Touring Circuits and the Geography of Rock Music ...

Popular Music and Society, 2014 Vol. 37, No. 3, 313–337, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2013.798554

Touring Circuits and the Geography of Rock Music Performance

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Ola Johansson and Thomas L. Bell

There are significant cultural differences among music audiences in different locations. Such geographic differences in the propensity to consume new popular music will have an impact on the choices artists and their managers make about where to perform live concerts. We suggest that the popularity of particular places on touring circuits operates as a proxy for the cultural sophistication of the place. Moreover, various locational factors also play a role in where performances take place. In this article, we explore how tour itineraries in the United States and Canada create urban cultural and spatial hierarchies and vice versa. The data source to establish these hierarchies is Celebrity Access, an online industry source in which large amounts of touring information are available. We include more than 12,000 concerts played during a two-year period (2006 –08), mainly by alternative rock artists, in the analysis.

Introduction Several years ago when both of us lived in Knoxville, Tennessee, we could not help but notice that nearby places such as Athens, Georgia, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, never seemed to be missed by new and exciting touring rock acts, while much larger Knoxville was frequently bypassed by the same artists despite the presence of a large college audience. We suspected that a great deal of what we observed had to do with cultural differences among audiences in different places, along with other possible explanatory factors such as city size and relative geographical location. The spatial differences in the consumptive preferences of new rock music are likely to have an impact on the choices artists and their managers make about where to perform live concerts. In this article, we explore the nature of tour itineraries in United States and Canada in order to investigate which places are most likely to be stops on concert circuits and which ones are not. We also use tour itineraries to help create urban hierarchies based on how culturally sophisticated and ready to adopt new music given cities (or groups of cities) seem to be and to explore locational factors that impact where performances are scheduled. To establish these various touring circuits, an online industry site called Celebrity Access, which contains large amounts of touring q 2013 Taylor & Francis

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O. Johansson and T.L. Bell

information, was analyzed. The dataset includes more than 12,000 concerts in the United States and Canada played from 2006 to 2008, mainly by alternative/modern rock artists. These data were then analyzed using both correlation techniques and the exploratory method of cluster analysis.


The Nature of Touring Touring has received little scrutiny among music scholars. The few studies that have been conducted can be categorized into four major types. First, the act of touring per se impacts the identity of the touring musicians and/or their music. Examples of studies of this type include examinations of Aboriginal musicians touring in Australia (Ottosson) and of Chinese folk musicians touring European countries (Rees). A second theme among these studies is a concern with how music diffuses to new places via tours. In the distant past, touring was the only mechanism by which audiences in places outside very large cities could experience certain musical forms. For example, opera spread in this fashion in the United States (Kaufman; Mallach). Third, the purpose of a tour may be to convey a political message. African-American vocal ensembles have historically toured in the United States and Europe to promote their educational institutions and the value of African-American education and civil rights in general (Schenbeck; Seroff). The US government has also sponsored tours abroad with the objective of communicating American culture and values (Fosler-Lussier). The fourth economically related theme is perhaps the most relevant to contemporary rock music tours. Concerts are an increasingly important part of the music industry as income from recorded music is declining rapidly in an era of downloading, file sharing, and other new forms of music consumption (e.g. Connolly and Krueger). The revenue of all live performances in the United States more than doubled from 1997 to 2005, which can be compared with a decline in record sales of 3 per cent during the same period (Black, Fox, and Kochanowski). Since then, record sales have declined much further. Economist Alan Krueger also noted dramatic increases in ticket prices, which is primarily related to the artists’ need to increase revenue as record sales have suffered during this long-term slump. Krueger calls it the “Bowie Theory” after a quote from David Bowie1 that suggests recorded music is increasingly ubiquitous, to the point where it has been almost decommodified, with little monetary value, whereas the experiential quality of attending concerts is, to use economic terms, non-substitutable and thrives semi-independently of other aspects of the music industry. Much like the recording industry, which is dominated by three big transnational corporations, the concert business has also experienced increasing levels of corporate control and concentration of ownership. The largest US concert promoter and venue owner is Live Nation, a spin-off from Clear Channel—the well-known radio station giant (Black, Fox, and Kochanowski). Likewise, the distribution of tickets is dominated by Live Nation after it merged with Ticketmaster in 2010. From the fans’ perspective, new forms of online ticket distribution create both challenges and


