While your local small venue struggles with rising costs, your favourite headline DJ may be commanding their biggest fee yet. Top-billing artists are flocking towards corporate gigs, festivals and mega clubs, such as The Warehouse Project in Manchester, where promoters can offer huge fees. Fred again, for example, is rumoured to be paid up to £1 million per show. Meanwhile, the grassroots dance music scene is being priced out of business. Is it time the biggest DJs reconsidered the fees and exclusivity contracts they accept?

Running events is an adrenaline rush; the highs are very high, and the lows can mean financial ruin. Hannah O’Gorman, co-founder of Manchester-based promoter NOSSA! is more familiar with these financial pains than most. “When you’re running a small party in your city, it’s not a business – it’s something that you do for the love of it; you do it for the community,” says O’Gorman, who struggles to break even on her events due to skyrocketing artist fees. “So, having headline DJs and agencies really pushing for those big fees feels pretty unfair on everyone else who just has to take the brunt of it.” 

Headliners are following the money. Social media feeds are filled with DJs playing to crowds in huge, corporatised warehouses. While small venues have increasingly struggled to compete, it is ironically these very same spaces that helped pioneer many of the sounds that mainstream superstar DJs profit from today. DMZ, the pioneering UK dubstep label and club night, began in the 400-capacity south London club Mass. Sheffield’s bassline sound developed around venues such as Niche. Detroit’s Music Institute became a crucial early home for techno. It’s difficult to feel positive about the future of dance culture when these spaces are under growing threat while headline artists and powerful companies dominate the top end of the industry. A 2026 parliamentary report found that Live Nation directly controlled 58 per cent of the UK’s primary tickets on sale in 2025, rising to 66 per cent when its affiliates were included. 

“Now you can technically never have played at a club until you’re doing 1,000-capacity shows. You can skip the beautiful thing of cutting your teeth with smaller venues and having to build a crowd and a following”

Rishi Bagdai, who DJs under the name Brown Excellence and curates Outlook festival, has noticed a similar pattern. “A lot of these smaller reputable venues have closed and many DJs who would have been playing these venues on the circuit aren’t anymore,” he argues. “The clubs people wanted to DJ back in the 2010s now either don’t exist or aren’t as attractive anymore to play. You can technically never have played at a club until you’re doing 1,000-capacity shows. You can skip the beautiful thing of cutting your teeth with smaller venues and having to build a crowd and a following.” The social media and TikTok-ification of dance culture can allow artists to build substantial audiences online and skip straight to larger venues. When a career isn’t built through a circuit of smaller clubs, the connection to those spaces – and the sense of responsibility towards them – can be lost. And why would an artist reduce their fees for a venue they have never needed? 

You may not care whether venues can compete with the high fees, but it affects you too. Ticket prices have soared amid Live Nation-Ticketmaster’s dominance; in the US, a federal jury recently found that the company had operated an illegal monopoly and overcharged fans. Meanwhile, a small number of headline DJs command huge sums as grassroots venues struggle to survive. It’s no wonder that many of the smaller reputable venues that Bagdai references have closed. Between 2020 and December 2023, the UK has lost a third of its nightclubs, not to mention the hundreds of venues that closed in the years before.

Even if a small venue survives, radius and exclusivity contracts can make bookings difficult. These clauses offer massive fees to headliners in exchange for exclusivity within a particular area and period. It’s a predatory system that hoards talent, denying them the opportunity of playing elsewhere in the city for a few weeks to a year. Even if a small venue magically came up with the funds to afford a headline DJ, a sufficiently broad contract could prevent the booking from happening anyway.

Katie Matthews, a co-founder of Sheffield’s DIY queer community venue Gut Level, however, argues that agents and DJs can be part of the solution. The venue maintains a strict equal pay policy across all bookings, helping to ensure a more sustainable model for the nightlife ecosystem. “It can be challenging when you are cold emailing agents, but it's not always the case,” says Matthews. “[Some] DJs and artists that want to support our organisation and wider community have come through to play at Gut Level. It’s what helps us have really sound people play, they just get what the space is about.”

Gut Level aren’t alone in their efforts. An increasing number of DJs have begun reducing their fees or putting on affordable parties of their own. Chief among them is Sherelle’s 2026 SHERELLELAND tour, organised in partnership with Save Our Scene and Music Venue Trust and aimed, in her own words, at “bocats on a budget”. The £10 capped events took place at six independent venues across the country, helping to bring affordable parties to cities increasingly left off the touring circuit. If corporate money is the poison of dance culture, then these community-first approaches present one potential antidote.

Still, relying on a DJ’s sense of morality to play these smaller venues for less money may not be a long-term solution for dance culture – and perhaps it’s unfair to place all the responsibility on them to begin with. Public policy can play a role too. Countries such as Germany provide tax breaks and financial assistance to venues – in 2018, for example, the Berlin senate pledged €1 million to venues across the city to help install noise insulation. The UK has introduced some support, including 15 per cent business-rates relief for eligible live music venues in England during 2026–27, alongside a few grants for cultural infrastructure. But this support remains piecemeal, and nightclubs primarily devoted to recorded music may not qualify for the relief. Clearly, national and local authorities deserve some blame for the rapid closures of grassroots venues across the country today. But DJs aren’t completely absolved.

Dance music does not exist in a vacuum; it does not live on Instagram Stories, nor does it exist on the financial spreadsheet of a megaclub like Drumsheds or The Warehouse Project. Headliners today owe their careers to the emerging sounds incubated within small venues, and to the dancers who kept them alive. Now that this ecosystem is facing collapse, perhaps it’s time they stopped accepting predatory exclusivity contracts, and started taking pay cuts to help keep the community alive. Otherwise, soon there may be no community to speak of.