started on public relief. Give money to working-class kids, and a significant number of them will form bands. A few of those bands will be amazing. And it will benefit the country a thousand times more than all of those kids would have done, had they been lifting boxes, or whatever it is they’re making them do now, as welfare conditionality. I miss David.

Let’s say it out loud. Today, the room you’d play that gig in, the company that sold the ticket, and the festival stage above it, are all, increasingly, owned by the same corporation.

Working-class kids aren’t being given public relief anymore. Instead, they’re attending endless job workshops, polishing already-overqualified résumés for non-existent, menial jobs. Stacking shelves in supermarkets. Working as baristas. For a pittance, when they work at all.

The new, up-and-coming bands never start. The instruments, the sound equipment — beyond their economic reach.

Technology and trends make the process of creating music a more solitary affair, too. Bedroom producers can easily rival the production values a band used to need a studio for. And organising a band — getting it to head in the same artistic direction, while everyone deals with the cost of living and the pressures on their adult relationships — is harder than it’s ever been. Financially, it’s difficult to recover from a few years on the road that end in artistic differences and obscurity. The weight of that risk is heavy.

Streaming media took the record industry. This episode is about who took the room.

The Choke Points — And Why It’s Not Only Ticketing Fees

Before we go looking for a villain, let’s be honest about what’s actually happening on the ground. It’s happening with increasing frequency, these days: artists are cancelling tours. And the reasons are real, boring, and non-conspiratorial.

Some overestimate demand. Artists are learning that streams and online followers don’t reliably translate into sold seats. Touring costs are soaring — inflation has hit travel, especially fuel, and crew wages, production costs, visas, and the loss of freedom of movement since Brexit, have all piled onto the bill for mounting a travelling production. High ticket prices are colliding head-on with consumer fatigue, and wallets already bereft of much discretionary spending power. And the gruelling schedules required to make touring pay are leading to mental or physical burnout, on the road.

It’s only very recently — a few months ago, in fact — that a term was coined to describe the visible symptom of all this. “Blue dot fever.” The empty, unsold seats, showing up in blocks, on online ticketing maps. Common enough now to have its own name, and its own press coverage — Northeastern Global News reported on it in May 2026. We can all point to the popular complaints as the root cause: outrageous booking fees, dynamic pricing. But those might be the smallest part of the problem, not the whole of it.

There’s a mechanism at play that makes the rest of it much harder to fix: vertical integration — across venue ownership, promotion, festivals, primary ticketing, and audience data, all held under one umbrella. The UK Government’s Business and Trade Committee produced a report on exactly this, earlier this year — competition and market functioning in the UK live music industry. They found Live Nation directly controlled 58% of the 23.1 million primary tickets on sale in 2025, rising to 66% including affiliates.

Why does that matter? The Committee concluded that the scale and integrated nature of Live Nation’s business model can make it difficult for artists and managers to operate independently of its ecosystem. This, they said, can reduce opportunities for independent promoters and venues to access and scale artists through the wider touring circuit.

But that’s not all. They found Live Nation uses long-term agreements with restrictive exclusivity terms that make access to its venues contingent on participation in its festivals. Or vice versa. Incentivising artists to consolidate their touring arrangements with the company, and reducing opportunities for competing promoters and events. Independent promoters alleged that venues owned or controlled by Live Nation favour in-house promotion businesses and integrated ticketing arrangements, impeding competition.

In secondary ticketing, the Committee received evidence indicating the restriction of resale activity to Ticketmaster’s own resale platform. Evidence alleged that even where third-party ticket agents participate in sales, they’re required to integrate their systems with Ticketmaster’s — which allows the company to retain customer data, even from a competitor. That data can then be leveraged across promotion, marketing, and event operations. The playing field isn’t level.

And the evidence suggested something more, too: that the level of vertical integration allows Live Nation to subsidise lower-margin, public-facing activities — like promotion — with the higher profits it makes from activities like ticketing. That enables it to offer lucrative, exclusive contracts to top artists that smaller competitors simply can’t match, and to maintain its market position while absorbing losses on lower-performing events. The Committee concluded that there’s been a detrimental impact on the grassroots music industry as a result.

There’s a recent example that makes all of this less abstract. Earlier this year, Ellie Goulding filed a lawsuit — not against Live Nation, but against her own former managers. She alleges they never disclosed that their management company had been bought by Live Nation, first partly, then fully, while they were steering her toward Live Nation companies for touring, merchandise, and a documentary. None of it’s been adjudicated, as of recording this — and Live Nation itself isn’t a defendant. But if the allegations hold up, it’s the vertical integration argument from the inside. Not a boardroom strategy, but one artist’s own manager, quietly incentivised to keep everything in the family.

