Fans First: Lord Kevin Brennan on fixing live music from the ground up - Bonus Episode

0:02Steve:Hello and welcome to the Price of Music brought to you by Music Ally, the show that's fascinated by all the fun and games and finances of the music world. I'm Steve Lamac and this is a special bonus edition of the show. Thank you very much for listening. In a moment, we'll be joined by Baron Brennan. There's a first for us, an actual member of the House of Lords on the show. Although Kevin Brennan isn't your typical lord. He's a former MP who plays the guitar, once suggested that the House of Commons should consider having dressed down Thursdays. He's also led a campaign with Billy Bragg to lift the ban on prisoners having access to guitars.

0:41Steve:And he's long been a champion of musical issues in Parliament, especially around grassroots music venues, which has led him to be given his latest role, which is that of spearheading a new fan-led review of live and electronic music on behalf of the Commons Culture Committee. Take a minute to just let that sink in and the importance of it. Yes, there will be an actual, there is an actual fan-led review. This is a very rare chance to tell government what live music in this country really means to us and what we like about it and what we don't like and what could be done to improve matters. It's a wide-ranging survey, including subjects like ticket resale.

1:24Steve:But all the findings will help discussions at government level about the music scene in this country. It's something that we've been asking for for ages. And it's currently open until the end of November. As an overview, this is what it says on the actual website. Our aim is to put fans at the heart of how the live and electronic music industry works and to make sure the government is listening to them to tell us more. Here is the man himself, Kevin. Welcome to The Price of Music. Thanks, Steve. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for giving us some of your time. At the risk of embarrassing you before we've even started, I found this quote on a website which says of you, this is from the former Longpig singer Crispin Hunt, Kevin Brennan is a rare and enviable thing, equally gifted as a writer of songs as he is a writer of wrongs.

2:15that's what you want on your epitaph isn't it that's that's quite the endorsement i haven't i haven't seen that before i'll have to buy chrispyn a drink next time i see him around it that's uh is he good words it's very nice of it although i guess it partly depends on whether you like the long pigs or not but uh oh i've got i've got a question for a music question for you

2:37Steve:because some people uh will already know this um but i don't know how is your band because now you've moved from the commons to the lords because you had a band with some fellow mps called brilliantly in case you don't know listeners mp4 uh you can see what we did there yes um we're kind it's a little bit we haven't officially sort of uh disbanded we were for over 20 years but there's only one left in the commons now we were basically four mps when we started out and it was a crossbar then we had a we had a two labor an smp keyboard player guy called pete wish art who was in run rig for uh 18 years so proper you know music industry professional top of the pops and everything uh but and we had a guy called greg knight who's our drummer tory drummer so we were a cross-party venture but there's only one left after 20 years and although we haven't completely disbanded and we have got actually one recording in the can that's never been released so if the clamor for another np4 record reaches such a great height maybe we'll drop it at some point as they say these days i mean everyone's getting back together i mean give it another five years it could be you could make the comeback the size of oasis you know um yeah i think uh i think probably we're more likely to fill one of these very small grassroots music venues than the than a principality stadium regardless but you never know you never know i do see i mean the reason i mention these things is that uh so you know people who aren't aware of your background don't think that this you know they're heading up this new survey is some sort of attempt to buy credibility because you've you know long and often been a voice on music industry issues in the commons haven't you over the years yeah i have um and i'm too old to worry about credibility so uh that doesn't really that doesn't really matter but i have and when i was uh when i got it as an mp what what i a few things just really rankled me a little bit one was that it in the House of Parliament, there was a rule at the time, you couldn't actually play music anywhere.

