175 British towns no longer get a gig. That is 25 million people one good night out short.

Somewhere tonight, in a back room over a pub or a 200-capacity hall that smells of spilled lager and last week's smoke machine, a band almost nobody has heard of is playing to a small, devoted crowd. Nobody in that room is getting rich. The band will split a few quid and a rider of warm cans; the venue, on the night's average margin, will make next to nothing. And it is, all the same, where British music actually comes from — the place every act you love started, long before the arenas and the algorithm.

That circuit is fraying. The Music Venue Trust's latest annual report makes for hard reading. Thirty grassroots venues shut for good last year; more than half of the survivors turned no profit at all; the sector now runs on an average margin of two and a half per cent, one bad month from the wall. The cruellest figure, though, is not about money. It is that 175 British towns and cities no longer receive any touring artists at all — around twenty-five million people, getting on for a third of the country, for whom live music has quietly become something that happens somewhere else.

This is the paper's question, wearing a band T-shirt. Music is one of the oldest things humans do that work neither requires nor rewards. We make it, play it and gather to hear it for no economic reason whatever, which is precisely what makes it worth something. A grassroots venue is post-work life already built: a room whose entire purpose is people spending their off-hours on something that produces nothing but meaning. Lose the room and you lose more than the bands. You lose the place a town goes to be together once the working day is done.

There is a fix on the table, and this month it reaches its deadline. For years the industry has weighed a voluntary levy — a small slice of every arena and stadium ticket, redirected to keep the grassroots rooms alive, on the logic that the stadiums are full of acts those small venues raised. The Music Venue Trust has said plainly that if the voluntary version cannot prove itself by this June, the government should legislate. We are in that month. Whether the biggest names in live music agree to fund the rooms they came up through, or whether it takes a law to make them, is being settled right now.

You cannot do much about a levy from your sofa. But you can do the one thing that keeps these rooms open, and it is the most pleasurable instruction this desk will ever give you: go. Not to the stadium. To the small place near you, on a quiet Tuesday, for a band you have never heard of, for the price of a couple of drinks.

Listen tonight: before you go anywhere, put on a record by an artist who came up through Britain's small venues — almost every one of them did. Then look up your nearest grassroots venue's listings for the week; the Music Venue Trust keeps a map of them. The way to keep music live is embarrassingly simple: turn up, pay in, buy a drink, stay to the end. A band you will be bragging about in five years is playing to forty people somewhere tonight.