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opportunities (Beaven and Laws). It is not clear what impact these economic trends have on the geography of touring, but undoubtedly the power over touring is concentrated in increasingly few hands and the number of concert venues may be limited by these forces. The “where” question regarding touring has not, however, been previously addressed in academic research. To gain insight into that question, we turn to publications written by and for the music industry itself. The industry literature indicates that the routing of a tour has several objectives. First, it can be to promote a recent record release. Appearing in concert boosts record sales (Waddell, Barnet, and Berry). For less-known artists, CD sales before or after the concert can be an especially important source of revenue. Second, the propensity for an artist to play in a particular place has to do with his or her fan base. Concerts may be scheduled in a particular region to build a fan base or to maintain an already existing one. Third, a tour can be designed to maximize short-term profit, simply making money by attracting as many concert attendees as possible while minimizing touring cost (Frascogna and Hetherington; Waddell, Barnet, and Berry). This short-term profit strategy may result in a tour emphasizing larger markets, while smaller places are frequented only occasionally, but with enough regularity to sustain the artist’s popularity. Fourth, performances attract media attention (Frascogna and Hetherington). An artist can establish a reputation and a following by touring even before he or she has a record contract. Early-career artists, for example, tour frequently as a way to build a fan base and attract attention from the music industry. Record labels usually prefer to see such an established track record before signing an artist. These “gettingto-know-the-artist” tours often involve the artist talking to local media. Such interviews can be very time-consuming and it is rarely profitable for new artists to tour. Well-established artists, on the other hand, can draw substantial crowds and ticket revenue (and other forms of income such as merchandise sales and sponsorships) (Krueger). As artists must tour to build an audience, manage exposure, and sell more records and merchandise, it is common that the record label subsidizes new or mid-level artists with tour support. For the record label, touring is a form of advertising that, it is hoped, will pay off in the end. Most industry observers agree, however, that record companies are more conservative than they used to be with tour support (Passman). Except when the goal of touring is to build a fan base in previously uncharted territory, the propensity to play in a particular city appears to correspond with the popularity of the artist there. Therefore touring circuits represent and reflect different musical tastes and preferences over space. This assumption is implicitly supported by the sparse literature on the subject, even if the subject is not addressed directly. Who Determines Where to Tour? Several actors influence the decision as to where artists tour. The planning of a tour commonly starts with the artist and his or her manager, who together design a


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tentative touring schedule based on the aforementioned tour objectives. The artist and manager invariably use a booking agent to negotiate performances and arrange the travel details. The booking agent may be a one-person operation or an employee of a multinational booking agency with offices around the world. The booking agent often works for the artist on commission when booking the act (Vasey). Agents may represent an artist exclusively. More commonly, they specialize in artists of a particular genre or concerts in a particular region. The job of the booking agent who represents a new artist is to “hound” as many concert promoters as possible in an attempt to book the artist. On the other hand, an agent for an established artist is more likely to be contacted by numerous promoters or “buyers” (Passman). The level of persuasion and enthusiasm of the agent about a particular artist can sometimes sway the buyer. The amount of money that is offered to the booking agent usually correlates with the size of the artist’s fan base and the expected concert audience at a particular location. In the end, offers from a buyer are accepted or declined by the manager and/or the artist. Both booking agents and buyers commonly turn to past concert data on ticket sales and revenues to determine where to schedule a concert. There are several databases that are used by the music industry for this purpose, including Pollstar, Celebrity Access, and Billboard (Krueger; Waddell, Barnet, and Berry). Such data are commonly structured either as “tour histories” of specific artists or as “venue priors”—information about concerts at specific venues. Artists use their own tour histories as well. After a tour, the manager and the artist commonly collect information to assess where the tour was profitable and whether the tour had a geographic impact on record sales. There are several types of concert buyers. This group includes independent promoters who book both artists and concert venues. Increasingly, promoters are non-local and book multiple shows, perhaps an entire tour. This is particularly true for large tour operations by well-known artists. In such cases, the promoters might be large international corporations, such as Live Nation or AEG Entertainment, that are influential in scheduling tour itineraries (Passman). While some concert promoters operate over large geographic regions, it is also common to find that the promoter and the owner of the venue are one and the same. Other buyers are universities with studentrun concert operations or festivals and fairs where an artist’s performance is part of a larger entertainment package spread over several days (Waddell, Barnet, and Berry). Once a promoter has established a working relationship with booking agents and artist managers, that person (and the venues where he or she books artists) will be trusted in the future. Thus, the establishment of trust between actors in the industry influences the geographic design of a tour (Frascogna and Hetherington). Many promoters learn their trade as college students. This “knowledge community” of local industry skills is, in addition to providing a receptive audience, a reason why college towns are frequent locations on the touring circuit. The sharing of tacit face-to-face information necessitates spatial proximity and the formation of such agglomerated knowledge communities (Asheim, Coenen, and Vang; Bathelt, Malmberg, and Maskell; Malmberg, Malmberg, and Lundequist).