4:37And I figured this is one of the most important parts of our culture, of our economy, you know, and so on. And you can't even feature any music in case it might disturb a meeting or something like that. And I managed to get that changed. And forming the band was helpful because it was very difficult to say, well, you guys can't play because we were actual MPs. And then we were able to bring other people in. The other thing that I noticed really about the music industry was it was very difficult to understand sometimes what the music industry actually wanted out of public policy because there were so many different voices ironically in an industry that's all about harmony or should be you know there were so many different voices uh primary and in in a lot of people don't understand in government governments really just want to know what do you what do you actually want i mean everyone wants some money obviously and all that sort of but what is it that you actually want and you need to flourish and help music uh you know continue to be a story in the uk and so i thought it was important to put some time into understanding the music industry i actually did a fellowship with the industry and parliament trust and spent you know 18 days over a couple of years actually visiting all different parts of the industry from you know publishers to venues to big record labels to live there's a live engine and um it was really useful to build up that expertise and then be able to try and communicate to government what the industry wants and try and get some change.

6:01Steve:Yeah. I mean, because we quite often hear MPs from time to time talking about music, or at least talking about the success of our music industry. I think people like to show off about Britain's pop music culture and our position on the global stage and the money that pop music, the pop music industry, raises, including, obviously, in export terms. And is that something which is, you think, a genuinely held belief, or do some people latch onto this? they're saying it just for show uh and in which case how how will this change matters your your review i suppose that's two questions really yeah i mean i think that over the years a better understanding that this has come about for mps and so on about how the music industry actually is genuinely a uk success story there's only three countries in the world that are net exporters of music and uh you know it's very unusual there's there's billions of pounds at stake there's lots and lots of jobs that's taken our music industry and that does matter to politicians to mps and so on because it's their constituents it's venues that are within their constituency uh and and a lot of them themselves this generation i mean i'm in my 60s now but you know this generation of people who actually grew up if you like being massive music fans and fans of you know rock music all of the different genres, are the policymakers.

7:26So there is more of an understanding of its importance. And the survey we're doing here is really triggered by the fact that organizations like the Music Venues Trust and so on have pointed out what's happening in our communities to some of our grassroots music venues closing down at a fast rate. Why is that happening? What are the causes of it? Are some of the reasons that's happening, public policy reasons like the rates or the local councils, noise abatement department or whatever it is, what are the real causes of that? And are there other ways, are there other issues that are going on that mean that small music venues are closing down?

8:01Do people not want to go to them anymore? I mean, you have to, you and I probably, I think I heard you say this yourself once, Steve, if we went to a gig when we were youngsters and you saw anyone over the age of 30, you'd say, what are you doing to your granddad? I think that's a direct quote from you, I'm used to it. And it's so true. You go to these days and you'll see people, you know, from all sorts of different age groups. But do younger people today actually want to go to the kind of venues that we used to love to go to, go down a staircase onto a sticky floor into a, you know, sweating room and see a band jumping up and down?

8:33And so we're all about trying to find that out and seeing what we can do to turn the dial in favor of the fans to try and, you know, keep this wonderful live sector we have going in the UK.

8:43Steve:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's probably worth just sort of mentioning the history of how this review came about, because it was originally a recommendation from the Select Committee on grassroots music, wasn't it? It was dismissed by government at the time, but in the end, the committee have come back to it and said, no, we think that we can get something really valuable out of it. Why don't we do it anyway? yeah exactly and i think probably the government might have been a little bit sort of um uh sort of we haven't done the football fan leg review which which some of this idea came from there were all these terrible things in football with you know owners changing the colors of football kits as they did to my home team in cardiff you know and and all dodgy money coming into the game and etc etc and we've seen fans in football stand up together you know and and actually work together to try and change things and now there's a football regulator for example who has just been set up which will have powers to do something about some of these issues where you have these terrible owners of football clubs and and and speak on behalf of the fan i know i'm not necessarily saying we need a music regulator or something like that in in music but i do think that there is a case to a government to listen more closer to the fan's voice so the select committee decided what if the government's not going to do it why don't we do it ourselves they asked me i used to be a member of that committee when i was an mp for a period of time and when i was on that committee i drove a lot of the inquiries that we featured around music we did a quite impactful um study on the economics of music streaming you know which has turned the dial brought about change And you ended up with things now, like, for example, where there's now a per diem, a daily payment for songwriters if they're asked by a major record label to work with somebody on writing some new songs rather than just has to depend on that song being a big hit to get any money at all.

