Topic hub
Economic impact
Impact studies are commissioned to persuade. Live Index publishes the assumptions that determine whether the number means anything.
Overview
Economic impact is the most quoted and least interrogated figure in live music. A total is produced, a multiplier is applied somewhere inside it, and the resulting number enters public debate without the assumptions that generated it.
Three of those assumptions do most of the work. Whether spending is new to the area or merely moved within it. Whether the multiplier applied to indirect and induced effects is defensible for the region. And whether displaced activity — the restaurant meal that did not happen elsewhere, the hotel night that was substituted — is netted out.
None of this means live music lacks economic value. It means the value should be stated in a form that survives scrutiny, because figures that collapse under examination eventually damage the case they were built to support.
Live Index reports direct spending separately from modelled effects, states the multiplier and its source, and publishes what the estimate excludes alongside what it includes.
Research on economic impact
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…
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.…
The Middle Is Disappearing
The strongest end of touring can prosper while the developmental middle—clubs, theaters, mid-level artists, regional promoters and independent…
The Independent Venue Paradox
Independent stages can create large spillover benefits for neighborhoods, workers and local businesses while retaining too little of that value to remain…
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.