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 policy and transit hours shape what is economically possible in a city.
City profiles at Live Index are built to be comparable, so policymakers can benchmark rather than anecdote.
Research on cities
Music Is Infrastructure
Live music is usually discussed as entertainment consumption. A more complete economic account treats venues, festivals and performance networks as…
The Economics of Gathering
A live event is an unusually concentrated economic event: thousands of people arrive at the same place, at the same time, with a shared reason to spend.…
Why Good Music Cities Need Bad Rooms
Low-cost, imperfect and marginal spaces often perform a research-and-development function for culture. Their inefficiency by conventional real-estate…
Houston Before the Festival
Free Press Summer Fest did not emerge from a market with no music. It emerged from a large city whose local scenes, independent media, clubs and…
Free Press Summer Fest: An Economic History
Between 2009 and its sale to C3 Presents in 2015, Free Press Summer Fest moved from a low-priced local experiment to a major Houston event. Its trajectory…
The $14 Million Weekend
A University of Houston study estimated that the 2012 Free Press Summer Fest generated roughly $14 million in regional economic output. The useful…
81,000 People and the Economics of Latent Demand
The 2012 FPSF impact study used an attendance figure of 81,000 and found that more than one-quarter came from outside Houston. The case illustrates how a…
From $7 Tickets to 100,000 People
Free Press Summer Fest's growth from a $7 advance ticket in 2009 to attendance approaching six figures illustrates how low-friction audience acquisition,…
The Economics of Place: Eleanor Tinsley Park
Festival sites are production assets, marketing assets and risk factors at the same time. Eleanor Tinsley Park gave FPSF a distinctive Houston identity…
Day for Night and the Post-Festival Festival
Day for Night emerged when the U.S. festival market was becoming crowded and lineups increasingly reproducible. Its music-and-digital-art model treated…
When the Building Becomes the Headliner
Day for Night's use of Houston's former Barbara Jordan Post Office demonstrates how adaptive reuse can convert dormant industrial architecture into…
The Next Live Music Economy
The next phase of live music will be shaped less by one new format than by changes in fan identity, ticketing interoperability, independent…
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.