Let’s break that down into plainer language, so we’re clear about what this episode’s argument can, and can’t, solve. A rival ticketing app, on its own, changes nothing. If the same company owns the venue, the promoter, the ticket, and the artist relationship, an alternative front door doesn’t matter. And no amount of restructuring fixes inflation, or an artist’s burnout, on its own.

Unbundling the Stack

The government’s solution to the choke points, if I can be permitted to loosely summarise, is to charge a ticket levy on big concerts and put the proceeds into a big fund to help grass roots artists and venues. In practice, this will probably just raise the price of tickets to see big artists by the amount of the contribution.

But there’s a bigger problem than that. The levy is voluntary. As of March 2026, only 30% of eligible tickets sold that year were actually supporting it. The shortfall is widely attributed to one company simply not implementing it. Live Nation. The levy is nice as far as it goes, I suppose, but ineffectual, in my opinion. It leaves too much to hand-waving and structural good luck, when the good luck depends on the goodwill of the very company causing the problem in the first place.

I think we can do better. I believe there is real power in federation. Let’s look at each choke point, in turn.

Venue federation. Independent venues in the federation keep local ownership and identity, join a shared service body for booking, insurance, technical production and collective purchasing. But here is the twist. If, as was suggested in episode 2, each of these shared service offerings was offered as a co-operatively owned venture, then solidarity is maintained, because the local venues in the federation become part owners of the services they need and use. No single venue carries the full cost and operational burden of running the services, but together, they can operate something substantial and fit for their business purposes.

An artist-owned promotion network. As with venue owners, the artists themselves can cooperatively own tools for tour routing, logistics and marketing. They can access them by paying a service fee paid to a cooperative they can jointly own. There isn’t a rights grab to try to tie the artist into an agreement in perpetuity, paid for by giving up equity in their intellectual property rights.

Ticketing as a shared utility. If every venue or artist could afford to develop and run their own ticketing software, they most probably would, but the costs are prohibitive — which is why a shared ownership model makes the utility available to all venues and artists for a low, published fee. Resales could be constrained to face-value only, cutting out the predatory speculators and touts. Protections like randomised, yet synchronised, QR codes could protect against illicit ticket cloning, while still allowing valid ticket holders into the venue without impedance. Ticketing could ban dynamic pricing by default, choosing a lottery-style ticket allocation method, when demand exceeds available seats. The data, in line with the post-enshittocene ethos, is portable. In short, ticketing is funded like shared infrastructure, rather than run like a rent-extractive tollbooth.

Portable audience data. In keeping with the post-enshittocene data sovereignty intentions, venues and artists keep the relationships with the audience members that have chosen to share their data with them. Each relationship constrained to each entity’s own audience, and contingent on confirmed ongoing consent. No single platform owns it. Artists keep details of their audience members, for as long as each member consents. Venues keep details of their clientele, for as long as the customers individually consent. Use of people’s personal data remains contingent.

The organising principle, in every case, stated once and clearly, is that no single entity should ever control more than one of these layers at a time.

Skipping the Arena Trap

Let’s be equally clear about this. The new music making and appreciating environment we’d like to see doesn’t succeed by trying to out-Live-Nation Live Nation, at stadium scale. That’s not a fight we can win, straight out the gate. They have too much clout in the market, right now. We’ve already heard the numbers. 58% of primary tickets. Rising to 66% with affiliates. You don’t out-muscle that by building a smaller version of the thing they already dominate.

Where we can build strength is at the layer they’ve so far neglected: regional touring circuits, multi-venue passes, venue clusters and city-wide music weekends. Things we’d like to have, but which aren’t on offer, today.

Picture a regional touring circuit, properly built. A band plays six mid-sized towns in a fortnight, each one a few hours’ drive from the last, each room sized to the actual local audience, not to some inflated stream count. Data supersedes ego and just plain old guesswork. No grueling fifteen-hour slog between arena dates. No half-empty room because the booking assumed an imaginary fanbase that only exists online, or isn’t all that excited about shelling out for arena tickets.

Picture a multi-venue pass. One wristband or e-ticket, one price, and a weekend where a fan wanders between four or five small rooms in the same city, catching whoever’s on. The way a festival works, except the festival is the city itself, for one weekend a year. We can count on some support from restaurants, hotels and the hospitality industry, due to the sheer footfall the multi-venue pass brings to the local area.

