U.S. live music venue atlas

This is a verified register cohort, not a census. The United States has thousands of rooms that present live music, and no complete public list of them exists; what follows is the subset Live Index has researched from first-party and public-record sources and can defend document by document. Counts on this page describe the register. None of them is a market share, a supply estimate or a sample designed to be representative, and any reading of them as national shares would be wrong.

The register records ownership, operation, lease, booking and ticketing as distinct relationships, because in American live music they routinely sit with different parties. A city can own a building that a private company runs under contract, in a room whose tickets are sold by a third company that has no interest in either. Collapsing those into a single idea of control is the most common error in writing about venue infrastructure, and this page is built so it cannot be made. Where a venue publishes an operator but no owner, only operation is recorded; where a venue's own tickets page shows a platform, the record says a platform was observed in use and stops there.

Of the 94 placed records, 30 carry a recorded owner, 40 carry a recorded operator or lessee, and 12 carry both with the operator a different party from the owner. 15 are owned by a city, county, state body, university or non-profit within these records. 90 carry a capacity published by the venue or its operator, each stored with the configuration the figure describes, and 47 of those sit in the small and mid-scale bands under 2,500 capacity — everything from the under-250 rooms up through 1,000–2,499, where most working touring is actually booked.