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Live Index

Research and data

Topic hub

Affordability

Attendance cost measured against local earnings, travel and the wider cost of going out.

Overview

Affordability is a relationship between price and local income, not a price level. A show that is routine in one city can be prohibitive in another, and a national average ticket price says almost nothing about whether attending is realistic for the people who live near the room.

The unit Live Index uses is hours of work: the qualifying, mandatory-fee-inclusive standard entry price for a show divided by the metropolitan all-occupations median hourly wage published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Expressing cost in hours removes the need to argue about which inflation adjustment is correct and makes two cities directly comparable in the terms an audience actually experiences.

Premium, VIP and resale inventory are excluded from that calculation. They are real prices, but they describe a different buyer and would silently convert an affordability measure into a measure of what the most motivated fans will pay.

Work in this hub covers the affordability measure itself, the wage side of the ratio, and the distributional question underneath both: who stops attending first when the cost of a night out rises faster than local earnings.

Research on affordability