Holds, Kills, Comps and Sellable Inventory: Why Venue Capacity Is Not Ticket Inventory

Capacity figures are the most widely available number in live music. They appear in venue atlases, permits, press releases and every argument about whether a show did well. They are also the wrong number for almost every one of those arguments, because capacity describes the building and a show sells inventory. This page defines the four terms that stand between the two and walks them through the illustrative manifest built for the ticket manifest page.

Capacity

A published booking glossary defines capacity as the maximum number of individuals a venue can legally hold according to its existing setup ¹. Two words carry weight. Legally: the figure is set by occupancy rules, not by the operator's ambition. Setup: the same building has several capacities depending on configuration, and a reserved-seat end-stage build holds fewer people than a general-admission floor. When Live Index's venue capacity atlas lists a figure, it lists a configuration's ceiling, not any show's inventory.

Kills

A kill is a seat removed from sale for a show because the production makes it unusable: it is behind the stage, its sightline is blocked by a delay tower or a video screen, it is where the front-of-house mix position or a camera platform sits. Kills are decided by the production design and confirmed on the show advance. Most are permanent for that show. Some — seats killed pending a final production plan — are better described as production holds, because they can return to sale once the plan is fixed, and the production holds page treats that case on its own.

Operational and accessible inventory

Some seats are neither killed nor sold in the general pool. Accessible seating and companion seats are sold under federal rules: Department of Justice guidance states they generally may not be sold to people who do not need their features, sets out when unsold accessible seats may be released to the public, and requires that they be offered through the same channels and at the same prices as comparable seats ². Seats reserved for operational reasons — medical, security, a spotter position — sit alongside them in the manifest. These are managed, not held: nobody is waiting to decide whether to use them.

Holds

A hold in the inventory sense is a block of tickets kept out of public sale for a named party: artist guests, promoter, venue, sponsor, label, press, radio. It differs from a calendar hold, which reserves a date rather than seats; the two share a word and nothing else. Inventory holds are temporary by intention. Unused holds are released back to sale, which is why tickets can surface late without any change to capacity. The scale of holds is documented for one sample only: the New York Attorney General found an average of 16 percent of tickets held across the top-grossing New York concerts of 2012–2015, ranging from about 5 to 29 percent by show ³. That is evidence that holds exist and vary. It is not a norm, and no other public measurement is available to this dossier.

Comps

A complimentary ticket is issued at no charge, from a hold or from unsold inventory. Comps are distributed but not paid, which is why they sit in the attendance chain between paid tickets and the door count. Comps issued deliberately to fill a soft house are what the glossary calls papering — distributing free or discounted tickets to increase attendance, usually when sales are low ¹. Whether comps count in a settlement depends on the contract; in a hard-ticket deal the artist's percentage is computed on paid receipts, and a comp contributes nothing to it while still occupying a seat.

Sellable inventory and the waterfall

The waterfall on this page runs a room configured at 5,000 for the event through production kills, operational and accessible inventory and holds to 4,400 initially sellable seats, then issues 200 comps and sells 4,000. Every figure is a scenario, chosen for legibility. What it shows is structural: the same 4,000 paid tickets are 80.0 percent of configured capacity and 90.9 percent of sellable inventory. A promoter describing the show as better than nine-tenths sold and a critic describing it as a fifth empty are both reading the same night through different denominators, and neither has misreported anything. The sell-through calculator lets you change any input and watch the two figures separate.

Why the distinction is economic, not pedantic

Sellable inventory sets the gross potential, and gross potential sets every projection a purchaser makes before the on-sale. A projection built on capacity overstates what the show can take by exactly the seats nobody could sell. Break-even attendance, pacing against a comparable and the versus test at settlement are all computed against sellable, and a buyer who uses capacity instead will find the show underperforming a target it could never have hit. That is the reason the offer sheet asks for a sellable figure and a comp allowance, not just a capacity.