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Many different types of venues exist, such as clubs, amphitheatres, and arenas. However, venues tend to be ephemeral and the mix of venues at any given point in time can impact a city’s attractiveness on the touring circuit (see Bell, Gripshover, and Johansson). Cities that are tourist destinations, such as Las Vegas and Orlando, are more likely to have a multitude of live venues, including national club chains. Socalled “showcase clubs” also exist in certain places. These showcases are prestigious for the artist to play at and these showcase venues primarily book “hot” artists. Main entertainment industry centers such as New York, Los Angeles, and Nashville are typically home to such showcase clubs (Frascogna and Hetherington). In some cases, artists do not tour at all. Rather, the audience has to come to a single performance venue, such as shows in Las Vegas or theatres in Branson, Missouri (Carney). In addition to single artist performances, the number of music festivals has proliferated in the United States (Brant). Festivals are usually held outdoors during the summer months. Even smaller cities organize their own festivals that provide major opportunities for audiences in such places to see live music. Based on a combination of the aforementioned factors, a tour schedule often starts with the booking of anchor dates, i.e. important performances in large cities or highprofile concerts such as well-known festivals. After that, smaller markets that make geographic sense are sought. Booking agents often arrange a “hold”—a tentative agreement—with a buyer to indicate that they are interested. As a series of “holds” in several cities are finalized, a tour takes geographic shape. If the mode of transportation is a bus, government regulations on how far bus drivers can work without rest may result in concerts “along the way” that might not otherwise have been considered (Office of the Federal Register). While a goal is for the tour to have an itinerary that is routed in a geographically rational manner that minimizes distances between concerts, that may not always be possible. Concert buyers frequently insist on a contract “rider” that prohibits the performer from scheduling another concert within a certain radius and time period, which prevents market area competition and may force artists to travel longer distances than they otherwise would have. Nor are venues always available at times that are suitable for an artist, so excess traveling is frequent. In the end, it is not always possible to maximize the efficiency of a tour circuit in the manner of, say, the mathematical solution to the complex “traveling salesman” problem in operations research (Applegate et al.; Cook) in which all venues are served and the distances between pairs of venues form an efficient closed loop in which the origin and the endpoint of the tour (hence the term “circuit”) are one and the same. A separate strategy that might be labeled the two-stage hierarchical model is to start with a large market tour, which, if successful, is followed by a second tour composed of smaller markets (Waddell, Barnet, and Berry). Larger markets are preferred as the audience in smaller places is more price-sensitive, which affects the profitability of the tour. The lowered revenue obtained in smaller market venues is partially offset by the generally lower costs of holding a performance there. Well-known artists can also draw a large audience in smaller cities as their “star power” attraction is strong and the competition from other artists (and other forms of entertainment) is weak.

