MSMN Analysis
Explainer based on published collecting-society materials, statute and touring guidance — not a listings piece and not an exclusive interview package.

Irish live venues, collecting societies, and the Brexit touring bill

MSMN has already filed the festival half of Irish live music: IMRO’s billion-euro habit, fields that must fill, and a National Music Strategy that still has not arrived. This piece is the room half. A European tour that looks smooth on a poster still has to clear three Irish and post-Brexit machines that households never see on a ticket: a 200-capacity room that can stay open, a collecting-society invoice that turns a night into a legal public performance, and a border that treats people, vans, backline and merch as four different files. Festivals import already-broken names. Venues mint the next one. When the rooms thin, the European circuit becomes a jump from bedroom to arena.

The Dual Music Licence is the night’s quiet landlord

In Irish law a public performance of recorded or live music is two copyright events at once. IMRO licenses the musical works — composition and publishing. Phonographic Performance (Ireland) licenses the sound recordings. Since 2016 most hospitality and venue operators have not run two contracts. They buy a Dual Music Licence, administered by IMRO, one invoice covering both repertoires. The Intellectual Property Office of Ireland’s public-performance materials still describe that split in the older language: IMRO for works, PPI for recordings. The Dual Licence is the operational peace treaty, not a merger of the two rights.

Tariffs then stack. Background music in a bar is one schedule. Featured entertainment — a band, a DJ, a late session — is another. Live rooms therefore pay for the right to exist as music businesses, not only for the pint. That is normal European collecting-society architecture. It is also a cashflow line that a 400-capacity independent cannot treat as optional colour. If the room closes, IMRO’s headline employment figures still count the loss; they do not replace the stage.

The legal frame moved in 2026. The Copyright and Related Rights (Amendment) Act 2026 (Act 4 of 2026, Bill 33 of 2025) amends section 208 of the 2000 Act so equitable remuneration for public performance of sound recordings is, by default, shared equally between performer and recording-copyright owner, less reasonable collecting costs, unless the parties agree otherwise — further effect to Directive 2006/115/EC after a Court of Justice finding that Ireland had not secured a fair performer share, including for recordings from outside the EEA. The cheque a venue already pays is now more tightly wired to performers. The Act reallocates a royalty; it does not invent a venue strategy.

Rooms without a census, and a planning file instead of a policy

The United Kingdom now publishes something Ireland still lacks: a grassroots-venue census. Music Venue Trust’s 2025 annual report recorded 801 trading grassroots venues across the UK, down from 810, and — for the first time — enough Northern Ireland data to sit in the UK-wide tables. That is a mirror, not a substitute. The Republic does not publish an equivalent stocktake of 100- to 500-capacity rooms.

What Ireland does publish, in local reporting, is the property ending. Unit 44 in Stoneybatter, run by the Kirkos Collective as an experimental-music and rehearsal room, was told to quit by March 2025 after the shopping centre that housed it was sold; the collective noted that recent public workspace money had largely missed music and artist-run rooms. Other closures and conversions — late-night rooms turned to other uses, sites cleared for housing or care — are individual planning stories. Together they are a cultural-infrastructure file that Screen Ireland would recognise for crews and that music policy still treats as nightlife.

IMRO’s 2025 Ireland: Music Report already said live events dominate consumer spend. Festivals and high-capacity concerts take the large slices. The 400-capacity room is how an Irish artist tests a set before a European support slot. When those rooms become nursing-home or residential applications, the live circuit’s farm system is the thing being rezoned. A European booker does not need the address. They need the artist to have played enough rooms to be routable.

Brexit is a van problem more than a passport problem — until it is both

The Common Travel Area still does the human work that continental touring lost. A British musician playing Dublin, or an Irish musician playing Manchester, is generally not in the Schengen visa business. The Musicians’ Union’s published Ireland-and-Europe case study is blunt about that relief — and about what the CTA does not solve once the same tour adds Denmark or France and a British crew member. Work-permit exemptions for “noteworthy artistic events” are national, uneven, and often written for the artist rather than the tour manager.

