Fan affordability

Research on fan affordability

• When Festivals Change a City But Still Lose Money

  Independent festivals can create civic value, artist discovery, tourism, and cultural memory while still losing money. Omar Afra writes on festival economics and live music risk.

• Who Owns AXS? AEG's Ticketing Division, and the Clients It Is Not

  AXS is a wholly owned subsidiary of Anschutz Entertainment Group. The venues and festivals it ticket — Red Rocks, Coachella, Crypto.com Arena — are clients, not assets.

• What Is a Concert Ticket Manifest?

  A ticket manifest is the seat-by-seat build of a show: what the room holds, what production removes, what is held, and what the box office can sell. Illustrative example.

• Concert Ticket Scaling Explained

  Scaling a house means assigning each sellable seat a price level. How a scale is built, why the weighted average face matters more than the top price, with a worked example.

• Holds, Kills, Comps and Sellable Inventory: Why Venue Capacity Is Not Ticket Inventory

  Capacity is what a room can hold; sellable inventory is what a show can sell. Kills, operational seats, holds and comps sit between the two, defined and walked through.

• Gross Potential in Concert Ticketing: What the Room Can Gross Before It Sells a Ticket

  Gross potential is the maximum face-value receipts a show can take if every sellable ticket sells at its scaled price. The formula, what it excludes, where it sits.

• Average Ticket Price (ATP) Explained for Concerts

  Average ticket price is a ratio with a choice on top and underneath: face or all-in value, paid tickets or everyone in the room. Each combination means something different.

• Concert Sell-Through Rate: The Denominator Matters

  Sell-through rate is paid tickets over the inventory actually for sale. Compute it on capacity and the same show reports a different number. Definition and calculator.

• Net Box Office vs. Gross Box Office: The Terms Behind Concert Settlement

  Gross box office is face-value receipts; net box office is what remains after the deductions the contract names. Seven settlement terms and one worked hypothetical sheet.

• Ticket Sales Velocity: How Fast a Concert Is Selling

  Ticket sales velocity is tickets sold per unit of time: daily counts, a rolling average, a cumulative curve. What it shows and why there is no published normal.

• Ticket Sales Pacing: How Promoters Compare a Show With Its Comp Set

  Ticket sales pacing compares a show's cumulative sales with a comparable at matched days to event. How the gap is computed and why no published pace exists.

• Why Concert Tickets Suddenly Appear: Production Holds and Late Releases

  Tickets that appear days before a sold-out show were usually held, not hidden: production holds released once the stage is set, artist and promoter holds returned.

• Paid Attendance, Tickets Distributed and Scanned Attendance Are Not the Same Number

  Paid attendance is what settlement is computed on; tickets distributed adds comps; scanned attendance is who came through the door. Why the three diverge.

• How Does a Concert Promoter Estimate Artist Draw?

  Draw is the paid tickets an artist can sell in a market at a price. Promoters weigh hard-ticket history first, adjacent signals next, audience metrics last.

• Ticketmaster Market Share: What the Evidence Actually Supports

  Every credible Ticketmaster market-share figure, with its source year, numerator, denominator and evidence status — and why no settled current percentage exists in any primary source.

• What Percentage of Ticket Sales Actually Goes to the Artist?

  There is no universal artist percentage. What exists: deal structures (guarantee, versus, backend), one company's scoped claim about its own shows, and one band's disclosed settlement — all examined here.

• Concert Presales Explained: How Tickets Are Released Before the On-Sale

  How concert presales work: artist, venue, card-sponsor and promoter presale windows, holds, the general on-sale and later inventory releases. Why there is no standard presale allocation, with an illustrative 10,000-seat scenario kept separate from the one measured regulator sample.

• Ye Stadium Economics 2026: Capacity, Ticket Prices, Attendance and Gross

  A show-by-show census of Ye's 2026 stadium run: the one reported box office figure, the attendance on record, primary price ladders by market, and a transparent model of the remaining route.

• What Does Live Nation Actually Own? A Company-by-Company Map

  Owns, operates, leases, books, tickets: Live Nation's relationships are five different verbs, not one. The 2025 filing quoted exactly, plus the documented record.

• Who Owns Ticketmaster? From Ticketron Rival to Live Nation Subsidiary

  Ticketmaster is a wholly owned subsidiary of Live Nation Entertainment — and has had six controlling owners since 1976. The documented chronology, with sources.

• What Did Concert Tickets Actually Cost? 1970–2026

  No honest single line runs from 1970 to 2026. Documented ticket prices, trade averages, the federal admissions proxy and fee data — kept apart, with sources.

• How Big Is the Concert Ticket Resale Market? Auditing the Numbers

  The widely quoted $18 billion secondary ticket market figure traced to its actual source — StubHub Holdings' S-1 — with its definition, method and limits stated plainly.

• Did All-In Ticket Pricing Actually Lower Ticket Fees?

  The FTC's all-in pricing rule, one year after its May 12, 2025 effective date: what it requires, what it never regulated, what enforcement has established, and why no honest national fee comparison exists.

• Live Music Price Monitor — July 2026 reading

  The official admissions price index rose 2.3 percent over twelve months to July 2026, its slowest pace since early 2025, while festival passes in the verified sample still cost a median $102.50 a day.

• Festival affordability update — July 2026

  Across 20 verified United States festivals that publish both a pass price and its scope, the median advertised cost is $102.50 per festival day and the range runs from $30 to $249.50.

• What the official price index does and does not capture about going out

  A short note on why the CPI admissions category can decelerate to 2.3 percent while concert affordability does not visibly improve.

