A concert is over in an evening, and what remains of it is mostly signs. The promoter announces that the hall sold out. A trade chart lists the tour by its gross. A clip of one member, filmed close up from the crowd, may travel further than the show itself did. Each sign is real, and each is easily taken for the thing it points to. This study reads a set of public records that ask, again and again, what a sign of that kind leaves out.
The records come from Dionyas, the music studio of the RISCON family. Dionyas does not publish judgments. Its list of 1,539 inquiries describes itself as editorial question design and gives its count of generated judgments as 0. Part of the list consists of general review designs: questions written for no particular artist, show or tour. This study reads the sixteen that sit where two of the studio's domains meet, the stage on which music is performed and the tour that carries it from city to city. Dionyas does not say who drafted them. What they offer is not a finding about concerts, audiences or ticketing but a design for asking about them, written down and left open.
The research question and the contribution
The research question is this: how do questions about live music design their asking before any judgment, that is, what do they treat as the sign of a good show or a successful tour, what do they ask to be kept apart from that sign, and what do they leave unasked?
The study reads sixteen general designs chosen by one rule, set out in the method section, and makes two contributions. The first concerns the debate on liveness and the audience, which asks what live performance is in a culture full of recordings and screens, and what people get from being in the room. The eight questions on the stage take a definite position in the design of their asking: each sets the experience of the room beside one of its stand-ins, a camera, a measure of precision, a plan, a larger hall, and asks what the stand-in adds or loses. This study calls that the separation of the room from its images and describes it record by record. The second contribution concerns the debate on the economics of concerts, which explains prices, resale and revenue. The eight questions on the tour take the measures that this literature works with, a sold-out house, a gross, a ticket price, a break-even point, and ask of each what it cannot say about the people it counts. This study calls that the separation of the count from the audience. The study also names what the questions leave out: the people who make a show besides the artist, resale, and the ranking of shows.
Liveness and the audience
The first debate asks what is left of the live event when so much music reaches people through media. Philip Auslander, in Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (2002), addresses what the status of live performance is in a culture dominated by mass media. Looking at theatre, rock music, sport and courtroom testimony, the book takes on some of the enduring sacred truths surrounding the high cultural status of the live event, as its publisher describes it.
Others have asked what the room gives that a recording does not, and found something. Dana Swarbrick, Dan Bosnyak, Steven R. Livingstone, Jotthi Bansal, Susan Marsh-Rollo, Matthew H. Woolhouse and Laurel J. Trainor, in How Live Music Moves Us: Head Movement Differences in Audiences to Live Versus Recorded Music (2019), ask what inspires listeners to attend concerts, sometimes at great expense, when they could listen to recordings at home. They note that live music unfolds in a way that is unique and not predetermined, and that being in the same space as the musicians may itself be exciting. Comparing an audience at a live album-release concert with an audience hearing the same, not yet released songs played from the recording, they found that heads moved faster at the live concert, and that fans moved faster and entrained more than neutral listeners. Steven Caldwell Brown and Don Knox, in Why go to pop concerts? The motivations behind live music attendance (2016), asked fans why they go. Their participants wanted to be there, to be part of something unique and special and to share it with like-minded others; concerts also served to show devotion; the novel and unknown parts of a show, new material and support bands, drew people; and price was not a factor in the choice to attend.
The listener's own account is a further thread. Stephanie E. Pitts, in What Makes an Audience? Investigating the Roles and Experiences of Listeners at a Chamber Music Festival (2005), notes that audience members' views of their own experience are rarely heard in research, though much is assumed about them, and examines how social and musical enjoyment combine to create commitment and a sense of involvement in an event. The performer's side has changed too. Yngvar Kjus and Anne Danielsen, in Live mediation: performing concerts using studio technology (2016), interviewed artists who perform studio works on stage. They found that creative authorship and expressive agency are constantly negotiated, through practices of scaling particular aspects of a studio work up or down on stage, and that while this challenges deep-rooted notions of the right bond between musician and music, studio technology has become an integral part of how many artists explore their agency.
As this study puts it, the debate runs between liveness as a value that media erode and liveness as something measurable in what audiences do and say. The Dionyas questions on the stage show how a published design treats that tension before any answer: which stand-ins for the room it names, and what it checks them against.
The economics of concerts
The second debate concerns prices, scarcity and revenue. Gary S. Becker, in A Note on Restaurant Pricing and Other Examples of Social Influences on Price (1991), asks why successful restaurants, plays and sporting events do not raise their prices even with persistent excess demand. He assumes that one consumer's demand rises with what others demand, and holds that this explains the puzzle about prices, why demand is fickle, and why it is easier to go from being in to being out than the reverse. Pascal Courty, in Some Economics of Ticket Resale (2003), observes that brokers and scalpers resell a significant fraction of event tickets at substantial markups although promoters do not support resale and often try to block it, and offers an explanation borrowed from the economics of airline pricing for why promoters do not capture those profits themselves.
Prices themselves have been explained in more than one way. Alan B. Krueger, in The Economics of Real Superstars: The Market for Rock Concerts in the Material World (2005), starts from a steep rise in concert prices alongside falling ticket sales. He weighs several explanations, among them superstar effects, the concentration of promoters and the crowding out of the secondary market, and tentatively concludes that the main cause was the erosion of the complementarity between concerts and album sales. Pascal Courty and Mario Pagliero, in The Impact of Price Discrimination on Revenue: Evidence from the Concert Industry (2012), find that pricing seats by category generates greater revenue than a single price, more so in markets where demand is more varied, and that adding a fourth seat category to three returns roughly half of what going from one category to two does.
The industry's own scoreboard is revenue. Grant C. Black, Mark A. Fox and Paul Kochanowski, in Concert Tour Success in North America: An Examination of the Top 100 Tours from 1997 to 2005 (2007), analyse pricing, attendance, the superstar phenomenon and structural change in the touring industry through the top 100 tours of each year, data that form a chart of sorts in which performers are ranked by gross concert revenues. When a show fails, the relation with the customer is at stake. Amy K. Smith, Ruth N. Bolton and Janet Wagner, in A Model of Customer Satisfaction with Service Encounters Involving Failure and Recovery (1999), studying restaurants and hotels, find that customers prefer recovery that matches the kind of failure they experienced, in amounts commensurate with its size.
This study reads these works as describing live music through the measures that markets keep: excess demand, markups, price levels, revenue by seat category, gross, satisfaction after a failure. The Dionyas questions on the tour start from the same measures and ask a different thing of them: not what explains the figure, but what the figure cannot say about the people behind it.
The chapter that follows sets out the data and method, then reads the questions on the stage and the questions on the tour. An appendix gives every record read, word for word. The conclusion returns to the two debates.