Picture a venue cluster. Three or four independent rooms within walking distance of each other, cross-promoting, sharing a door policy, sharing a crowd — so a night out becomes an evening, not a single ninety-minute transaction. Not into the band? It’s a short walk to see another. Or plan to sample them all. You’re not captive while the stage is reset between the opener and the headliner. Staggered sets can ensure there is music close by to see, when the stage goes dark in the middle of the evening. What about bar sales? Thirsty, hungry audience members are going to get a drink and a snack from one venue or another. That should even out in the wash.

Picture a city-wide music weekend. Forty venues, one city, seventy-two hours, and a programme built by the people who actually run those rooms — not by whoever owns the arena on the edge of town. Think Edinburgh Fringe festival, but with a level of cooperation between artists and venues that isn’t available yet.

None of that needs an arena. None of it needs Live Nation’s permission. All of it improves the value of the entertainment and the fun had by audiences.

For many years, I worked on designing a federated software architecture, consisting of local nodes to keep autonomy, but with shared protocols to let the network act coherently as a whole. The logic is uncannily similar. We touched on that earlier in episode 1. Indeed, if the federated computing fabric existed, the services we talked about earlier could be ported to run on it. That would be layering a level of co-operation on a deeper level of co-operation.

There’s a lot of low-quality, dubious data involved in ticketing, at arena scale. In large part, these data explain why blue dot fever has emerged. If you book arena tours on the basis of stream counts and follower numbers, inflated by bots the artist may have been unknowingly paying for anyway, while making the baseless assumption that each click is a captive, paying customer, then the empty seat crisis inevitably happens. In contrast, a federated network of smaller, right-sized rooms is structurally resistant to that failure mode, in a way a single arena booking never can be. Sure, your stream and follower numbers might be as toxic as the data for bigger stars, but the blast radius of putting your faith in hokey numbers is far smaller. It’s a survivable error. With judicious and careful planning, the tour finances don’t necessarily have to take a dive.

Proof This Works at Small Scale — Cooperative Festivals and the Grassroots Fund

Asking whether any of this federated, grassroots stuff could ever work might surprise you. The facts are this sort of model IS working. Now. Today. Albeit on a small scale. Cooperative festivals and grassroots funds are having real impacts and getting results now.

We should put cooperative festival ownership into concrete terms. A cooperative music festival is a shared-ownership, non-profit live event where multiple artists, venues and independent collectives pool their resources to cut costs and support the grassroots music community. It’s not the only kind of cooperative you can use, but it’s one people are trying.

Events are centred on shared ownership, structured as a community benefit society or collective, where participants co-own the festival. Costs are reduced by sharing heavy infrastructure, staging, sound and transport expenses. They’ve demonstrated a co-op can lower overall production costs by as much as 40%. Instead of a single corporate promoter dictating the schedule, programming of the festival is collaborative. Member groups and venues co-curate the lineup to showcase diverse independent talent. Risks are mitigated for smaller or struggling festivals, who can temporarily join the cooperative network to share financial risks, keep their audiences engaged and recover before returning to independent operation, if that is their wish. Nobody is held hostage.

Cooperative festival ownership, owned jointly by venues, artists, workers, local residents, attendees as members, can have capped-return community capital. Their constitutions can block a sale to a major promoter without near-unanimous, multi-constituency consent. Good governance can equate to good protection.

An example of this emerging model is the Where It All Began initiative in the UK, launched by grassroots music organisers to counter rising operational costs and festival cancellations. This was in response to the fact that 72 independent festivals announced postponement, cancellation, or permanent closure in just one year. A collective of festival organisers and venues came together to organise what is being described as a “pioneering, game-changing music collective,” to help support alternative live music. Organisers and venues have outlined how rising logistical costs and an increased dominance in large-scale music festivals and events are harming independent promoters. Festival Insights reported how debut events, such as 2025’s Homestead Festival, were forced to cancel their weekends due to spiralling costs. More established festivals, such as the cult favourite BANG FACE, are also feeling the squeeze, with the festival founder James St Acid stating, in July, that “the cost of an event has tripled in around five years. It can only sustain itself if people are buying tickets.”

