GigXchange Index — UK Live Music Rates, July 2026

Monthly open dataset of UK live music booking fees by city, gig type and band size. Built from 4,290 weighted observations across six live sources: agency rate cards, a monthly artist stated-rate panel, post-event verified submissions, Musicians' Union and Equity published rates, human-reviewed web extractions and anonymous public submissions. Issue 04 — July 2026. This is the issue where we removed data from our own index. What changed since June 2026: 225 observations quarantined out of the pool. 123 ticket-derived club estimates had been approved into the live index when that model was designed to run in shadow mode and count for nothing. 62 artist-panel rows and 40 venue budgets traced back to our own seed and test accounts: fees nobody was ever paid. Every ingest adapter now screens for test accounts and fails closed when it cannot tell. Two sources withdrawn entirely. Venue budgets were seed data to the last row, so that source restarts from zero. The ticket-derived club model is out. Six live sources remain, down from eight. 280 published cells, down from 310. The quarantine cost 36 overnight; regrowth since leaves 280. The weight basis changed, and sources.csv changed shape with it. Weights reported are now those actually applied to the rows, not the intended setting. Post-event verified submissions read 0.12, not the 0.85 published in Issues 01–03: those launch-era rows entered at 0.34 × 0.34 and the time series never retro-edits itself. A quality gate had stopped running. The per-musician-per-hour range check was silently dropped in a spring rewrite and spent roughly 10 weeks inactive. Restored this issue; on its first day back it rejected a £25,000 "wedding band" and a £100 one from the same feed. The city league moved for the first time in four issues: London (£917) overtook Leeds (£910) for fourth. Edinburgh still leads at £1,186. Headline medians (3–4 piece): wedding £1,042 (up £37), private party £1,000, corporate £839 (unchanged for a third issue), pubs £375 (down £50, as the quarantine left that cell rather than because rooms pay less). Net growth was +254 observations to 4,290, but the number that matters more is the 225 taken out. Files: gx-index-july-2026.csv (280 published cells: scope, city, region, gig type, band size, p25/p50/p75/p90 in GBP, sample size, weighted n) and sources.csv (which sources fed this issue, at the trust weight actually applied to their rows). Known limitations. Confirmed platform bookings, the top-weighted reference signal, still contribute zero rows, so every published cell rests on asking prices, union floors and verified reports rather than money that provably changed hands. Festival, theatre and corporate remain sparse (12, 3 and 14 observations respectively at 3–4 piece) and are directional only. Thin cells fall back to regional or national aggregates. Figures are artist take-home, net of commission, and are not consumer prices. Full report: gigxchange.app/rates/reports/july-2026 · Live figures: gigxchange.app/rates · Licensed CC BY 4.0.