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Research Method To investigate empirically the geography of touring in the United States and Canada, we used Celebrity Access as the data source. Celebrity Access is an online performance industry publication containing touring information. The information collected was: (1) the artist/group and (2) their performance locations. To generate a manageable data sample, we turned to a list of rock artists that we had used in previous research to identify local music scenes (Johansson and Bell). The origins of the data were the ten most frequently played college radio albums as reported by the College Music Journal. In all, 294 artists appeared on the list, of whom 161 had tour dates available in Celebrity Access at the time of data collection in 2008. These 161 artists performed more than 12,000 concerts. All concert dates were included, whether they were segments of a longer tour or so called “one-offs” (single concert dates). The data, because of their origin in the College Music Journal, emphasize new alternative/modern rock artists. Trends in alternative/modern rock can be treated as a vanguard, i.e. they comprise a set of musical practices that are later adopted into more mainstream forms of rock. As such, the genre is useful when exploring how open different places are to new trends. Performance locations were aggregated into metropolitan areas (as defined by the US Bureau of the Census and Statistics Canada), an appropriate geographic scale to represent market areas for concerts. In all, 243 metropolitan areas appeared on the tour itineraries. First, the data are presented in absolute terms (e.g. how many artists performed in each city). Metropolitan areas are organized as a tiered hierarchy in terms of how many artists each metropolitan area attracted. Then, to account for the importance of metropolitan area population size, relative measures are explored in which the number of artists who perform in each metropolitan area is adjusted on a per capita basis. These per capita-based data are presented in four different metropolitan size categories. Such descriptive statistics do not, however, reveal whether or not groups of artists play in the same cities. For the answer to that question, we use the statistical procedure of cluster analysis. Cluster analysis is an exploratory data analysis tool that, in our case, organizes metropolitan areas into clusters. Metropolitan areas in the same cluster exhibit a high degree of association based on the similarity of artists and acts that they attract. That is, the same group of artists tends to schedule performances there. Cluster analysis is used when no a priori formal hypothesis about the nature of the data is stated. Rather, the technique is used to ferret out any underlying structure that may not be immediately apparent when dealing with datasets of this size and relative complexity. The most common form of cluster analysis—the hierarchical method—is used in this study. This method can be visualized as a “tree diagram” or “dendrogram” where metropolitan areas are grouped, or linked together, into progressively larger clusters using a predetermined grouping procedure (a mathematical algorithm). In this case, that algorithm is provided in the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), the software used for the cluster analysis. The researcher must make a decision as to how “deep” into the dendrogram the clustering of similar metropolitan areas will proceed. The objective of the cluster



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analysis is to find groupings of similar metropolitan areas that make good intuitive sense and can be justified in an a posteriori manner. The downside of cluster analysis is that the resulting grouping structure depends on the choices that the researcher makes along the way. Decisions about where in the dendrogram to truncate the clusters and how many clusters to delimit can affect the conclusions. The output of this exploratory procedure can, therefore, be interpreted in a variety of ways. That is, another researcher might place a particular city or set of cities in a different cluster than we did simply by choosing different cut-off levels for inclusion or exclusion of a given city or set of cities. Those familiar with factorial ecology, a mathematically based form of intra-urban analysis of spatial structure conducted by social scientists in the 1960s and ‘70s, will understand that cluster analysis is a similar type of exploratory analysis. Factorial ecology was used to obtain a pattern of factor loadings (correlations) of a welter of input variables mapped mathematically onto a set of fewer and, it was hoped, more interpretable numbers of constructed composite dimensions (Palm and Caruso). In a manner similar to the interpretation of significant dimensions in a factorial ecology, the output of a touring cluster analysis is interpreted here and reasons why certain cities appear in the same cluster are suggested. Results of the Data Analyses Hierarchy of Metropolitan Areas The first step in the correlation analysis was to establish a hierarchy of metropolitan areas based on the number of artists who played in each place. This measure (i.e. number of artists) is preferable to the absolute number of concerts in these metropolitan areas because some artists play up to ten times in large metropolitan areas, while perhaps only once in smaller places. The numerical scale difference may, therefore, have an overwhelming effect on the analysis in favor of large market metropolitan areas.2 Figure 1 illustrates the different hierarchical tiers of US and Canadian metropolitan areas. The notion of city hierarchies is often employed in urban studies—from central place theory popular since the 1930s (Christaller; Harris and Ullman) at a regional scale to a concern for the level of integration of the urban system at the national level in the 1960s and ‘70s (Borchert, “American,” “Major”) as well as the more recent examination of the linkages among “world cities” and their level of importance as command and control centers of the global economy (Friedmann; Taylor; Wallerstein). It is natural that the top tier contains a very small number of cities, and for each successive lower-ranked tier the number of cities contained within the tier should increase. Using what is referred to as a triangular number sequence, the tiers in this article consist of the following number of metropolitan areas in five identified tier levels: 2, 4, 7, 11, and 16.3 (Only five tiers are included to limit the scope of the analysis.) New York City is joined by Chicago, rather than Los Angeles, in Tier One. Of the 161 artists in the data set, 151 played in New York City and 149 in Chicago. Chicago is


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Figure 1 Hierarchy of Metropolitan Areas as Measured by Number of Performing Rock Artists.

