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.
Our affordability work indexes the full cost of attendance against local wage data to make cities comparable.
Research on affordability
The State of Live Music: Growth Without Health
The live music business is generating extraordinary top-line results, but revenue, attendance and ecosystem health are not the same variable. A more…
Revenue Is Not Health
Gross revenue is indispensable for understanding the concert business, but it is a poor stand-alone measure of ecosystem health. The same revenue increase…
Is Live Music Becoming a Luxury Good?
The question is not whether expensive concerts exist; they always have. The more useful question is whether the economics of ordinary participation are…
The Price of Participation
Concert affordability is usually discussed in dollars. A more informative measure asks how much labor, disposable income and ancillary spending are…
The Fan Is Working
Fans do not merely consume live music. Their advance purchases supply event cash flow, their behavior produces market information, and their participation…
The Affordability Trap
Artists, venues and promoters can each face legitimate cost increases while their individually rational responses combine into an event whose total burden…
Measuring concert ticket price inflation without measuring the wrong thing
Why headline ticket price figures mislead, and how Live Index constructs a price index that separates face value, fees and resale.