This study asked how questions about live music design their asking before any judgment. Its answer, from sixteen Dionyas general designs on the stage and the tour, is that the questions refuse to let a visible sign stand for the show until it has been set beside what it might hide. The questions on the stage set a camera's frame, a standard of precision, a controlled plan or a larger hall beside the experience of the room. The questions on the tour set a sold-out notice, a price, a gross or a loss beside the people those figures count. None of the sixteen asks which show is better.
Discussion
The debate on liveness asks what the live event is worth among media. Auslander, Liveness (2002), takes on the sacred truths around the high cultural status of the live event, and Swarbrick and colleagues (2019) measure something the room adds. On this study's reading, the Dionyas questions on the stage sit between these positions. They neither treat the room as sacred nor treat its images as equal to it. The fancam question credits the camera with an appeal of its own; the question on moving a small show to a large hall asks what video, sound and staging cannot carry; the question on risk takes unpredictability as a possible source of liveness and, in the same breath, asks where it becomes a safety problem. Kjus and Danielsen, Live mediation (2016), describe performers scaling parts of a work up and down on stage. The Dionyas questions ask the same scaling to be judged by what an audience in the room receives.
The debate on the economics of concerts explains figures. Becker, A Note on Restaurant Pricing (1991), asks why successful events do not raise prices despite excess demand; Courty, Some Economics of Ticket Resale (2003), why promoters do not capture the profits of resale; Krueger, The Economics of Real Superstars (2005), why concert prices rose; Courty and Pagliero, The Impact of Price Discrimination on Revenue (2012), how seat categories raise revenue. Black, Fox and Kochanowski, Concert Tour Success in North America (2007), describe the chart that ranks tours by gross. The Dionyas questions on the tour start from the same figures and ask of each what it leaves out: the seats behind a sold-out notice, the audience behind a price, the remainder of a loss, the unique listeners behind a city's admissions. What separates the questions from this literature is their direction. The literature asks what explains the figure; the questions ask what the figure can be taken to say about people.
The design also leaves things unasked. No question names a choreographer, a director, a promoter or a crew: the stage questions speak of performers and audiences, and the tour questions of artists, operators and local partners, but the people who build and run a show appear only as an operator whose responsibility is to be told apart from the artist's. Resale, the subject of Courty, Some Economics of Ticket Resale (2003), is not named; seats held back from sale are the nearest the questions come. Safety appears once, as the limit of liveness, and not as a subject of its own. The two domains link to each other in the studio's table, yet their questions divide the show: no stage question names a price or a cost, and no tour question names the body on stage. They meet in two places, the comparison of one large show with three small ones, which counts the close experience and the artist's burden among its terms, and the question on change from city to city, which brings the tour onto the stage. These are the edges of the design, and the works read above give some of them a place the questions do not.
Contributions
This study makes two contributions. To the debate on liveness and the audience, it adds a measured description of a published design that asks about one show at a time by setting the room beside its stand-ins, and that ranks neither above the other; it reads the question on risk as joining liveness and safety in one inquiry. To the debate on the economics of concerts, it reads the measures this literature explains, sold-out houses, prices, gross and break-even, turned into questions about their denominators, put before any figure is known. It also names what the design leaves out: the people who make a show besides the artist, resale, and safety as a subject in its own right.
Limits
The study has clear limits. It reads sixteen records chosen by one rule, all general designs written for no particular case, and its counts describe those records and nothing else. The records copy their scopes, needs, boundaries and states from the studio's domain table, so only their titles and questions serve as evidence, and the two boundary sentences that carry the studio's caution on video and on revenue are treated as frame. Dionyas does not say who drafted the records. They are in Korean and are read in a single translation made for this study; another translation could shift a nuance (the English liveness, in the question on risk, renders a Korean word for being on the spot), though the quoted sentences are the evidence and are given in full in the appendix. The readings through the literature are this study's interpretation. Nothing here describes how performers, audiences, promoters or ticket markets behave; the records frame these matters and this study has not checked them. The study gives no advice on pricing, touring, staging or safety, and ranks no artist or show.
Further research
Three lines suggest themselves. The first is to read the same domains in their other kinds: the 55 historical questions and the 35 cases led by the stage or the tour, to see whether they keep a sign apart from the show once a particular concert is named. The second is to put one question, say the one on the denominator of sold out, to an actual body of material and see what it cannot settle. The third is to ask whether questions about the edges named here, the crew, resale and safety, would keep the same design or need another.
This study's contribution, stated again at its end, is a measured description of how a published set of questions designs the asking about live music: as a request to set each sign of a show beside what it might hide, the room beside its images and the count beside its audience, before any answer is given.