In this interview, Mark Davyd, founder and CEO of Music Venue Trust, mentions the "famous" and famously misattributed Hunter S. Thompson quote about the music industry. It goes "The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."

It's now common knowledge that Thompson didn't actually say this, or at the very least if he did it wasn't about the music industry. Mark acknowledges as much in this interview. And yet, it remains a perfect summation of the music industry at large even today, and in this interview Mark expounds upon that at length.

In April 2026 he unleashed a series of 4 Substack posts which shone a light on the dodgy dealings of the UK's performing rights body PRS for Music. In them, he details how each y ...