While the co-operative model has undoubted promise, it needs to be said that it hasn’t been plain sailing for the Where It All Began not-for-profit festival. While it is, indeed, not-for-profit, it cannot sustain being “for loss.” Its 2026 festival was postponed until 2027 to avoid a £60,000 to £80,000 loss, caused by mounting production costs, funding delays and weak ticket conversion.

Organisers outlined the main reasons for the postponement. Late funding grants cost the team vital development time. Issues with the initial ticketing platform caused a seven week delay in marketing and promotions. Delays in launching the brand created public uncertainty about the event’s legitimacy. Slow ticket sales in March and April reflected a wider slump felt across the entire festival sector. Three hundred or so deposits, from original founders, didn’t convert into full tickets or payment plans, leaving a £45,000 deficit in the festival’s balance sheet. Infrastructure and transportation expenses jumped by a staggering 10 to 15%, adding an unforeseen £30,000 in production costs.

The perfect storm. The numbers just didn’t add up, despite the savings. Would that be true for all small festivals? If it is, then small festivals are in real trouble. They’re being eaten alive by much larger companies.

Real UK illustrates a precedent for cross-subsidy funding. The LIVE Trust’s voluntary £1 per-ticket levy, on shows above 5,000 capacity, funded £500,000 for grassroots venues, including a £125,000 artists’ touring fund. The operative word is “voluntary.” Evidently, Live Nation didn’t volunteer. In my view, making the voluntary levy a mandatory one would be justified, with the current state of live music.

Real UK also set a precedent for community-ownership. Music Venue Properties, with Real UK’s help, raised close to £2.35 million in community shares, grants, loans and donations to keep grassroots venues out of rapacious property speculators’ hands.

These aren’t hypothetical initiatives. This is already happening at small scale in Britain right now. And the change has barely begun.

Bootstrapping It Without Waiting for Permission

So, how can a coalition bootstrap a more wellbeing centred live music scene? Can we start without waiting for permission? The examples we’ve just discussed suggest we can. Here’s a practical sequence, stated as a build order, rather than a pie in the sky wish list.

Firstly, stay asset-light and agile. We should build our scene as a small, regional network of existing venues under fair, non-exclusive agreements. We shouldn’t go on a venue-buying spree.

Second, build a layered funding model. Funders at different layers can include listener memberships, venue subscriptions, artist service fees, founding partner contracts, grants, community shares and ethical loans. We know that’s possible. We’ve seen it demonstrated.

Like all good bootstrapped enterprises, the third step is to earn before owning. It’s important to prove the network’s value through better booking, better data, and collective purchasing, before it ever attempts to own a building.

Next step, funding the public-good layer. This would include line items like accessibility, archiving, emergency support, education outreach. This public-good layer is funded separately, through a ring-fenced community fund, so it never has to compete with payroll or keeping the lights on.

The fifth stage is to use precommitment, not speculation. Obtain letters of intent from venues and pre-registrations from artists, before committing to expensive infrastructure.

Let’s make this bootstrap sequence tangible, for a moment. Not a forecast. Just an illustration. Picture a simple first year budget for one of these federated hubs. Income of around £150,000. Expenditure of around £150,000. Nobody’s getting rich. That’s rather the point.

Where would the money come from? Listener and audience memberships, first. Something like 1,800 members, at £25 a year. That’s £45,000. Founding venue subscriptions, next. Perhaps 15 venues, paying a modest annual fee for access to shared booking, insurance and collective purchasing. £30,000. Artist and promoter service fees. A flat, transparent fee on bookings routed through the network. £20,000. Founding partner contracts and mission-aligned funders. Early enterprise revenue, blended with mission-aligned philanthropy. £30,000. And grant funding. Arts, cultural, or public-innovation money. £25,000.

Add it up, and that’s £150,000, coming in from five different directions. No single benefactor. No single point of failure.

Now, where does it go? Fair pay for a small core team, first. Two people, properly paid. A coordinator, and a booking and operations lead. £65,000. Not two people working for free, “for the cause.” That would just reproduce the very exploitation we’ve spent this episode talking about.

An artist guarantee top-up fund, next. £25,000. Money that exists specifically so a minimum guarantee is real, when a show under-sells. A contribution to the mutual risk pool. £15,000. Seed money, for the shared cancellation, illness and equipment fund.

The cost of actually running the shared services we promised, earlier in this episode. Booking software. Insurance brokering. Purchasing admin. £20,000. Thin, but liveable.

Reserves. £15,000. Set aside, before anyone is allowed to call anything a surplus. Reserves are for rainy day contingencies. They’re the enterprise’s safety net.

