The Bundesstiftung LiveKultur is rolling out the Club-Euro across Germany: a one-euro surcharge on every ticket that participating venues collect themselves and pay into a common fund. The surcharge is not a public levy, and its tax treatment remains undecided. The pilot that deploys it, however, is paid for with public money.
It starts with project funding from Initiative Musik, according to the foundation's announcement of 27 August. It is worth knowing what that body is: Initiative Musik's main funder since 2007 has been the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, the BKM. Zora Brändle has led the project since 1 September, and venues can already sign up. The model was developed in Cologne by KLUBKOMM, the local association of clubs and promoters. The pilot builds on that and on meetings held with Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Cologne and Leipzig, cities with which there have been talks, not confirmed participants.
There is no central collection body: the money is gathered venue by venue. Each one charges its customers the euro, within the price or itemised separately (the example in the official model FAQ is '€25.00 ticket + €1.00 Club Euro'), declares its sales in an online form and settles every quarter. Of a city's pool, 85% stays there and is shared among the smaller receiving venues; 15% of total income goes to the foundation's Live Music Fund, for structural measures and administration.
It applies to concerts, festivals and tours where the performance is the centrepiece, to events where live music is essential, and to DJ shows with the artists as the focus. A pure club night without a curated programme is not automatically included. If the venue is hired out to a third party, the landlord passes the euro on as an itemised line on the invoice, and the promoter becomes responsible for collecting and settling it.
How it is charged in legal terms remains open, and the FAQ warns that it reflects the current state of the concept. Two routes are under study: a donation, with the option not to pay, an identified recipient and no consideration in return, or a service fee at the reduced 7% VAT rate. That opt-out is a requirement of the first route, not a general rule.
The sector is moving ahead of politics. On 2 June the Bundestag Research Services completed a report on live music promoters with one chapter on the federal government's power to legislate a compulsory levy in the sector and another on the constitutional and fiscal fit of a levy on tickets. It is the work of a research service: neither a law nor a legislative initiative. That it confirms such a power is the foundation's reading, not the document's.
As the announcement itself notes, a Berlin study by the Clubcommission puts the share of surveyed clubs that cover their costs at 61%. 'If venues cannot sustain themselves even in Berlin, with demand at its peak, the problem is not the audience. It is that the funding model for live culture no longer holds up,' says Felix Grädler, of the foundation's board of trustees, in the same statement.
Compare it with Germany's other rescue of the year: at Berlin's RAW-Gelände, the district pays one million euros a year in public money to keep the clubs from closing. Here the euro comes from the box office, venue by venue, and is distributed by a foundation set up by the venues' own trade body, LiveKomm, with a donation and its own funds. But the scaffolding that gets it going is paid for by the federal budget: this is not pure sector versus pure state. In Spain, the APM Yearbook put live box office at 807.2 million in 2025, 11.24% more than in 2024, with Madrid and Barcelona accounting for 92.2% of the growth: an aggregate that concentrated says nothing about small venues.