10:40Little basic changes like that can make a big difference to people, particularly at the bottom of the music industry or people who are not making the millions and billions of pounds that some are. So I think the committee thought it would be worth doing. And when it's concluded, the report, which will be in the new year, it'll be presented to the committee first, of course, and then they will present it to the government. And the thing is, the government does have to respond to a select committee of the House of Commons. Can't guarantee they'll do everything we want. And not everything will be to do with government either.

11:09There might be some recommendations that are more to do with industry. But that'll be the procedure. So the survey itself will close probably the end of November, I think. And then sometime in the new year, we'll come out with a report.

11:22Steve:And how is it formulated? Because I doubt it's as easy as some people think writing the right sort of questions that generate the most informative answers. Does that make sense? And obviously, you know, even before that, I guess, someone somewhere has to sit down and decide what the scope of it's going to be. because it could be five pages long or it could be 100 pages long, depending on what sort of topics you want to cover. Yeah, and a lot of that comes down to my responsibility, really to try and produce something that is easy enough to understand, digestible, but not superficial, I suppose, at the end, is the sort of thing you want to produce.

12:10And in my own mind, it seems to me, looking at it from the beginning, And you think, what sort of thing will we land with? I'm hoping we might be able to come back with almost a sort of fans charter, you know, a Hippocratic oak, if you like, of live music. It's something where we should say everybody involved in the live music sector, from the small venues to the big promoters, to the huge artists, everybody should be able to agree that this is a set of values we ought to be working to when we're dealing with fans we shouldn't be treating them as an afterthought when they are actually the heart and soul and the very reason you know you can have a live music uh event it's no good it's no fans to happen people don't come along you know it's it's it's not uh it's not a live music event it's not a gig and um it seems to me very often that fans are almost considered as a sort of unnecessary requirement for a gig rather than the actual essential ingredient you know for a good gig um and that goes from everything from accessibility to gigs to ticketing and the way that you know ticketing is undertaken for the transport to and from you know um uh events um you know all those sorts of things seem to be sometimes a complete afterthought yeah when someone's putting on a putting on a gig and everyone ought to be really able to agree, we're not going to rip off the fans.

13:38But actually, very often, that is not the case, as we know. And I think some of the early returns I've seen from the survey we've put out in some of the question suggest that a lot of people are concerned about ticket prices. That's not a surprise, I suppose. We're all concerned about prices and so on. But they're also concerned about the hidden parts of ticket prices, the add-ons, the booking fees, and all those sorts of things they're very supportive actually steve of uh so far of the add-on that's the levy which you've you know the new live levy which you've i know you're involved with uh with live the new charity that is is there to administer that levy to help support grassroots music venues and so on um but they're very suspicious of things like booking fees where do they go and what transparency you know for the fan i think is a really important thing and i am i'm hoping to try and get as much buy-in as possible from people say we will you know adhere to this set of values when we're dealing

14:33Steve:with fans yeah i mean it does there's so much to pick up from um from that answer including the fact that when you get to this part in the survey i will be amazingly i mean i'll be i'd be shocked if more than four people however many thousands of people answer this survey i would be stunned if more than, say, four people, when it comes to the question about, do you think, how happy are you with print-at-home costs? Because there's a whole list of these are the costs added to your ticket. As you say, there's the contribution to grassroots venues. There's the standard booking fee, which I think most of us have sort of resigned to now.

