The bar no longer feeds the club: in seven years the revenue structure of Berlin venues has flipped

Clubcommission Berlin, together with the city's economics department, has published "Clubkultur Berlin 2026" — the first major review of the Berlin club scene since 2019. The headline finding: demand has not gone anywhere, but the business model has turned over.

This was announced by Clubcommission.

The study was presented on 7 August aboard the ship Hoppetosse. The figures come from the quantitative part, for which club operators and event organisers were surveyed.

What exactly flipped

In 2017 around sixty per cent of income came from food and drink, with the door accounting for just twenty-one per cent. Now the ratio is reversed: the door brings in fifty-nine per cent, the bar twenty.

Behind that sits a change in how audiences behave: seventy-three per cent of respondents observe falling alcohol consumption, sixty a rise in non-alcoholic drinks, and fifty-seven shorter stays. The bar, which used to cross-subsidise the cultural side, has stopped doing so, and the whole load has shifted onto the ticket.

"People are not going out less. They are consuming differently," Clubcommission says.

Floors full, tills not

Eighty-three per cent of the venues surveyed report at least fifty per cent occupancy, and a third more than seventy-five. That barely shows up in the finances: where in 2017 seventy-nine per cent at least broke even, in 2025 it is sixty-one.

The heaviest pressures named are staff costs, operating costs, the falling purchasing power of the audience and rent. Eighty-five per cent admit that economic pressure is already changing their programme — which makes this a question not only of survival but of what music a venue can still afford to book.

As reported earlier by ONE//FM, London's fabric marked twenty-seven years with a thirty-hour marathon — the institutions hold on, but at a steadily rising cost.