The Live Music Pulse: 2026 Baseline

This is the first edition of a recurring reading. Its purpose is not to declare whether live music is healthy, which is a question no single number answers, but to fix a set of defensible published indicators at a known date so that the next edition has something to be compared against. The value of the exercise is entirely in its repeatability: same series, same definitions, same arithmetic, same disclosure of what is missing. A baseline that changes its inputs between editions is a press release.

Nothing here is combined into a composite. The five indicators below use different units, universes, frequencies and revision practices. Averaging an index level with an employment count and a wage figure produces a number that cannot be interpreted and cannot be audited, and the practice is common enough in industry reporting that it deserves naming. Each indicator is reported separately with its period, its derivation and its limits.

Price: admissions inflation is running below general inflation

The BLS Consumer Price Index category for admission to movies, theaters and concerts stood at 241.831 in July 2026, against 236.286 twelve months earlier, an increase of about 2.3 percent.¹ All items rose from 322.169 to 332.813 over the same period, about 3.3 percent.² On a ten-year view the two series are close to identical: admissions up about 38.6 percent since July 2016, all items up about 38.6 percent. The category pools cinema and theater with concerts, so this is an admissions proxy rather than a concert ticket index, and it measures a category basket rather than the specific tours anyone argues about. What it does establish, over a decade, is that admissions inflation as officially measured has tracked general inflation rather than outrunning it — a finding that sits awkwardly next to the discourse, and one that the category's breadth partly explains.

Labour: employment above pre-2020, wages modest

Employment at performing arts companies (NAICS 7111) was 145,700 in June 2026 on a preliminary basis, against 142,000 in June 2025 and 137,300 in June 2019.³ Year-over-year growth of about 2.6 percent, and about 6.1 percent above the pre-2020 June reading, describes a sector that has recovered its establishment employment and is adding to it. The series counts jobs at performing arts companies, which includes activity beyond popular music, and preliminary months are revised.

On the promotion side, the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program reported 194,390 people employed in NAICS 711300, promoters of performing arts, sports and similar events, in May 2025, with a median hourly wage of $21.64, a mean hourly wage of $28.80 and a median annual wage of $45,020.⁴ The gap between the mean and the median is the usual signature of a right-skewed wage distribution. This is an annual series with a long publication lag, so it will not move between quarterly readings, and the industry classification includes sports and other events.

Spending: the series Live Index wants and does not yet hold

The Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes personal consumption expenditure detail including a line for live entertainment excluding sports, in the NIPA underlying detail tables.⁵ It is the closest official measure of household spending on live entertainment, and Live Index has not yet loaded it into the national store, so no value is reported in this edition. Stating that is more useful than substituting a proxy. When it is loaded, it will be reported with the same treatment as the others: level, year-over-year change, and an explicit note that the category excludes sports and includes live entertainment beyond music.

Company-reported activity, clearly labelled as such

Live Nation Entertainment reported, for fiscal 2025, consolidated revenue of approximately $25.2 billion, Concerts revenue of $20.9 billion, Ticketing revenue of $3.1 billion, sponsorship and advertising revenue of $1.3 billion, approximately 55,000 events, approximately 159 million fans, 131 festivals and more than 10,500 ticketing clients.⁶ These are issuer disclosures about one company's activity, audited for financial reporting purposes and not independently verified as market measurements. They belong in the baseline because the company is large enough that its activity counts are informative about the sector, and they are labelled as company-reported because they are not a census. Pollstar's midyear analysis reported a North American average ticket price of $122.15 for 2026, which is trade-collected data covering reported touring activity rather than the whole market.⁷

What is missing, stated as a work programme

• Concert volume. No public series counts shows by market and capacity band. Census County Business Patterns counts establishments, not events.
• Capacity inventory. No official source records venue capacity, so supply cannot be tracked at room level from public data.
• All-in ticket prices. Collectable since the FTC disclosure rule took effect in May 2025, but requiring original observation with capacity and market controls.
• Mid-tier settlement economics. Guarantees, production costs and net-to-promoter figures are commercially held and unpublished.
• Ancillary cost of attendance. Parking, transport and concessions have no public national series.

That list is the honest state of live-music measurement in the United States in 2026, and it is the reason this publication exists. Four defensible series and one company's disclosures do not describe an industry. They describe the parts of an industry that a federal statistical system built for other purposes happens to capture. Every subsequent edition of this baseline will report the same five indicators on the same terms and will add rows only when a collection meets the published standard, so that the record of what improved and what did not is itself part of the data.