Club night visits at Dutch music venues fell by 14% in 2025 compared with 2024, and only 19% of those nights sold out, down from 28% in 2023. Between 2024 and 2025, the amount each paid visit brought in at the box office rose from €18.42 to €19.55.
What the report measures, and what a "poppodium" is
The VNPF — Vereniging Nederlandse Poppodia en -Festivals — has published the Poppodia en -Festivals in Cijfers series since 2004. The 2025 edition came out on 10 July 2026. At that point the association counted 73 poppodia and 45 festivals; festivals joined the series in 2014.
The report doesn't portray the whole sector. It covers programming, audience, employment, revenue and costs for the 55 poppodia with complete figures for 2023, 2024 and 2025, and adds programming and audience data for 43 associated festivals in 2025. The data comes through the Poppodium Analyse Systeem (PAS), the system venues use to report to the association. Using the same sample across all three years is what makes the comparison reliable.
It's worth clarifying which venues we're talking about, because the headline is easy to misread. A poppodium is not a nightclub. It's a pop music venue, mostly not-for-profit and backed by municipal funding, that programmes concerts as well as club nights. The report itself says so: these venues aren't pursuing a financial surplus, but fulfilling a public role centred on artistic quality and talent development. What's falling in these figures is the club night within these venues. It is not Dutch commercial nightlife, on which this document says nothing.
One more point, and it's the kind that changes how you read everything else: the report counts *bezoeken*, visits. Someone who goes four times counts as four visits. There's no figure for distinct individuals.
The audience: fewer visits, and the decline isn't evenly spread
The 55 venues recorded 6,444,864 visits in 2025. In 2024 the figure was 6,756,832, and in 2023, 6,259,436. Almost 5% down on the previous year, but still 3% above two years earlier.
Within that total, each type of activity moves differently. Club nights fell 14% compared with 2024, and 13% comparing 2025 with 2023. In-house concerts dropped 4% in 2025 versus 2024, but remain 9.5% above 2023. Musical activities held outside the venue grew 5% in 2025 and are up 8.0% since 2023. Non-musical programming slipped 1% in 2025 compared with 2024, and closed activities — training, corporate hire — fell 2%.
The 2025 breakdown looks like this: 51.5% in-house concerts, 18.6% club nights, 17.9% musical activities at other locations, 8.2% non-musical public programming and 4.4% closed activities. Music accounted for 88% of all visits. 86% of visits were on a paid ticket; 14% were free.
While the audience was falling, the programme was growing: 20,428 activities in 2025, up 3% on 2024 (19,893) and 4% on 2023 (19,674). Of that programme, 40% were in-house concerts, 15% club nights, just over 11% activities at other locations — mostly concerts — 17% non-musical public programming (film, theatre, talks) and 18% closed activities. Nearly two-thirds of the calendar was music.
Sell-outs: from 28% to 19% in two years
Here's the figure a promoter would look at before the total.
In 2023, 28% of club nights sold out. In 2024, 25%. In 2025, 19%. Nine points in two years.
Concerts are slipping too, and it's more honest to say so than to hide it: 26% sold out in 2023, 23% in 2024, 21% in 2025. Five points. But the slope is half as steep, and the order has flipped: in 2023 and 2024 club nights sold out more often than concerts, and in 2025 it's the other way round.
Average attendance per club night fell from 455 in 2023 to 406 in 2025. Average attendance per concert, by contrast, rose over the same period, because concert visits grew faster than the number of concerts programmed. The report doesn't give a precise figure for that average, and none is invented here.
There's a second trend underneath. Between 2023 and 2025, club night visits fell faster than the number of club nights held. In other words: fewer club nights were programmed, and they also performed worse. Both at once.
None of this is uniform. 60% of venues saw their club night visits fall between 2023 and 2025; 40% reported growth. For concerts the proportion flips: 34% recorded a decline against 66% that grew. For four in ten venues, the club night is still working.
The report doesn't explain the fall. It proposes no cause, and none is proposed here either.
Why it matters: the money is coming in through concerts
The report publishes audience and revenue figures in separate chapters and never cross-references them. Doing so is where it gets interesting.
The 55 venues brought in €247.1 million in 2025: 2% more than in 2024 (€242.3 million) and 14.1% more than in 2023 (€216.5 million). 68% of that revenue comes directly from the public — 40% ticket sales, 23% food and drink, and 6% other audience revenue: cloakroom, lockers, booking fees, membership dues and merchandise. Subsidies, almost entirely municipal, account for 24%. Sponsorship makes up 1%.
