We are losing music pubs and music-friendly Landlords at a
frightening rate - and the evidence is that the Licensing Act
2003 is responsible. |
www.kentfolk.com
|
I have been saying we are losing music pubs and music-friendly
Landlords at a frightening rate for a while, but now I have some hard
numbers - and hard numbers they are to swallow - but if all things
remain equal (and they never do), we could have no live music in Kent by
2012.
I have been doing the KentFolk web page since the year 2000, and the
fall off in gig numbers is very evident from my data - but my research
gets in the way some months, and that causes scatter in the numbers, so
for good figures I went to Chris Ashman of www.kentgigs.com and asked if I could data-mine his Gig
Archives :
"Hi Beau, I would suggest that you should look at our lists also
in the light of the number of venues that are prepared to pay to promote
their events rather than expecting bands to act like "rent a crowd".
...... We can say without doubt this is the worst period we have seen
for Kent bands since we started supplying the media in 1981. "
So I pointed my programs at his gig archive, and this is the graph I
get; I plot the number of gigs per week in Kent and East Sussex that are
listed on www.kentgigs.com over the years Summer 2004 to
Christmas 2008 :
Are Kentish and East Sussex Live Music Gigs Coming to
an End ?
At first look we have a quite a lot of scatter, then we can see that
in fact some of the variation is a regular dip of some 20 or 30 gigs per
week over the Christmas weeks, which makes sense.
But the main feature is that a steady live-gig-rate of about 70 per
week has been about halved. What has caused this ? - we can line-up
events on this time-graph with major events that have recently happened
:
- The Credit Crunch - starting late Summer 2008 into Autumn -
There is a definite dip, but surprisingly the graph seems to have gone
up again by Winter and the time of the regular Christmas dip - perhaps
people are in need of compensation, and live music is a good option?
- The Smoking Ban - came into effect 1st July 2007 - Possibly
there is a slight dip, but I do not believe there is any statistically
significant change.
- The Licensing Act 2003 - came into force on 24 November
2005 - We see that what was a regular and fairly steady live music
gig-rate of about 70 per week has turned within a month or two
into a steady and apparently uniform slide towards zero.
Now I am not one of those who found no merit in the Licensing Act
2003 - I agree the licencing fee takes most of the possible profit from
the gigs I sometimes put on, but I do get a piece of paper that makes
the gig legal.
However what is totally unacceptable is that it would
seem that for the publicans and musicians the scheme is unworkable, such
that if everything is equal - and it won't be - we can expect no live
music over the Christmas weeks next year (2009) - down from a recent 40
to 50 gigs per week over the Christmas period - and before the end of
2011 live music gigs will be effectively over or too far away to drive
to.
There is an urgent need to get this data to those who can make a
difference, and also your real stories about publicans who are being
thrown out and musicians who are losing their trade - this data is
unequivocal :
- The
Licensing Act 2003 is destroying live music in one of the most musically
active counties in the UK.