Diaspora Demand: The Concert Markets Hidden Inside American Cities

Touring geography is inherited. The set of cities a tour visits is determined by the buildings that exist, the promoters who operate there, and the historical record of what has sold in that market before. All three are backward-looking, and all three change slowly. Population does not.

The hypothesis follows directly. Metropolitan areas that have absorbed rapid population growth from specific communities should generate demand for artists connected to those communities, and if routing decisions lag settlement patterns, that demand will go unserved for years — because the market has little history in the booking data used for decisions.

Why this piece carries no figure

Testing the hypothesis requires two datasets joined at metropolitan level. The first is population change by ancestry, origin or language spoken at home, which the American Community Survey publishes for metropolitan statistical areas with published margins of error. The second is concert activity by artist and market over the same period, which does not exist in any public form and would have to be assembled from event listings under a fixed rule about what counts as a date and how artists are attributed.

Live Index has not extracted the ACS tables or built the event dataset. Publishing a map or a scatter plot from partial listings scraped opportunistically would produce a picture whose shape depended entirely on which listings happened to be available, and the resulting figure would look like evidence while being an artefact of collection. The argument is published here because the mechanism is worth stating; the measurement is deferred until both sides of the join exist.

What the test would look like

• Universe: U.S. metropolitan statistical areas above a stated population threshold, fixed for the whole period.
• Demand-side proxy: ACS population by selected ancestry, origin or language spoken at home, with margins of error reported alongside every estimate.
• Supply-side measure: counted concert dates by artist and market, under a published rule for inclusion, capacity band and genre attribution.
• Control: total metropolitan population and existing venue inventory by capacity band, so that routing gaps are not confused with an absence of suitable buildings.
• Output: dates per capita relative to the metropolitan mean, reported with uncertainty and never as a ranking of cities.

That specification is the deliverable. Until it is executed, the honest position is that a plausible mechanism has been described and nothing has been demonstrated.