This page is the evidence base for the investment thesis: the external figures the argument rests on, each with the body, measure and year that published it. It is deliberately not a statistics compendium — the full maintained set of UK live-music figures lives on UK market statistics, the canonical page for those numbers, and GigXchange's own primary data is published at the GX Index.

Industry-level figures (external sources)

• £8bn — total UK music industry GVA in 2024, up from £7.6bn in 2023 (UK Music, This Is Music 2025).
• 220,000 — full-time-equivalent jobs supported by UK music in 2024 (UK Music).
• £6.68bn — consumer spend on live music in 2024. This is an economic-impact measure published separately by LIVE, on a different basis from GVA, and is not a component of the figure above.
• 801 — grassroots music venues remaining in the UK. 30 closed permanently over the year, 53% made no profit at all, and average margins ran at 2.5% (MVT Annual Report 2025).
• 175 — UK towns and cities, home to an estimated 25 million people, that no longer receive regular touring shows by professional artists (MVT, 2025).
• 59% — grassroots venues (475 rooms) with no major promoter activity at all (MVT, 2025).

Market-structure figures (GigXchange primary data)

GigXchange publishes the market's missing microdata, all free to cite with a link: thousands of UK venues that book live music mapped across hundreds of UK towns and cities in the venue directory; over a thousand verified open mic nights in the open mic directory; and the GX Index — thousands of weighted fee data points refreshed monthly with a public methodology, the only published dataset of observed market rates for UK grassroots gigs. Live counts are on the Investor Hub landing page.

What the numbers say together

A large industry (£8bn GVA) rests on a grassroots layer that is measurably fragile — 53% of venues made no profit in 2025, on average margins of 2.5% — and informationally starved (no published pay data before the GX Index, no national venue picture before the directory). That combination — scale above, fragility and opacity below — is the market-structure argument developed in The UK live music market and Why now.

Citation policy

Every GigXchange figure is free to cite with a link to gigxchange.app; several datasets are additionally released under CC BY 4.0 with permanent identifiers. External figures above should be cited to their original publishers — UK Music and the Music Venue Trust — via the links given.