15:15Steve:But the idea of, sorry, I'm having to pay to print this out at home if more than four people say yep absolutely at home with that absolutely fine with that i will be i'll be amazed but there is i mean what what you were just saying which was one of the things which struck me actually as um as i went through the survey is it does almost take you on a the whole journey of a gig because it talks about you know buying the ticket different um aspects of buying the ticket uh and it talks about what which sort of venues um you go to which ones you like but as you say also says you know how easy is it to get to and you know what and what's the public transport like and how safe do you actually feel late at night on a bus if there's a bus which i think is it's going to create quite a picture isn't it quite a detailed picture of what the stumbling blocks what the good things are and what the stumbling blocks might be yes and a lot of those things are quite practical things too you know they're not airy fairy concepts and and so they're very practical things and and and it and it very strongly comes back from the fans that these are things they're concerned about now you've got this whole movement it seems to be around the country the music cities movement where local authorities saying we want to be thought of as a music city through in cardiff where i live but you know liverpool manchester all these sorts of all these places, they badge themselves, we are music cities.

16:43We want to be known for having a really great music scene in our city. Okay, that's fine. But if you can't get a bus home at the end of the gig, because there's no buses after 10 o 'clock, or if the train starts running, and yet the gig's not ending until 11 o 'clock or something like that, then how can you badge yourself as a as a music city and similarly you know if you're if you're having big events and a local authority council is working with a big promoter in the live nation or somebody like that about putting an event on if the accessibility is not you know if you're disabled you can't go to the event it's not very good accessibility um you know if people are getting ripped off in the ticketing process by fees, printed home fees and things that really are just basically a shakedown of the fan rather than actual genuine cost to the business, then the local authority, it seems to me, are in a good position to say, well, we're badging ourselves as a music city.

17:48That must represent certain values as well. And therefore, we're going to insist that the buses run on time, late at night, that people can get home. We're going to insist that the promoters adhere to certain standards and treat fans in a certain way. And in that way, I think there's an actual lever there with which we can try and help move things on a bit because the local council is actually involved in wanting to have a successful local music industry. And they themselves shouldn't be allowing people to open up next to a venue, some residential thing next to an existing venue, and then try and shut the venue down for making noise, that sort of thing.

18:27is the sort of thing that local councils can have some influence over. Yeah.

18:31Steve:It's interesting how much of this is interlinked as well, don't you think? This is going off a slight tangent. But in terms of being able to get to a gig on public transport, in this day and age where we're finding tours are half the length of what they were 30 years ago, and there are certain towns which now appear to be less utilised by booking agents or bands. So certain towns are getting bypassed. So the people in that town then have to get on a bus or a train to go to the next town where there are still gigs. So we're creating more of an audience that has to move around. And it's that audience where, you know, if you used to have a venue in Bath, Bath Malls, if Bath Malls shuts, then everyone in Bath has got to get on a train to Bristol.

19:22And there's got to be a train late enough home from Bristol

19:27Steve:otherwise you're scuppered aren't you? Exactly as I say, Cardiff is my there's a lot of concentration gigs in cities these days it's true and towns and places are definitely losing out but if that is going to happen you've got to have those public transport links and they've all got to work for people to be able to travel but secondly we also need to think about why is that happening and what can we do perhaps to try and re-energize and reinvigorate what's going on in some of the smaller towns and cities that are losing out. And I was thinking about this the other day and talking to some people.

20:07Interesting thing about the music industry, I think, is how in some ways there isn't such a direct connection in the music industry between who you support, the band you support, the artists you want to go and see sometimes, and the fan. In football, you're a Cardiff City supporter, you're a Liverpool supporter, whatever it is. and there's a very sort of direct connection in music that there's a sort of there are certain barriers between the fan and the artists that they love and that they support whether that barrier is the you know the promoter of the gig or whether that barrier is the the ticket platform or whether that barrier is the record label themselves or the management and so on i think with all the technology we have these days there must be loads of fans out there who if they were connected to more directly with the artists.

20:57And there was a continuing dialogue going on. If that artist actually then put on a gig in their little town, they'd actually find they did have an audience there that would come and see them. But somewhere or other, it seems to me, in the music industry, and people have said this to me, that the music industry always seems to put up some little layer of a barrier between the fan and the artists themselves.

