Live shows are still vital for emerging artists breaking through. This startup is streamlining the process

The live music bookings industry has long been tangled in red tape and middlemen. GigPig, a UK-based hospitality music marketplace, says it’s time for a cultural reset.

The decline of the nightlife and live music industries has been impossible to ignore in recent years. The Night Time Industries Association (NTIA) has published a steady stream of stark reports detailing venue closures, festival cancellations, and a broader decline in people’s willingness to go out – the result of cultural shifts, financial barriers, and the influence of AI and digital platforms on how we discover artists. 

The shifting landscape has also changed how we, as fans, share and experience music. As most would agree, discovering a track in its sped-up, 15-second form on social media, or through a playlist curated by commercially driven algorithms, pales in comparison to hearing it live. Giddily informing your friends about a band you stumbled across when sitting down to eat at a festival, or the first time you hear your favourite track played live – access to these kinds of spontaneous, communal experiences seems to be decreasing year-on-year. 

One organisation addressing this issue head-on is GigPig, a platform that helps venues manage the entire process of booking live musicians and DJs. Calling itself the UK’s largest live music marketplace, GigPig’s two-pronged approach to supporting venues and artists alike posits itself as a leg-up for an industry on its knees. GigPig enables venues (more than 3,000 so far) to source, book, pay and promote gigs, preserving valuable resources given the ease with which they can access talent pools. Right now, over 14,000 artists have joined the platform for free, enticed by the promise of easy access to opportunities and the agency they maintain over their bookings. 

GigPig’s co-founders Kit Muir-Rogers and Michael Forster saw the catastrophic impact of the Covid pandemic as an opportunity to redress a booking process that, for decades, has felt slow, messy and outdated. “Post-pandemic, venues were wary of spending and short on staff, so the timing was both the hardest and the most important moment to launch,” Muir-Rogers explains.

Having run agencies themselves and managed artists and venues alike, the founders marketed GigPig as a radical model for “stripping out the waste.” The difficulty has been in shifting attitudes. “The biggest challenge is cultural,” Muir-Rogers admits. “You’re asking the biggest operators in the UK to change a decades-old habit.”

Their aim was to streamline how people connect – to take the admin and middlemen out of the equation and put human relationships back at the centre. “One of our biggest clients wanted to bring bookings in-house,” Forster recalls. “We handed them our system, and it worked so well that it became obvious this should be the norm, not the exception. GigPig is the scaled-up version of that idea.”

According to the NTIA, more than one in four late-night venues have shut their doors since 2020 and 72 independent festivals were cancelled, postponed, or closed in 2024 due to financial pressures. Whilst the impact is nationwide, the worst impact is felt in towns and small cities where late-night venues are much more than just pillars in local economies. Founded in the north of England and having expanded to other cities since, GigPig sees the most powerful transformations take place outside of London, where the economic impact that live gigs have on pubs and bars also serves to strengthen local communities and preserve heritage.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by GigPig (@gigpiguk)

The Liverpudlian four-piece The Sugar Brothers first encountered GigPig after enquiring with a venue that, themselves, used its services to book acts. “[It] has been an incredible tool for us. They cover all fronts; from booking, invoicing, last-minute cancellations, reminders and scheduling, all we have to do is turn up and do what we do best”, they tell us, effusively. “[They also encourage] the building of relationships between the artist and venue, and are always looking for feedback on how things can be improved – and that really shows”.

Relationship-building is vital for emerging artists less familiar with touring and club circuits, who have long depended on live gigs to connect with new fans, promoters and peers. Financial precarity forces bookers to make decisions based on an artist’s capacity to guarantee ticket sales, making it far harder for emerging talent to gain recognition through shows, let alone earn a sustainable income.

GigPig users Latoya Reisner and Yelena Lashimba, a.k.a. the Mancunian DJ and production duo Shimrise, point out how essential it is for these rising artists to book lower-pressure gigs while they build up to industry networking and their own headline shows, too. “You’re always going to be playing on different standards of equipment that you can’t control, and it’s normal to make mistakes along the way. At home, if I made a mistake on a mix, I’d stop and start again. In bars, you’re forced to keep going, which really helps you grow and build that muscle – especially when you’re playing for four-to-six-hour sets,” Reisner says, highlighting GigPig’s connections with other spaces outside of traditional music venues. “When you’re starting out as a DJ, it can be difficult being thrown into an intense club setting immediately. Building confidence through bars and restaurants and more intimate, relaxed venues through a platform like GigPig has been crucial.”

GigPig is funded by Jägermeister’s Venture Capital Investment Unit Firm Best Nights VC, which, since 2021, has been investing in innovative tech startups reshaping our social interactions. “When we began preparing to invest in the company, GigPig was facilitating over 1,500 live performances per week. For us at Best Nights VC, that’s music to our ears,” says Managing Director Lorrain de Silva. Since launching in 2022, GigPig has now facilitated over 110,000 gigs, saved venues around £5m, and generated over £28m directly for artists.

“GigPig didn’t just grow fast – it grew right. We saw high retention, increasing velocity, and a genuine behavioural change in how venues discover and book live talent,” adds Investment Associate Christina Hummer. “We saw rapid traction, a repeatable model, and powerful network effects, with meaningful scale on both sides of the marketplace.” De Silva agrees: “It’s always free for artists, and it’s fair and reliable for venues.”

By streamlining the logistics of live music booking, platforms like GigPig offer emerging artists a practical platform to grow while providing venues with a simpler way to discover and book them. At a time when technology often dehumanises how music is created, shared and promoted, it points to a different path – one that uses tech not to replace connection, but to make it easier: a tool for bringing people with common goals together and using digital systems to promote and facilitate real-world interactions.