OXFORD’S live music scene is worth £10.5m to the local economy each year, but venues are facing a host of threats including competition from the growing number of festivals, a first-of-its-kind study has revealed.

The UK’s first ever Live Music Census concluded that Oxford has at least 110 venues where live music is played and the scene supports 350 jobs, but parking and loading problems, business rates and festivals are all making life increasingly difficult.

Exactly a year since the census was carried out, the final report has made a range of recommendations to local and national government on how they can help.

Co-ordinated by the University of Edinburgh, the census on March 9, 2017, saw university students across the country spend the night watching live music in just three case study cities: Glasgow, Newcastle-Gateshead and Oxford.

In the city of dreaming spires, 12 students from Bucks New University watched a total of 16 performances at eight venues including ambient synth-pop at The Cellar, ‘ferocious grunge noise’ at the Library and RnB at the O2 Academy.

Dubbed ‘Springwatch for live music’, the survey aimed to get a measure of live music’s cultural and economic value, discover what challenges the industry faces and inform government policy to help it flourish.

In the final report published this month, the study’s leaders described Oxford as a city ‘long associated with college choirs’ which ‘came to national prominence in the 1990s with the likes of Ride and Radiohead, and today hosts genres ranging from roots reggae to jazz, and folk to hip hop’.

Based on interviews with gig-goers, promoters and bands about how much they spent getting into town, getting into venues, food and drink, researchers estimated the total annual spend around live music in Oxford was £10.5m.

However, the report said: “Forty-three per cent of the respondents to the online venue survey in Oxford said the increasingly competitive environment between venues and promoters had an ‘extreme, strong or moderate negative’ impact on their live music events in the past 12 months."

Some 38 per cent cited 'parking/ loading issues', 30 per cent cited the increased number of music festivals and 18 per cent said that increased business rates had negatively impacted venues.

Victoria Larkin, deputy director of Oxford Contemporary Music, told the researchers: “Oxford has a remarkably sustained, very vibrant music scene...[but] there’s not really a big gig space other than the O2 Academy.

“There are a lot of 100-200 capacity venues which can sometimes make it tricky to turn a profit.

“Parking is eye-wateringly expensive and venues often don’t have their own parking facilities.”

She also said that at times, the ‘great range of cultural activity’ resulted in ‘diary clashes’ meaning audiences were divided between two or more events, making promotion more 'risky'.

In a list of recommendations, the report said central government should 'review business rates for music venues and other smaller spaces for live music'and 'continue to investigate secondary ticketing via the Competition and Markets Authority'.