Closed Doors, Cancelled Gigs, and Complacency: Can Grassroots Music Still Fight Back?

The closures aren’t coming slowly. They’re swallowing cultural heritage and grassroots music whole, and barely anyone outside the scene notices. Retro Bar in Manchester, the same venue that soundtracked generations of alt misfits and hosted countless formative live sets, is clinging to survival with less than 10% of its crowdfunding target met. Meanwhile, hundreds of gigs across the UK are being axed weekly, not due to lack of talent or poor organisation, but because ticket sales just aren’t there. If people can’t be bothered to turn up, how can we blame artists for burning out, bowing out, or refusing to play to empty rooms? We’re not just losing venues—we’re losing proving grounds, safety nets, communal hubs, and sonic battlegrounds. Yet the response is tepid at best. The apathy is deafening. It raises a hard question: are independent artists still fighting for something worth saving, or are we just romanticising the wreckage as it falls apart in our hands? The Cancel Culture Nobody’s Talking About: Cancelled Gigs from Lack of Interest It’s easy to blame landlords, gentrification, and rising costs for the closure of venues, and those are all valid villains. But the quieter killer of grassroots music is disinterest. When […] The post Closed Doors, Cancelled Gigs, and Complacency: Can Grassroots Music Still Fight Back? appeared first on A&R Factory.

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The closures aren’t coming slowly. They’re swallowing cultural heritage and grassroots music whole, and barely anyone outside the scene notices. Retro Bar in Manchester, the same venue that soundtracked generations of alt misfits and hosted countless formative live sets, is clinging to survival with less than 10% of its crowdfunding target met. Meanwhile, hundreds of gigs across the UK are being axed weekly, not due to lack of talent or poor organisation, but because ticket sales just aren’t there. If people can’t be bothered to turn up, how can we blame artists for burning out, bowing out, or refusing to play to empty rooms? We’re not just losing venues—we’re losing proving grounds, safety nets, communal hubs, and sonic battlegrounds. Yet the response is tepid at best. The apathy is deafening. It raises a hard question: are independent artists still fighting for something worth saving, or are we just romanticising the wreckage as it falls apart in our hands? The Cancel Culture Nobody’s Talking About: Cancelled Gigs from Lack of Interest It’s easy to blame landlords, gentrification, and rising costs for the closure of venues, and those are all valid villains. But the quieter killer of grassroots music is disinterest. When […]

The post Closed Doors, Cancelled Gigs, and Complacency: Can Grassroots Music Still Fight Back? appeared first on A&R Factory.