At the turn of the new year, Boris Johnson announced that a deal had been agreed with the EU to allow the UK to leave the EU. Exactly what this entailed was unclear, but no more so than for the UK music industry.
Left with no choice but to wait with bated breath for months on the future of UK artists being able to tour across Europe, finally, there is good news for the UK music industry.
The UK government has announced that deals have been struck with 19 EU member states to allow British artists to tour without a visa. This ensures that previous fears of British artists incurring large fees for touring can be partially settled; but at the same time, there is still work to be done.
These 19 countries are: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Sweden.
A spokesperson for the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) said, “We want to ensure that when Covid-19 restrictions are lifted, touring can resume and our world-leading creative and cultural artists can continue to travel widely, learning their craft, growing their audiences and showing the best of British creativity to the world.”
Whilst this is certainly a promising start, it would be wrong to label this a job well done. Key destinations for UK artists such as Spain, Portugal and Greece are still missing from the Visa-free list.
Hopefully, this is just the start and before long UK artists will be able to tour throughout the EU as they could before.
[Image by Piotr Piatrouski via Shutterstock]