And governance and admin. £10,000. Bookkeeping. The cooperative’s constitution. Legal costs. The unavoidable costs of doing business at all.

Notice what’s deliberately missing from that list. There’s no profit line. Fair pay comes first. Artist protection comes second. The infrastructure that makes both possible comes third. And reserves come before anyone’s allowed to call anything a surplus.

That ordering is the argument. Not just the arithmetic. Two principles we’ve already named in this series, made visible now in pounds and pence.

No single entity bears all the risk — a goal we established back in episode 2.

Also, and this is worth noting, no single entity ever controls more than one of these layers. We established that as a founding principle, earlier in this episode.

Both principles. Right here, in one budget illustration.

Better Economics for the People on Stage

Let’s look a little closer at our “no one bears all the risk” theme.

Independent bands get stiffed, or underpaid, at gigs frequently, especially at the local and DIY levels, where formal contracts are rare. While exact statistical percentages do not exist, because there’s no reliable way to collect the shameful data, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence around. Discussions across musician communities show that getting shortchanged, ghosted on payment, or hit with last-minute pay cuts happens to most DIY and indie acts, at least a few times during their touring or local gigging years.

Why does it happen? There’s the “door deal” trap. Promoters or bars agree to pay bands a percentage of the door ticket sales, but if attendance is low, they often claim there is no money left to pay the band.

Emerging independent artists don’t have the clout of seasoned ones. Less-established acts lack legal and management leverage, or written contracts. This makes it easier for shady venue owners or promoters to withhold cash, or offer a “paltry payday” instead of the agreed amount. It’s hard to argue when the promoter is quite literally holding all the cards.

Then there’s the poor turnout disputes. Venue owners sometimes argue that slow business or poor crowd draw voids the full payment agreement, leaving musicians with nothing, or a small fraction of what was promised.

How can those risks be mitigated? If the co-operative offers minimum artist guarantees, transparent settlement statements, agreed payment deadlines and cancellation compensation, many of those practices can be reined in.

A shared, modest, mutual risk pool, across the network, is also an important component of sharing the risk. It covers cancellations, sudden illness, equipment failure, theft or malicious damage, and other similar contingencies, so that one bad night doesn’t fall entirely on the finances of a single artist.

On the cost side, inflation in travel, crew wages, production and visas has been enough, on its own, to push tours that looked profitable on paper, deeply into the red. That either leads to tour date cancellations, or else having to sell pictures of the singer’s bottom on OnlyFans, to make up the shortfall.

If you think that’s a hyperbolic accusation to make, in 2024, singer Kate Nash, under the slogan “Butts for tour buses,” said she now makes more money from selling photos of her bottom on OnlyFans than she does from her concerts, after joining the platform because it’s “a really difficult time for artists to tour.” The musician announced that her OnlyFans income will subsidise her shows because “touring makes losses, not profits.” “The only way I could find to make a profit on the tour — you’re either going, hopefully I sell enough T-shirts to cover the debt, or you cut people’s wages, or you fire band and crew, or you travel dangerously.” She told BBC News.

The shared purchasing and collective booking we discussed earlier in this episode exist specifically to blunt this, not just to build solidarity. It’s putting the co-operative’s money where its mouth is.

Stated plainly, the risk currently sits almost entirely on the person with the least power in the transaction. That’s the thing we want to actually fix, here.

But there’s aspects of live music we haven’t fixed yet. None of this removes the physical and mental toll of the road. That’s a wellbeing problem, not an ownership problem — which is exactly why the wellbeing fund named in Episode 2 needs to explicitly reach touring artists, not just people in the studio. We’ve still got work to do.

The Audience as Member, Not Just Ticket Buyer

We mentioned this in episode 2. Your subscription, itemised. What does that mean in the context of audience as member of a co-operative, not just a drive-by ticket buyer? Well, it means getting statements from the co-operative. Statements that tell you “this month, your membership helped get this venue’s roof fixed.” Or “your contribution helped a touring artist you saw last spring get to their next city to play.”

Ordinary concert tickets don’t come with many tangible benefits. But membership does.

Membership benefits that matter in practice include early access without speculative resale. It includes face-value ticket exchange, local discovery, a small member-directed allocation toward a venue or artist of their choice. The experience is one of inclusion and involvement. Not alienation and discomfort. It’s less transactional.

In our times, people don’t have as much money as they once did to put toward discretionary spending. They have had to become very selective about what they choose. A bad night out leaves them thinking about the opportunity cost. What did they give up to come to this gig? Was it even worth it?