located closer to the population center of the United States and, when some artists designed a moderately extensive tour, the West Coast was sometimes not included. This is, for example, true of European artists who, when scheduling short tours, perform only in select northeastern cities, but often include Chicago as well. As reported in note 2, however, the overall number of concerts was higher in Los Angeles than in Chicago as the former is such a large market. Included in Tier Two, in addition to Los Angeles, are Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco—cities that one might expect to occupy such a position based on city size. But they also must be attractive for other reasons as well. For example, San Francisco has a long-standing association with popular music and Boston harbored an important scene during the 1980s and ‘90s and appears to retain a prominent position in American music space. In the larger Tier Three group, cities from different parts of North America are included—many are the important regional centers and drivers of the increasingly integrated North American space economy (Borchert, “Major”). These are important regional centers of touring as 122– 34 artists scheduled concerts there. Among that group, Austin, Texas, and Portland, Oregon, stand out as important stops on the touring circuit because they are distinctly smaller markets than, for example, Toronto and Atlanta. Tier Four also includes a geographically dispersed and diverse set of cities that are important in the touring world. Again, the size difference of metropolitan regions in


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the same tier can be pronounced, such as “under-performing” Houston (population 4.7 million) and “over-performing” Salt Lake City (population 1.3 million). Among Tier Five cities, a point has been reached where no more than half of the artists performed, and the last cities in Tier Five—Indianapolis and New Orleans—attracted only one-third of the artists in the data. One truly small place is found in Tier Five— Lawrence, Kansas—which is explained by its role as a strategically located college town. The importance of geography per se is addressed later.


Performances per Capita by Metropolitan Area Because market size is shown to greatly influence performance locations, there is a need to adjust for population size. Table 1 shows a per capita measure, specifically the number of performing artists per 100,000 people. Cities are presented in four different size categories. In the large city category, San Francisco, a Tier Two city, is enormously dominant with almost eight artists performing per 100,000 population (a value surpassed only by the smaller urban places of Austin and Portland and a host of much smaller places with metropolitan populations under 500,000 that are mostly college towns). Not only San Francisco but also Seattle and Boston are near the top. The link between touring and cities that are known for prominent local scenes is evident and can be teased out much more easily when population size is accounted for on a per capita basis. Washington DC is another city with an increasingly youthful demographic characterized by postgraduate and relatively affluent young singles. Note that the per capita calculation “discriminates” against the largest North American cities, which are special cases because of their size. Table 1 should not, therefore, be interpreted to suggest that New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago are under-served by music performances. Mid-sized cities are dominated by Austin and Portland. Many other cities also score well, however, with approximately four to six artists performing for every 100,000 persons living in the metropolitan area. Except for San Francisco, these figures are higher than for large cities. In the third size category, fewer cities have a high per capita score. The attractiveness of cities on the touring circuits drops as the concert market of the population of the urban place falls below one million people. Most cities from 500,000 to 1 million have a score below two artists performing per 100,000 population. The exception is a group of cities in west-central North America stretching from Arizona to the Canadian Prairies. In college towns, the per capita measure increases again, as is evident in the section of Table 1 that shows metropolitan areas with fewer than 500,000 people. Among the top ten cities in that category, the only place that is not an obvious college town is Asheville, North Carolina, which is known for its “bohemian” and “artsy” character. Smaller urban areas without a sizable university rarely attract many concerts in this genre of music. In fact, many small metropolitan areas had no performances whatsoever. Table 2 shows that the ten largest of these “no show” cities are mainly smaller metropolitan areas in Florida and cities in the Rustbelt. Almost 600,000 people live in Youngstown, Ohio, which

San Francisco-Oakland Seattle Washington Boston Montreal Atlanta Phoenix Toronto Detroit Philadelphia Dallas-Fort Worth Riverside Houston Miami Chicago Los Angeles New York

7.97 3.77 3.46 3.14 2.98 2.97 2.77 2.67 2.47 2.38 2.22 1.94 1.86 1.65 1.63 1.15 0.73

Austin Portland Salt Lake City Nashville Milwaukee Columbus, OH Cleveland Providence Denver Vancouver San Diego Louisville Orlando Minneapolis Ottawa New Orleans Cincinnati Las Vegas Indianapolis Buffalo Va. Beach-Norfolk St Louis Memphis Pittsburgh

10.00 9.44 6.52 5.93 5.80 5.45 5.22 5.13 5.10 4.93 4.76 4.58 4.26 4.04 4.04 4.04 4.04 3.58 3.42 3.42 3.38 3.19 3.17 3.01

