How Live Index collects data

Face value is not what a fan pays. The measure records the amount a member of the public must pay at checkout, before government tax, because that is the number that determines whether an ordinary person can attend.

Standard Entry Price. The lowest generally available, mandatory-fee-inclusive price for standard admission to an eligible event, observed at a recorded time.

Government tax is recorded as a separate field and never netted into the headline figure. Mandatory fees are recorded separately from face value so the fee share of a ticket can be measured rather than assumed.

Each market maintains a persistent panel of twenty venues spanning all five capacity bands. Membership changes are versioned, dated and given a reason; a panel is never edited in place.

A venue enters the panel only with a verified capacity and a cited source for it. Every membership change carries one of the published reasons — opened, closed, changed-use, no-longer-presents-music, capacity-correction, replacement-for-coverage, geographic-correction — and the previous panel version remains on the record, so a figure published last year can still be reconstructed from the panel that produced it.

AUnder 500

Small rooms, developing and local artists, lowest entry prices.

B500–1,499

Club tier; the working floor of touring.

C1,500–4,999

Mid-size halls, ballrooms and theatres.

D5,000–14,999

Amphitheatres and large halls.

E15,000 and above

Arenas and stadiums; highest prices, lowest event counts.

An observation is eligible only when it is captured between 21 and 120 days before the event. Prices very close to an event reflect scarcity and clearance rather than the cost of deciding to go; prices captured too early reflect inventory that is not yet real.

Every observation records its seller, its source URL, its timestamp and the researcher or process that captured it. Sources are ranked, and the canonical tiers are:

1. 1Venue box office or official event page
2. 2Primary ticketing checkout for the official on-sale
3. 3Promoter or festival official listing
4. 4Licensed discovery feed metadata — discovery and QA only, never a price of record

Data is collected only from permitted, licensed, public or directly contributed sources. No collection method that violates a platform's terms of service is used.

Live Index reports affordability in hours of work, not dollars. A ticket price on its own says nothing about whether an ordinary person can attend; a price measured against what an hour of local work is worth does.

Statistic

Median hourly wage, All Occupations

Source

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics

Geography

The same metropolitan statistical area used to define the market, matched by CBSA code.

Cadence

Annual. The vintage and reference period are printed with every figure.

Disclosed limitation

Ticket observations are current; the wage denominator is annual. The lag is disclosed on every release rather than smoothed.

A thin sample produces a confident-looking number that is wrong. Live Index would rather publish an absence than a false precision, so a market reports its coverage state until all five conditions hold for the period:

• 30 eligible observations
• 10 contributing panel venues
• 3 capacity bands represented
• No venue above 20 percent of the sample
• No band above 50 percent of the sample

A national figure requires 8 qualified markets and is the median of qualified market values, one vote per market. It is not weighted by population, because a population-weighted national number would simply restate New York and Los Angeles.

Published figures are never silently overwritten. A revision records the original value, the revised value, the date and the reason, and both remain permanently available so a previously cited number stays traceable.

Current coverage and release status for every market is published on the coverage ledger.