Touring Middle Dashboard v1 — July 2026

The phrase "the touring middle" describes the layer of the business between the club circuit and the arena tour: the acts who fill a fifteen-hundred to five-thousand capacity room, the promoters who book them and the crews who move them. No official statistic measures that layer. What official statistics measure is an industry group, NAICS 711, that contains performing arts companies, promoters, agents, independent artists and — the reason for every caveat that follows — spectator sports. In July 2026 that group employed 583.4 thousand people on a seasonally adjusted basis, a preliminary figure, down 24.1 thousand from July 2025 and 26.2 thousand from its September 2025 level in this window ¹.

NAICS 711 employment, July 2026

583.4k

Seasonally adjusted, preliminary

Twelve-month change

−4.0%

24.1k fewer jobs than July 2025

Below the window high

−26.2k

Against September 2025, the highest month in the series shown

A four percent twelve-month decline in an industry group this broad is not a small movement, and it runs against the way the live business has been described for three years. But the honest reading is narrow. Two of the last months are preliminary and will be revised, sometimes materially, when the establishment sample fills in. The decline could be concentrated in spectator sports and touch music not at all; the published aggregate cannot distinguish them. And employment counts jobs on payrolls, which is precisely the wrong instrument for a workforce that is heavily contracted, self-employed and paid per show. The people whose livelihoods the touring middle actually describes are systematically under-observed by the only series that gets close to them.

What would have to exist before this becomes an index

An index is a claim that several measurements can be weighted into one number that means something. This dashboard deliberately makes no such claim, and it will not until three conditions hold. First, at least one input that observes touring directly rather than by industry proxy — routed show counts at a stable capacity band, or venue-level activity for a fixed panel of rooms. Second, enough history on every input to establish a baseline, which for a monthly series means years rather than months. Third, a documented weighting with a stated rationale and a published sensitivity check, so a reader can see what the composite would say if the weights were different. Publishing a composite before those exist would produce a number that moves convincingly and means nothing, which is the failure mode this publication exists to avoid. Until then: the inputs, their periods, their revisions, and the gap between them and the thing they are standing in for.