Mission
Music is infrastructure.
Mission
Live music is one of the oldest forms of human assembly and one of the most immediate expressions of culture.
It is also an economy.
Every night, stages activate neighborhoods, employ workers, fill restaurants and hotels, support artists and independent businesses, generate tax revenue, move people through cities, and create the shared experiences from which culture is built.
Live Index exists to better understand that system.
We study the economics, infrastructure, accessibility and movement of live music: how tickets are priced, how venues survive, how artists tour, how markets develop, how public policy shapes cultural ecosystems, and how the economics of participation affect the people in the audience.
We believe live music should remain economically viable for the people who create it, produce it and present it.
We also believe it must remain meaningfully accessible to the people who make it matter: fans.
A healthy live music economy cannot be measured only by gross revenue. It must also be measured by participation, affordability, opportunity, resilience and cultural consequence.
Live Index brings together data, original research, public information, industry knowledge and emerging analytical tools to measure those forces more clearly.
Our purpose is not to tell the live music business what it wants to hear. It is to understand what is actually happening.
Core principle
Live music is more than a luxury good.
Concerts have economic value, but their significance cannot be expressed entirely through price.
Live music creates social infrastructure: places to gather, opportunities for artists, economic activity for cities and businesses, and experiences through which communities understand themselves.
That does not exempt live music from economics. It makes understanding those economics more important.
Live Index studies both sides of that equation.
What we publish
Original research, transparent methodologies, documented datasets, market and city reports, and a set of recurring indices measuring the condition of the live music economy. Everything is published at a permanent URL, dated, and attributed to a named person or desk.
Our readers are people who need to cite something: journalists, economists, promoters, policymakers, artist managers, venue operators, academic researchers, city officials — and the people buying the tickets.
Independence
Research is not commissioned by, and index construction is not influenced by, promoters, ticketing companies, venues or public bodies. Where a piece of work is funded or supported externally, the relationship is disclosed on the page itself rather than in a general policy statement.
We do not publish a number we cannot source, and we do not publish an index reading before its inputs meet the coverage threshold set out in the methodology. Where data is missing, we say so rather than estimating around it.
Responsibility
Omar Afra founded Live Index and directs its research programme, index design and editorial standards. Responsibility for each published measure sits with a named person, recorded on the author pages and attached to every document they author, analyse or edit.