BACK in May 2025, Stalybridge Celtic’s Bower Fold Stadium hosted the inaugural StalyFest, an eclectic mix of club artists, legendary Britpop bands (Cast, Starsailor), and ‘soundalike’ bands such as Oasis Supernova and The Rolling People.
On the surface, there’s nothing unfamiliar about the concept. It was a two-day music festival like many others in the country. Yet StalyFest, which raised money for The Christy Charity, represented hope for an industry in dire straits—and it’s due back in 2026.
Lost Performances
Research group Economics Observatory indicates that the UK owns a 12% share of the global music market. In 2024, 20 million people saw a live event. British music fans are still eating exceptionally well a year later.
Two once-in-a-lifetime events – Oasis’ reunion and Ozzy Osbourne’s final show, both in July – saw gig attendance climb. Then, there’s Glastonbury, Download, Bloodstock, and both Leeds and Reading festivals for fans to attend.
Strip away that upper tier of British music, and things aren’t quite so rosy. A report from The House of Commons summarised wider venue fortunes as a “crisis of soaring costs”, as the number of smaller spaces in the UK fell by 13%.
That figure represents 30,000 lost performances, according to the Economics Observatory. It seems the music industry increasingly concentrates its efforts on high-profile, high-capacity events at the expense of “feeder” venues.
While the numbers for the first StalyFest haven’t been published yet, Bower Fold Stadium holds 6,500 people, roughly aligning with the 5,000 visitors About Manchester magazine expected to turn up a month prior to the event.
Put another way, StalyFest, as small as it is, occupies a valuable middle ground between the upper and lower tiers of British music.
The Digital World
So, why all the gloom? It’s hard to deny that entertainment has changed, shifting away from the outdoors to the indoors, and the physical to the digital.
Classically offline pastimes like casino gaming now invest as much in serving players on the internet as in brick-and-mortar facilities. Recently, operators have mixed the two worlds with live casino gaming, which adds a human dealer on webcam to interact with players in real time.
For music, which was arguably one of the first parts of entertainment to embrace the digital world, a decline in venues offers a mirror on the journey of casinos and arcades – but it’s a more fundamental problem, and one that could starve the industry of its oxygen.
Without those feeder clubs, there’s no music industry. Casinos didn’t die because they moved away from the high street, but the same model won’t work for music venues.
British festival season is winding down as the colder months approach, which could give clubs a minor boost.
Defying a downward trend for physical entertainment amid soaring venue and living costs (the 2023 Musicians’ Census claimed that 23% of musicians can’t support themselves financially) will be tough, however.
StalyFest hasn’t mentioned the line-up for 2026 yet. In fact, the only guarantee so far is that it’ll return on Saturday, 9th May. For Tameside music fans, the renewal of a smaller event is a reminder that there’s still some life left in grassroots music.