Paid Attendance, Tickets Distributed and Scanned Attendance Are Not the Same Number

Ask three people at the same show how many came and you will get three honest answers. The tour accountant says paid. The box office says distributed. The building's operations manager says scanned. Each is right for their purpose, each is a different number, and a figure reported without saying which it is has told you very little. This page defines the three, shows them on a constructed example and explains what each is used for.

Definitions

Paid attendance is the count of tickets sold for money — every price level, including discounted tickets sold for a positive amount. It is the count a hard-ticket settlement runs on, because the artist's percentage is computed on receipts and receipts come from paid tickets. Tickets distributed is paid plus complimentary tickets: press, guest list, sponsor obligations, artist and promoter comps, radio giveaways and any paper. It is the number of people who hold a ticket and could walk in. Scanned attendance — sometimes turnstile, drop count or actual — is tickets redeemed at the door. It is distributed less no-shows, and it is the count that fire code, staffing, bar and merchandise revenue and the artist's experience of the room actually depend on.

One show, three counts

The chain on this page starts from an illustrative, constructed 5,000-capacity room with 4,400 sellable seats. Paid attendance is 4,000. Complimentary tickets add 200, so tickets distributed is 4,200. Of those, 3,850 scanned, leaving 350 no-shows. The same night is therefore 90.9 percent sold, 95.5 percent distributed and 87.5 percent full — and 77.0 percent full if the reporter used architectural capacity as the denominator. Every one of those figures describes the show; only the first is what the artist was paid on. The numbers are chosen for legibility and describe no real event.

Why they diverge

Comps are the first wedge. They are working inventory in the manifest, they are real people, and they are not receipts. A show with a heavy guest list can be full and settle poorly; a show that was papered to look full for a filmed date settles on its paid count regardless of the room. No-shows are the second. Buyers who paid and did not come are counted in paid and distributed and not in scanned; the gap widens for free tickets, for very early on-sales, for bad weather and for shows with a strong secondary market where a ticket may have changed hands and then been unused. No public source publishes no-show rates for concerts, and none is stated here.

Which count for which question

Sell-through and every financial ratio use paid over sellable, as the sell-through page sets out. Average ticket price uses paid in its denominator when it means realised price, and distributed when it means revenue per person in the room — two legitimate figures with different meanings. Per-capita bar and merchandise spend use scanned, because only people present spend. Capacity and safety use scanned against the legal limit. A trade report of attendance almost always means distributed or a rounded version of it, which is why Live Index's reconciliation of gross revenue and artist profit does not treat reported attendance as a paid count.

Attendance in economic-impact claims

The count that travels furthest from the building is the one in an economic-impact release, and it is the one least likely to say which of the three it is. Impact studies begin from an attendance figure and multiply it by spending assumptions, so the choice between paid tickets, tickets distributed, scanned entries and attendee-days, which counts the same person once for each day of a multi-day event, moves every downstream dollar. A three-day festival that reports 100,000 attendance may mean 100,000 people or roughly a third of that many attending three times, and the release rarely resolves it. Live Index’s history of Houston festival impact claims traces how such figures were reported and repeated. When an attendance number arrives without a definition, the correct reading is that it is undefined, not that it is the largest of the three.

Hard ticket and soft ticket counting

On a hard ticket the distinction is financial: the artist's backend depends on paid, so every comp is a settlement question. On a soft ticket — a festival or a private event — the artist is paid flat, and the three counts are an operational matter for the buyer. The vocabulary is the same; the stakes attach to different parties.

What is documented

The vocabulary — capacity as the legal maximum for a configuration, papering as free or discounted distribution to raise attendance, settlement as the post-show accounting — is documented by the glossary cited here ¹. The relationships between the three counts follow from their definitions. Their sizes on any real show, and the distribution of comp shares or no-show rates across shows, are not publicly documented, and this page states none.