21:20Steve:It's interesting. I hadn't thought about that, really. I wonder whether we transfer, you know, our love maybe from the band, you know, or the football club, from the band to maybe actually just the place, the venue, you know, that you will support Bedford Esquires like you would support your local football team more than maybe the away teams who are the bands who are on tour. I don't know. Is that a reasonable analogy? I think there's a lot of truth in that as well. I think people do really love and support particular venues. But I still think that making that direct connection between the artist and the fan is something that we could encourage.

22:01And there are people out there who are trying to build those sorts of alliances now to make sure the fans have a more direct connection. And that their experience, even when they go and buy a ticket, isn't as awful as it seems to be for lots of people from their responses to the survey.

22:17Steve:Another thing which is obviously very relevant, which is included in the survey, is the resale of tickets and what can be done to make that a better experience for fans. Because there is an ongoing debate, isn't there, behind the scenes at the moment where we're expecting some announcement of this survey into ticket resale. But that's a big subject at the moment. obviously coming off the back of um big shows like the oasis gigs but i imagine that's going to be a very um yeah a very big issue once you get to the end of this yeah i it will be i mean interestingly i think um the oasis tour thing was really interesting i think and and that's actually i think caused a little bit of a reset in the uh in the in the live industry because we were on a pathway, I think, towards a situation that is quite common in America in particular, towards this idea of surge pricing in ticketing.

23:23This idea like when you get on an airplane, you buy your ticket a couple of months in advance, it might be one price, but as you get closer to the flight itself, the price goes up as the demand and supply vary. And so you might sat next to someone on an airplane and you paid a completely different price for the ticket for the same for the seat i think i think there seems to be a kind of visceral hatred for that idea for a gig amongst people and i think it's partly to do with the fact that the gig is more of a communal experience than a flight really isn't it you know you're not you're not there to sort of have a religious kind of epiphany when you catch on the flight is trying to get from a to b and hopefully do so in reasonable comfort but the uh a gig is a completely different thing so people really respond very badly to that idea.

24:06And the interesting thing was, of course, Ticketmaster were accused of surge pricing during the Oasis gig sale. In fact, what was going on was something rather different, and the Competition and Markets Authority had looked into it. They're actually admitting people into the ticket sale, saying the price of the ticket is, what, whatever, 100 quid, and then saying, as you go on, say, whoops, we've run out of 100 quid tickets, but we can give you a ticket for 150 quid. But it was exactly the same ticket, really. They just, you know, dress it up in a different way. They say, that's not surge. You know, there were only ever that number of tickets available at 100 quid, so it was not really surge pricing.

24:43But the point is, when you went into that sale, you didn't know that was going to happen. And that's the point. You need transparency and clarity. That's what fans want, you know, out of the situation. I think it invidious to sell the same ticket at two different prices, you know, at the same sort of seated door. or place in the gig at the two different prices. And it's certainly invidious to put smoke and mirrors around it and trying to pretend to the fan it's something that it actually isn't. The other issue you were mentioning, sorry, this is a long answer, Steve, but there's loads in this, isn't it, is more the secondary ticketing thing when you buy a ticket for resale.

25:19And the government has said, and they haven't announced the details of it, has said that it does intend already to act to restrict ticket resale and not have a free-for-all, like you see tickets on Via Gogo advertised for a thousand quid and all that sort of thing, not have a free-for-all, but have a properly regulated secondary ticket market where if there is a markup in the price, it would be a reasonable one to cover any costs or whatever, but not an outrageous bit of just ripping fans off. So it'll be interesting to see the details of that proposals. certainly when the survey comes out we'll see where the government will come to by then but I'm sure this survey and the report following it will have something to say on that subject as well.