Since 2023, ticket sales have grown 23% and food and drink 13%. Two other items have grown faster in percentage terms: sponsorship, up 36%, and hire income for closed activities, up 15%. Sponsorship, though, is worth only 1% of revenue: it's growing quickly but moves little on the total. Subsidies are up 11%. And average revenue per paid ticket and visit rose from €18.42 in 2024 to €19.55 in 2025, a 6% increase. That figure needs care: it excludes VAT and is an average across the whole programme — concerts, club nights and non-musical activities. It is not the price of a club ticket.
Even so, the direction is unmistakable. The ticket is earning more than ever just as the dance floor is emptying. These venues' business is increasingly being made at the concert.
The spending side confirms it, without saying so directly. The report attributes the 17% rise in programme costs between 2023 and 2025 to more concerts and higher fees, noting that the number of club nights, by contrast, fell. Those direct programme costs were 62% artist fees, 5% royalties and 33% other artist expenses: travel, catering, accommodation, equipment, staging and booking agency commissions.
And yet the sums don't add up. 2025 costs came to €251 million: up 2.3% on 2024 and 16.8% on 2023. They're rising faster than revenue. The average result was -1.6% of total revenue. 52% of venues closed 2025 in the red, 11% broke even and 37% ended in the black.
The spending breakdown shows where the money goes: staffing 38%, programme 36%, premises 11%, food and drink purchases 6%, marketing 2% and other 8%. In 2025 versus 2024, staffing rose 8% and marketing 7%, while the programme rose just 1%. Since 2023, staffing is up 25% cumulatively. The report points to a shift from contracted work to salaried employment, possibly linked to the end of the enforcement moratorium on false self-employment (*schijnzelfstandigheid*); that's the publication's hypothesis, not a settled fact. Today, 78% of staffing costs go on payroll employees, 12% on freelancers and 5% on agency and payroll-company staff.
One figure puts all of this in order: ticket sales covered 96% of programme costs at small venues, 95% at medium-sized ones and 114% at large ones. Only the large venues fund their programming entirely from what they sell. At the others, that gap has to be covered by other revenue streams — our reading, not one the report spells out this way — starting with the bar and the municipal subsidy.
The VNPF itself warns that behind the averages lie large differences between venues, and that more frequent deficits could end up forcing cuts to programming, staffing and audience development, making it harder to take artistic risks.
It's the same problem that in Germany has led to charging one euro per ticket and redistributing it from large venues to small ones, or to the Berlin district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg paying one million euros a year in public money to keep the clubs at RAW-Gelände open. Different countries, the same figures that won't balance. The contrast lies in the Spanish live market, where the APM recorded €807.2 million in box office revenue in 2025, up 11.24% on the previous year, though growth there is just as uneven across regions.
The second snapshot: the same thing is happening outside the venues
On 19 January 2026, Respons published research commissioned by VVEM (Vereniging van Evenementen Makers), presented at Eurosonic Noorderslag in Groningen. It's a different association and a different method: it covers events with a capacity of 3,000 or more. That makes it a useful independent check on the direction of the data.
The number of EDM/dance festivals fell 11% in 2025. Paid festivals dropped 4% in number but drew 5% more visitors. Visits to major concerts rose 2%. International programming rose from 52% in 2024 to 55% in 2025. According to the VNPF's summary of that study, dance visits fell 2%; that figure doesn't appear in the Respons release itself and is attributed to that summary.
Two different associations, two different methodologies, the same direction: concerts are holding up and dance is shrinking. Sentiment, at least, is better than a year ago — 60% of organisers are positive about 2026, up from under 50% twelve months earlier — but concerns about rising costs remain. The same concerns showing up in the poppodia's accounts.
What to do with this
Look at the sell-out rate, not the total sold. A Dutch venue looking only at total visits would see a 5% drop on the previous year and call it a bad year. Looking at sell-outs, it would see nine points down in two years for club nights and five for concerts: two problems of very different size. The share of sold-out events, by activity type and by year, is what separates a rough patch from a structural shift.
Separate the club night's accounts from the concert's. At these venues the two coexist under the same roof and end up in the same profit-and-loss account. Unless ticket revenue, artist fees and bar takings are split out by type of night, one side can end up funding the other for years without anyone noticing. In the Dutch case, concerts are growing in visits and in fees while the dance floor empties.
Read revenue per visit alongside bar spend. At the poppodia, food and drink accounts for 23% of revenue, and average bar spend per visit rose from €7.87 in 2024 to €8.66 in 2025 — a 10% increase, more than the ticket. A night with fewer people can turn over the same if those people spend more; and a full night on cheap tickets may not cover the fee. Look at both numbers together, or neither.
Distinguish visits from people. The whole report is built on visits. A 14% drop could mean fewer people, or the same people coming less often, and the two don't call for the same response. If a ticketing system can't separate new buyers from returning ones, there's no way to tell which of the two is happening. It's one of the reasons club ticketing is measured differently from concert ticketing.