• Why a festival's sticker price says so little about what it costs to attend

  A short note on pass length, tier floors and uncounted fees, using the 20-festival verified sample where the median day costs $102.50.

• The State of Live Music Affordability 2026

  A coverage report on what can and cannot be said about live music affordability in 2026, built from the Live Index festival catalog and its stated admission prices.

• What Would a Ticketmaster Divestiture Actually Change?

  Separating primary ticketing from promotion and venues would move some decisions and leave others in place. This is an operating analysis of which contracts, data and switching costs would survive.

• Venue Exclusivity and Ticketing Contracts: What the Public Record Shows

  Exclusivity, term length, advances and switching costs shape which platform sells a venue's tickets. Most agreements are private; this sets out what public documents do and do not establish.

• The Total Cost of Attending a Concert

  The ticket is one line in the cost of a night out. This sets out an all-in accounting framework and three transparent scenarios, and explains why no national average exists.

• Are Concert Audiences Shrinking as Prices Rise?

  Revenue records and attendance are different quantities. This tests what the published evidence can and cannot establish about participation, and names the denominator nobody publishes.

• The Fan Divestment Problem

  A narrow definition of fan divestment — sustained withdrawal attributable to price, friction or perceived value — and the observations that would distinguish it from ordinary complaint.

• How Many Tickets Does an Artist Need to Sell to Make a Tour Work?

  Break-even on a tour is arithmetic, not a margin rule of thumb. This sets out the algebra, the cost lines it requires, and worked scenarios with every assumption stated.

• What a Sold-Out Show Actually Pays an Artist

  A sold-out room produces a box-office figure and a settlement, and they are not the same number. This traces the deductions between the two without claiming a universal split.

• Why Gross Revenue Tells You Almost Nothing About Artist Profit

  Reported tour grosses are transaction totals, not income. This traces every stage between the reported figure and an artist's take-home, and identifies where the record goes dark.

• Festival Ticket Prices vs Inflation

  Comparing festival prices over time requires holding the product constant, which festivals do not do. This specifies a bounded sample and the adjustments any honest comparison needs.

• The Superfan Economy Is Replacing the Concert Audience

  Live-music revenue is concentrating in the highest-spending fans and premium inventory. Revenue growth and participation health are different measurements, and only one is being reported.

• Are Superstar Tours Hollowing Out Live Music?

  The largest tours have never grossed more. Whether that draws spending, calendar capacity and attention away from smaller tiers is a mechanism that can be specified and tested, not a proven finding.

• Why Buying Concert Tickets Early Can Cost You More

  Presale urgency no longer reliably delivers the lowest price. A framework for measuring what a comparable seat costs at each stage between announcement and doors.

• If Live Nation Is Broken Up, Who Actually Benefits?

  A jury has found liability and states have asked for divestiture. Structural remedies would redistribute leverage, but not every driver of what a fan pays sits inside Ticketmaster.

• The Fan Affordability Index: What a Night of Live Music Actually Costs in 2026

  Advertised ticket price is one line in a much longer bill. A sourced baseline of what is publicly measurable about the cost of attending a concert, and what is not.

• Who Owns the Fan?

  Nobody owns a fan. What differs between integrated and independent operators is who can observe, retain and act on the transaction record — and that difference is contractual.

• The Ticket Fee Stack, Line by Line

  Service fees, facility charges, order processing, taxes, delivery and premium pricing, with the FTC all-in disclosure rule now in force. What is documented and what is not.

• The Live Music Pulse: 2026 Baseline

  A first recurring baseline of separately published indicators for U.S. live music: admissions prices, performing arts employment, promoter wages, and the gaps.

• America’s Broken Venue Ladder

  Whether an artist can graduate from 300 to 5,000 capacity in a market depends on which rooms exist. There is no national capacity census, and that absence is the story.

• Houston: A Data Portrait of an Undervalued Concert Market

  The first repeatable Live Index city portrait. Houston metro population, wages, cultural economy and touring geography from primary sources — and the concert measures no public dataset supplies.

• The Festival Bubble: What It Looked Like From Inside

  Festival supply expanded through the 2010s. The correction that followed is documented in cancellation counts and ticket-price data.

• The Festival Arms Race: How Immersive Production Changed the Economics of Live Music

  How stages, video, architecture and visual art raised festival production expectations, fixed commitments and financial risk for independent operators.

• The Live Nation Flywheel: How Consolidation Actually Works

  Promotion, ticketing, venues and sponsorship reinforce each other inside one company. The FY2025 filing shows the mechanism in reported operating scale.

• When Will Artists Route Around Ticketmaster?

  Robert Smith, Ariana Grande and Jon Bellion each pushed on a different part of the ticketing stack. What each case shows about the cost of leaving it.

• Artist Ticketing Control Matrix

  An evidence log of specific, publicly documented controls artists have exercised over how their tickets are priced, allocated, transferred and resold.

• Metal’s Quiet Bull Market

  Rock streaming volume, deep-catalog share and reported arena and stadium ticket counts for Sleep Token, Ghost, Metallica, System of a Down and BABYMETAL.

• Stop Calling It the Latin Market

  Language, genre and geography are three different variables. Collapsing them into one market category produces bad demand estimates and worse routing decisions.

• Where Streaming Data Fails as a Concert Forecast

  Streaming measures attention at zero marginal cost. Concert attendance measures willingness to spend money and travel on a fixed date. The two diverge systematically.

• 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.

• 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.