Metro Areas 1 –3 Million

Number of Performing Artists per 100,000 People

Metro Areas . 3 Million

Table 1

Tucson Omaha Albuquerque Calgary Winnipeg New Haven Edmonton Knoxville Albany Quebec City Oxnard Birmingham Raleigh Little Rock Charleston, SC Tulsa Toledo Worcester Baton Rouge Hamilton Fresno Bakersfield Scranton Harrisburg

6.99 5.44 4.77 4.20 3.87 3.52 3.20 3.20 3.20 3.08 3.19 3.04 3.01 2.74 2.73 2.12 1.94 1.86 1.82 1.81 1.73 1.51 1.44 1.43

Metro Areas 0.5 –1 Million


64.02 31.75 24.76 23.61 17.35 16.92 16.59 16.37 15.31 13.73 13.36 12.14 12.13 11.96 11.48 11.25 10.22 10.19 9.39 9.18 9.15 8.36 7.60 7.25 (continued)

Lawrence, KS Columbia, MO Athens, GA Burlington, VT Durham-Chapel Hill, NC Charlottesville, VA Bloomington, IN Asheville, NC Iowa City, IA Boulder, CO Champaign, IL Bend, OR Santa Cruz, CA Madison, WI Atlantic City, NJ Ames, IA Eugene, OR Tallahassee, FL Missoula, MT Gainesville, FL Myrtle Beach, SC Ann Arbor, MI Springfield, MO Ithaca, NY

Metro Areas , 0.5 Million (Top Cities)

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Jacksonville Baltimore Kansas City Oklahoma City Charlotte Sacramento San Jose Hartford Tampa Grand Rapids San Antonio Rochester

2.64 2.55 2.53 2.31 2.27 2.11 1.96 1.94 1.75 1.65 1.51 1.18

Richmond Allentown Syracuse Honolulu El Paso Colorado Springs Dayton Greenville, SC Greensboro McAllen Springfield, MO Akron Fort Wayne Mobile Wichita Stockton Bridgeport

1.40 1.25 1.23 1.03 1.03 0.97 0.84 0.83 0.78 0.53 0.50 0.43 0.40 0.37 0.37 0.35 0.23


Morgantown, WV Yuba City, CA Boise, ID Portland, ME Guelph, ON Fargo, ND Fredericton, NB Yellowknife, NT State College, PA Saskatoon, SK Las Cruces, NM Flagstaff, AZ Columbus, GA Kingston, ON Santa Fe, NM Reno, NV Moncton, NB

7.19 7.19 7.17 6.88 6.82 6.30 6.15 6.05 5.89 5.75 5.72 5.72 5.45 5.45 5.42 5.30 5.10

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Table 2 The “No Shows”: Largest Cities with No Performances, by Metropolitan Population


Youngstown, OH Daytona Beach, FL Melbourne-Titusville, FL Augusta, GA Fort Myers, FL Canton, OH Saginaw, MI Lafayette, LA York, PA Rockford, IL

594,746 493,175 476,230 477,441 440,888 406,934 403,070 385,647 381,751 371,236

apparently is the least rocking city in North America. People in this declining steelmaking center did not get to see a single one of the 12,000 performances in the database unless they traveled to regional centers like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, or Cleveland, Ohio. Demography is a likely explanation for the geographic pattern in Table 2. Florida and Rustbelt states have an aging population structure which makes them less desirable concert markets. This is particularly true for smaller metropolitan areas. Anomalies in the Rock Music Hierarchy of Metropolitan Areas It is evident that the size of cities, and thus the number of potential concert goers, plays an important role in tour scheduling. Yet, there appears to be great variation from city to city. Unlike services that people are likely to consume to an approximately equal degree no matter where they live, concerts exhibit geographical unevenness. Basically, the choice of attending concerts is not like going to the grocery store, though both are forms of consumptive behavior. Statistically, the correlation between metropolitan size and number of artists who play there in concert is 0.71, which yields a coefficient of determination (i.e. an r2 value) of 0.50. In everyday parlance this result means that half of the attraction metropolitan areas have as concert destinations can be explained by the size of their population. And consequently, the other 50 per cent is accounted for by other, as yet unexplained, factors. No further analysis has been pursued to identify such factors statistically, but the discussion below suggests what those factors may be, and why and where they operate. One unique region with a high number of performances is the Pacific Northwest. There, Portland has a prominent music culture similar to its larger neighbor Seattle. Both places are known to have thriving alternative scenes (most famously Seattle’s grunge; see Bell), and youth culture in general (e.g. the depiction of Portland in the US cable television show Portlandia), so it comes as no surprise that the number of artists who travel to both places is among the highest in North America. The data indicate that, when in the Pacific Northwest, artists commonly tour both cities. This



