Apple built a 600-capacity venue in London. Its first season is booked with people who sell out arenas.

Elton John opened Apple Music Hall on Monday night with twelve songs in an hour. "Your Song" first, "Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me" last, and nothing released after 1983 in between. Outside, the whole thing was projected onto the wall of Battersea Power Station for the people who had not got in.

The room is new. Apple Music Hall sits inside the power station, under the same roof as Apple's European headquarters, and holds 600 people. It was about five years in the making, ran internally under the name Project Apollo, and was designed by Apple's own Apple Places team under Kristina Raspe.

Apple's own site for the venue calls it "Apple's first-ever live venue". Worth a bit of precision there, because Apple has been putting on shows for twenty years: the iTunes Festival, later the Apple Music Festival, ran in London from 2007 to 2016, mostly at the Roundhouse, and Apple says it hosted more than 600 acts. What is new is not that Apple does concerts. It is that the room belongs to them, and it is permanent.

Getting one of the 600 tickets

Tickets were £40, sold through the venue's own site and powered by Dice, with a two-ticket limit on the opening night. The independent promoter Communion ONE is working with Apple on the bookings.

The less convenient part is that they went on sale at nine on the morning of the show. Not a week before, not through a ballot. Nine in the morning on a Monday, for Elton John that evening. The first three shows all went in that same drop. Forty pounds to see him in a room of 600 is unusually accessible. Being free at nine to fight the rest of the internet for one is another matter.

If you lose that fight, the shows are livestreamed globally on Apple Music, and the Elton John set is now up on demand. Which is where it stops being a normal 600-capacity venue. There are 48 speakers around the audience, a 38-foot stage that can be turned around for shows in the round, hardwiring for sixteen or more cameras feeding a purpose-built control room, and two recording and mixing studios. iPhones run alongside the broadcast rig, because an iPhone fits where a camera cannot. An artist can arrive, play to 600 people, go out live around the world and leave with a finished spatial mix and a multicamera edit of the night.

Apple would like to make one thing clear

Oliver Schusser, Apple's vice president of Apple Music and international content, has already been asked the obvious question. "No, we're not in the 'live business'," he told Music Week, adding the air quotes himself. "This is not the beginning of a strategy where we want to be in the venue business." To the BBC he made the same point another way: "We have really no interest in trying to be in the way of anyone else, and that's one of the main reasons it's a smaller space."

Apple says the size matters for another reason too. Schusser told Music Week that "smaller venues of roughly this size have been struggling, and that's a problem for artists, because you have artists that need to start to perform in a size like this, but then the venues don't exist and so they can't". The wider picture backs the worry, if not the exact size: thirty grassroots venues closed permanently in the year covered by the Music Venue Trust's most recent annual report, more than half of the survivors made no profit at all, and 175 UK towns and cities no longer get regular touring shows.

It also makes the first bookings quite interesting.

Look who is playing it

• →2 October, Baby Keem
• →7 October, Skye Newman
• →13 October, Troye Sivan
• →22 October, Arlo Parks
• →29 October, Burna Boy
• →26 November, Chase & Status
• →2 December, Charli xcx

Which is a strange list if the problem you are solving is that emerging artists have nowhere to play. Burna Boy can sell stadiums. Charli xcx headlines festivals. Troye Sivan is not waiting for someone to give him his first shot at a mid-sized London room. Apple is taking artists who could fill venues many times this size and putting them in front of 600 people instead.

Which is, of course, exactly why everyone will want a ticket.

Who gets to grow in it

Six hundred is not just a nice size for an intimate show. It is a rung on the ladder, the room artists need on the way from small clubs to theatres. Apple can now work in that part of the market with something an independent venue does not have, which is Apple money. It can charge £40 for Elton John, put sixteen cameras in the ceiling, build two studios behind the stage and broadcast the result worldwide. Whether the room itself makes money is almost beside the point.

That does not automatically make Apple Music Hall bad for independent venues. Apple could bring more attention to live music, give artists an extraordinary place to make things, and put some of that money and reach back into the ecosystem around it.

But that part is missing from the conversation, and specifically one half of it is. Apple has been asked about the grassroots sector, by the BBC and by Wallpaper*, and Schusser's answer was that Apple has "really no interest in trying to be in the way of anyone else". What nobody has yet is the answer from the other side. The Music Venue Trust has not publicly responded to Apple Music Hall, and no independent venue operator has been quoted on it anywhere. The other voice in the room is the culture secretary Lisa Nandy, who called it "a huge vote of confidence in the UK as a global creative powerhouse".

The closest anyone has come is Craig McLean in Wallpaper*, who wrote that Apple now has an opportunity to pay some of this investment forward into a live sector dealing with rising costs and shrinking income.

Apple says rooms of this size matter because artists need somewhere to grow. It has now built one and filled its first season with people who finished growing some time ago. So who gets to grow in it?