20% of Young People In the UK Have Never Seen Live Music: Why Are We Surprised?

There’s a new stat circulating, one that’s been framed as if the very soul of youth culture is withering on the vine: one in five young people in the UK have never experienced live music. Cue the hand-wringing, the crisis headlines, the immediate moral panic about the death of grass-roots music and the impending collapse of civilisation as we know it. Yet the deeper you look at the way this statistic has been framed, the more it exposes something subtly corrosive: an entitlement complex wrapped up in nostalgia and a very narrow idea of what constitutes a “life well lived.” I love live music; I’ve dedicated a significant proportion of my disposable income to it for as long as I can remember, and I’m no stranger to travelling to see it and treating it as a holiday. I love the feeling of squeezing myself into a sweaty venue, knowing that I’ve practically been abstracted from reality while I get to submit my senses entirely to music. And yes, I know that a lot of musicians are able to hang on through the revenue they gain through gigging and touring. But part of advocating for the survival of the live, independent […]

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