Unprecedented ticket prices are a real driver of consumer fatigue and empty seats. Who hasn’t thought twice before shelling out for a concert, perhaps many months in advance of the show? Even if you love the artist more than anything, there are some ticket prices that are beyond the sensible reach of a cash-strapped fan. They just can’t justify the cost to themselves.

Face-value resale, no “by-default” dynamic pricing, and transparent booking fees are a direct answer to that fatigue, not only to extraction. When the fan feels like they are getting a fair deal, not being bilked for all they’re worth, they feel much better about paying for the show.

Membership of the co-operative can be a wonderful way for artists and fans to enjoy a great night of entertainment together, but it only works if it’s a genuinely better night out, not a guilt-trip version of a worse one. What does that mean in practice? None of what follows needs a monopoly’s balance sheet. It needs a venue that’s answering to its members, not squeezing the last penny out of a captive crowd.

Respect fan time. Start the show on time instead of making people wait for hours. Post exact set times online before the event starts. Limit long gaps between the opening act and the main show. A venue chasing one more merch transaction per punter has no reason to start on time. A venue that answers to the people who own a piece of it, does.

Improve venue comfort. Speed up merch lines by adding more staff or using mobile ordering. Lower drink and food prices inside the venue, instead of taking advantage of people, like they’re virtual hostages. Fix sightlines so people in the back can actually see the stage. This is exactly what the shared purchasing and collective booking, from earlier in this episode, make affordable. Proper staffing and fair prices, without needing arena-scale volume to justify them.

Vary the setlist. Change the songs each night to keep the show fresh and exciting. The band and crew will enjoy the challenge and the variety too. Play rare songs that die-hard fans love to hear live. Talk to the crowd to make the night feel personal and special. Not scripted banter and stale jokes. Be human and relatable. Nobody’s optimising a locked setlist for maximum efficiency, across fifty tour dates. The artist stays the artist. Not a jukebox. When your audience are co-owners of the co-operative and the band also co-owns, then in spirit, a different dynamic between them prevails. The ambience is more familial. That’s what big arena shows can’t do at all.

Ensure safety. Watch the crowd and stop the show, if fans get crushed or hurt. Nobody can enjoy the show if there are disruptive elements causing mayhem in the audience area. Create a safe space with zero tolerance for bad behavior or harassment. Audience members who cross the line are out, with no questions asked and no debate. Provide free water so fans stay hydrated during the show. This isn’t a policy handed down from a corporate safety department, either. It’s what a room full of people who actually have a stake in the place, holds itself to.

There are so many relatively easy ways for an artist and a venue to make audiences feel like this was one of the best nights of their lives. Serving up less than best, with contempt for paying customers, is the road to obscurity. Do that, and a member stops being a ticket buyer who happens to have a discount code. They become part of the reason the place exists, at all.

Close — What’s Still Unbuilt

So, where does all this leave us? None of this defeats a company with dominant market power by itself. It does, however, make independent live music viable enough that artists, venues, and audiences have a credible way around the gatekeeper, if not a total replacement on day one. To help build the coalition so that it serves every stakeholder well, I’d love to hear from independent venue owners, promoters, musicians’ union members and representatives, local authorities, and anyone who’s tried to book a room and instead hit a wall, or found you were shown the door.

Tell us about the room. The venue that closed. The fees that ate the whole night’s margin. The tour that never happened because the numbers didn’t work before you’d even loaded in. And if you run an independent venue, book tours for a living, work for a musicians’ union, or sit on a local authority’s arts budget — email us at info@confelicityrecords.com. Confelicity Records is all one word. The federation we’re describing only exists if it’s built by people already doing this work, not by us guessing at it from the outside.

Here’s an analogy. We’re trying to study horses by going out into the world and observing real life horses. We don’t want to sit in our studies, ruminating on horses, thinking to ourselves, “what would I do if I were a horse?”

In the next episode, we’re going to delve into threats and menaces. We’ve now expounded on two layers of this proposed federation — the tools and their funding, as well as the live room itself. Next time: what happens when the people who currently own the industry notice, and don’t like it.

I’ve been Michael Topic, and you’ve been listening to the Post-Enshittocene Music Manifesto. If this episode was useful to you, rate it, share it with one person who’d get something out of it, or leave a review — that’s genuinely the thing that helps a show like this find the people it’s for. I’ll look forward to your company next time.