26:03Steve:When you do finally try to make sense of the findings what are you hoping that you'll see? Are you looking for general trends or answers to specific questions or a mixture of the two? Yeah I think it is a mixture of the two. There are very very particular things that you know people uh are concerned about but they're also um you know more general trends that are going on in around live music and gigs and so on as i said i'm i'm hoping that what will be clear are the sorts of things that we ought to be able to get and i know this is probably possibly idealistic but we ought to be able to get you know everybody in the industry to buy into the notion that fans should be treated fairly you know i accept it's a business You know, people have got to make money out of it.

26:54You know, the promoters need to take their cut. The venue needs their cut. The artist should be paid. You know, creator remuneration is my whole thing. I want musicians actually to get paid, you know, out of all this. And I think fans, unless, you know, they're a sort of leftover from the three-festival movement or something, you know, they understand you've got to pay, you know, and it's right that it should pay and it's right that musicians should get rewarded for their labor as often they're the only person in the room who doesn't get paid when you go to an event. He's the actual musician. When the bar staff's getting paid, the cleaners are getting paid, the doorman's getting paid.

27:27But you say, would you play for free? I've always thought that's crazy. It is labor when you make music. But I would have thought that everybody could agree that that's fair enough. But what shouldn't be happening in all of that is that you're hiding things from the fans. When we were talking earlier on about the booking fees thing i think i've asked people this question and i don't think i've ever come across anybody who's just a music fan who actually knows the answer to it which is where do you think the money goes on all these additional fees you know what do you think it pays for um and people genuinely don't know they some of them think does it go you know i'm paying for the platform that the ticket is being advertised on and being sold through yeah in part some of it It might go to that.

28:19But where else does it go? A lot of people don't realize that actually, in some instances, a chunk of that booking fee will be going to the artists themselves. Meanwhile, the artists will be there saying, it's outrageous, ticket prices. I'm going to keep the ticket prices down at our gigs. And yet, around the other side, as the customer's on their way out, the website haven't bought the ticket and they're getting shaken down. one of the people shaking them down is the artist themselves who's taking a third of the booking fee or something like that. So transparency, you know, clarity, treating people fairly and not just shooting them as an opportunity to shake them down, I think is something fans really, really are hankering at.

29:00Steve:And this obviously, crucially, once the scores are in, it's there. I wonder how much pressure there is going to be on, well, I guess yourself, everyone who's involved in it, in making sure that this does translate into some conversations at government. Otherwise, the more cynical of your music fan will go, look, you see, we did this, we told them what we thought, and they didn't do anything about it. So something's going to have to happen or at least be discussed, doesn't it, at the end of this. And this is why I encourage everyone to fill this in because the more people that do, the more powerful it becomes as a piece of data.

29:42Steve:But then at the other end of it, someone's got to go, crikey, there's a real appetite from the fans themselves. They do actually want to have their voices heard. We're going to have to do something about this. Yeah. I mean, when we did the Music Stream Report a few years back, I mean, I would have liked to see much more radical change coming out of that than actually happened. But sometimes in politics, you can't always get what you want to quote the old song, but get what you need sometimes. But in the music streaming thing, not every recommendation we made in that report was implemented. I actually tried to change the law through a private members bill to improve payouts under copyright law for streaming to artists.

30:31But what did happen was a whole series of working groups were set up within the part of government that's called the Intellectual Property Office, which is really the organization that's there to make sure that people who own a copyright on something like a song, for example, actually get paid out. And that only exists because the law says they should get paid out. It doesn't exist in nature itself. and um uh you know lots of groups were set up and there's been huge improvements for example in the transparency of the data that you know people at spotify have that ensures people get paid there's been this uh you know uh uh this committee set up about remuneration which is still working which already produced this songwriters payment which i was talking about earlier so things happen and you know it's about turning the dial basically and and turning that dial in the direction of the fan and i'm very confident that the government will actually listen to what we have to say and i'm hoping i can make recommendations they're not you know out with the theories recommendations but our recommendations that are practical that national government local government and the