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phenomenon may be called the complementarity of positive proximity. That is, the relative closeness to a competing concert market makes it more likely that concerts are scheduled in both places, rather than one instead of the other. Another example is that of Toronto and Montreal, which also seems to benefit from positive proximity. But, as we shall see later in other cases, if the metropolitan areas are too close to each other, especially if one is considerably larger than the other, an economic shadow effect is often evident that is deleterious to the musical fortunes of the smaller urban area. Austin, Texas, is the self-proclaimed “Live Music Capital of the World” (see, for example, the City of Austin homepage). The data largely support such hyperbole. Not only is the city home to a large university (the University of Texas), but it also hosts the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival, which is one of the most prominent music-based festivals in North America. Many concerts in the dataset were indeed scheduled in Austin during the period of the SXSW festival. The Austin City Limits public television show with live music must also be acknowledged as a feature that has aided the city’s positive musical reputation over a longer period of time (Shank). Moreover, it is commonly acknowledged that Austin is culturally different from other Texas cities. Not only is Austin known as the Live Music Capital of the World, but another slogan commonly seen on bumper stickers and billboards is “Keep Austin Weird,” an indication that a culture different from the rest of the generally conservative state is alive and well in Austin. Note how Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio appear lower in the hierarchy than expected based on their populations. Dallas and Houston are placed in Tier Four, a step below Austin despite containing much larger populations. The per capita concert numbers are unimpressive for both cities; in fact, they are near the bottom among large US cities. San Antonio, also more populous than Austin, is not even among the five tiers in Figure 1, and has one of the lowest concert scores among mid-sized cities in Table 1. Texas represents a form of regional segmentation where one city (Austin) attracts concerts (and presumably the right demographic for new rock music), while the popularity of music forms that fall mostly outside our dataset—rap, Tejano, and country—is probably concentrated more in other Texas cities than in Austin. The smallest metropolitan area in Tier Four is Salt Lake City. At first glance, there is no immediate reason why Salt Lake City would attract more performers than expected. However, Salt Lake City is part of a broader geographic pattern stretching across west-central North America from Arizona in the south to the Canadian Prairies in the north. Among the cities with a metropolitan population between 500,000 and 1 million, Tucson, Arizona, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Calgary and Edmonton, Alberta, and Winnipeg, Manitoba, all score very high on concerts per capita. These cities benefit from occupying a pivotal intermediary position in the network of touring places. Because of their location, these cities are able to attract artists on an east-west touring circuit. The great distance between cities in the eastern portion of the continent and the West Coast makes it impossible for artists whose mode of transportation is land-based to travel without stopovers. That probably enables promoters to negotiate performances in these geographically well-positioned


