Topic hub
Cities
Local policy, licensing and the municipal economics of live music.
Overview
Live music is a local industry with local rules. Licensing regimes, zoning, noise ordinances, parking minimums, alcohol law and transit hours set the conditions a room operates under, and they differ between metros with similar populations and similar wages. Live Index records those rules alongside the market's data rather than treating a city as its population figure.
City records at Live Index are built to be comparable rather than promotional. Each one distinguishes the metropolitan statistical area, which is the unit federal wage and employment data use, from the municipality, which is the unit that writes the ordinances. The two units are not interchangeable, so every figure in a city record is labelled with the unit it belongs to.
The economic-impact question is treated separately from the operating question. What a venue or festival earns and what a city gains from it are different measurements with different evidence standards, and the second is routinely reported with the confidence of the first.
Work in this hub covers city-level data portraits, municipal policy, and the local wage and employment series that make attendance cost legible in the terms residents actually face.
Research on cities
Free Press Summer Fest, 2009–2015: growth, attendance and the Houston festival market
A source-led timeline of Free Press Summer Fest, 2009 to 2015, using only the attendance, price and economic figures publishers actually printed.
Day for Night, 2015–2017: sound, light and summit programming
A cross-year record of how Day for Night programmed music, visual and computational art and, in its final edition, a talks summit — built from the documented rosters in the Live Index archive.
Houston festival attendance and economic-impact evidence, 2009–2017
Every attendance, price and economic figure published for Free Press Summer Fest and Day for Night, recorded with the measure it represents, the party that produced it and the limitation that applies.
Grassroots venue loss is an inventory problem, not a news cycle
Why counting venue closures misses the point, and how a room-level capacity inventory changes what the data can tell cities.
Market gravity: why some cities are routinely skipped
A routing model that estimates the pull each market exerts, and identifies cities systematically underserved relative to their fundamentals.