Equipment and merch are the second border. An ATA Carnet is the standard temporary-import passport for professional gear moving between Great Britain and the continental EU. Music-industry guidance treats it as routine cost and as a document you can fail on a stamp. The CTA does not magically extend that courtesy to a Calais queue. Cabotage and “merchandise in baggage” limits then decide whether a splitter van is a tour or a freight consignment, and whether T-shirts are stock or a customs event. The MU case study’s wish list — visas and carnets waived, cargo as well as splitter vans, merch enough for a six-week run without a VAT surprise — is still the unfinished EU–UK cultural protocol.

Irish artists who hold an Irish passport are EU citizens on the continental leg. Their British crew, their UK-registered van, and their merch boxes may not be. Culture Ireland’s Regular Grant Scheme is the public instrument that still treats international presentation as a state interest: travel, freight, accommodation and subsistence toward a confirmed international invitation, not a living. Four rounds in 2026, with activity windows that now stretch further than the old calendar, are how a mid-level Irish act sometimes makes the ferry or the flight. The grant does not rewrite cabotage. It can pay the invoice that cabotage created. Northern Ireland sits on both maps: MVT’s new NI figures are a UK grassroots story; Dublin–Belfast routing is a CTA story; Derry to Groningen becomes a carnet story at the eastern ports.

What a household should treat as the live test

Three checks will say whether Irish live is still a European circuit or only a weekend economy.

One: Did a mid-level Irish act you like play a room under 500 capacity this year, in Cork, Galway, Limerick or a Dublin independent, before they played a continental support slot? If the answer is only arenas and picnic fields, the farm system is already a brochure.

Two: Did the Dual Licence and the 2026 performer-share rule show up as a functioning cheque, not as a reason the room went dark? Collecting societies are infrastructure when they pay. They are a closure risk when they are only a tariff.

Three: Could that act add a British crew member and a van of merch to a French week without a lawyer on retainers? If no, Brexit is still pricing Irish-European touring as a specialist sport.

The unfinished work is habit, routing and a right to be paid: a Tuesday room, a carnet and Culture Ireland window, and IMRO/PPI plus the 50/50 rule in section 208. Until Ireland publishes a venue stocktake with the seriousness MVT now applies to Northern Ireland, the rooms will keep disappearing as individual planning stories. That is a European small-market failure mode. It just happens to use a stage door instead of a catalogue tile.

Sources

• IMRO, Dual Music Licence and organisation: https://imro.ie/
• Intellectual Property Office of Ireland, public performance licences (IMRO/PPI): https://www.ipoi.gov.ie/media/nulhnh0s/public-performance-licenses_.pdf
• Houses of the Oireachtas / Irish Statute Book, Copyright and Related Rights (Amendment) Act 2026 (No. 4 of 2026): https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/bills/bill/2025/33/
• Irish Statute Book, Act 4 of 2026 (PDF): https://www.irishstatutebook.ie/eli/2026/act/4/enacted/en/pdf
• Directive 2006/115/EC (rental and related rights): https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2006/115/oj
• IMRO, 2025 Ireland: Music Report: https://imro.ie/news/new-research-reveals-irish-music-industry-contributes-e1-billion-annually-to-economy/
• Musicians’ Union, Navigating Tours in Ireland and Europe post Brexit and Covid: https://musiciansunion.org.uk/news/navigating-tours-in-ireland-and-europe-post-brexit-and-covid-a-case-study
• Culture Ireland, Regular Grant Scheme: https://www.cultureireland.ie/funding/regular-grant/
• Music Venue Trust, Annual Report 2025: https://www.musicvenuetrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/MVT_2025-Annual-Report_Digital-Spreads.pdf
• Irish Independent, Unit 44 / Kirkos Collective closure reporting: https://www.independent.ie/regionals/dublin/lifestyle/dublins-art-scene-suffers-yet-again-as-anther-creative-space-announces-closure/a1678608594.html