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intermediary places at relatively low cost and artists to perform when the option otherwise would be one or more nights off, which would cut into the profitability of the tour.4 This region may also benefit from the need for bus drivers to schedule rest time. Much like Texas cities (except Austin), Florida is lagging in the number of rock artists in performance. Miami is positioned lower than expected in the touring hierarchy in Tier Five. In fact, Miami has the lowest per capita score among large US cities. Tampa-St. Petersburg is left out of the hierarchy completely in Figure 1 due to an equally low score. Stuart Ross, a tour manager for well-known rock bands, says that many artists do not like to go deep into Florida. If they have only a limited amount of time on a nationwide tour they may be able to work in only one or two Florida dates. He states that the band may play Jacksonville in northern Florida but no more. Jacksonville has a higher per capita score than Miami and Tampa, but still below the norm. We label this the peninsular effect, in which geographic isolation at the periphery of the highway network connecting peninsular Florida with the generally east-west trending movement of artists traveling across the southern part of the United States has a dampening effect on concert scheduling in the state. In many ways the peninsular effect is the opposite of the intermediary effect and both are related to the geography of North America. Large urban agglomerations on both coasts (Gottmann) are separated by nodal urban locations of some importance in the otherwise sparsely settled Great Plains, Great Basin, and desert Southwestern states in the United States and the Prairie Provinces of Canada. The one Florida location that is relatively attractive for artists as a place to perform is Orlando in central Florida (situated in Tier Five). Orlando, like Las Vegas, depends on a tourist-driven economy that enhances performance opportunities. The peninsular effect may be extended to other cities that are situated on the periphery from a network connectivity perspective. For example, it is possible that the low scores received by Rochester and Syracuse in upstate New York are a result of this peninsular effect. Meanwhile, nearby Buffalo—en route between Toronto and Great Lakes cities such as Cleveland—has a medium score. To paraphrase our tour manager informant again: fans will drive from small places to a nearby big city but rarely the other way around (Ross). This phenomenon represents the performance shadow effect. It is uncertain how far such a shadow extends, but numerous examples suggest that the effect is indeed real. Riverside-San Bernardino in southern California is essentially an extension of greater Los Angeles, and, although it reached Tier Five (as a metropolitan area with more than 3 million inhabitants), the per capita concert score is low. To the north, San Jose, which is reported as a separate metropolitan area, suffers from proximity to (i.e. is in the performance shadow of) event-filled San Francisco. The equally low per capita score for Sacramento may be, in part, attributed to the same performance shadow even if the city is at a minimum a 90-minute drive from San Francisco. On the east coast, the Bridgeport, Connecticut, metropolitan region is reasonably populous, but it cannot compete with New York City or even the more college-oriented New Haven just to the



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north. In Ohio, Akron appears to be too close to Cleveland, and Dayton is poorly situated between Columbus and Cincinnati for those who prefer local live music. The aforementioned contract radius clause of concert buyers may play a role in some or all of these cases. Lawrence, Kansas, is an anomaly as a metropolitan area with fewer than 100,000, but positioned among much larger cities in Tier Five. It is also where the University of Kansas is located. Such college towns may not attract quite as many artists as major cities, but nevertheless occupy an important niche in touring. Among the small metropolitan areas (fewer than 500,000 people), there is a strong concentration of performances in college towns. There are, however, distinct differences among college towns. While 64 artists performed in Lawrence, Kansas, only ten did so in another quintessential college town not far away, Fayetteville, home of the University of Arkansas. The data suggest that the best small city performers—Lawrence, Kansas, and Columbia, Missouri—also benefit from their intermediary position for artists who arrange westward tours. Moreover, Athens, Georgia, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, have overcome the performance shadow of larger nearby cities (Atlanta and Raleigh respectively), probably because they have their own identity as important music scenes and are thus concert destinations for more people than the local student population. This is also true for Lawrence, which outperforms relatively large-market Kansas City, which is only 40 miles away. For this type of modern/alternative rock music, colleges and universities with a large liberal arts component (especially in the fine arts) are more attractive as venues than their more technical and applied counterpart institutions. Cluster Analysis Urban hierarchies based on both absolute and relative measures of the relationship between city size and scheduled musical performances do not, however, say anything about what artists play at which locations. To uncover those patterns of touring activity, we turn to cluster analysis in order to identify coherent touring patterns, if such exist. The data used in the cluster analysis are organized by “cases” and “variables” where the cases are the 243 metropolitan areas visited by one or more of the 161 performers (i.e. the variables) with tour itineraries posted in Celebrity Access. As noted earlier, the size of the market is a very important factor in explaining where artists perform. Cities were, therefore, first grouped into the four size categories used for the correlation analysis and a cluster analysis was subsequently performed separately on each size category. The results are presented in Figures 2 – 5. The earlier individual cities cluster together in the dendrograms, the more musically similar they are (i.e. the same artists tend to play in those cities). Further to the right in the dendrograms, cities link into progressively larger groups, and eventually they form one cluster. What follows is a discussion of the clusters that were observed through this statistical procedure. In the largest city category, we identified the following clusters, which were assigned descriptive names: “The Sunbelt Group” (Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Phoenix), “The Canadian Duo” (Montreal and Toronto), “The West Coast Hot Beds” (San


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Figure 2

Dendrogram: Metropolitan Areas over 3 Million.

Francisco and Seattle), and “The Northeastern Metros” (Philadelphia, Boston, Washington DC, and Chicago) (Figure 2). The Sunbelt Group includes cities distributed over a large area, but they are all located in the southern half of the United States, which means that that they share characteristics of recent economic and population growth. While the distance from Atlanta to Phoenix is significant, it is possible that some artists route tours in an eastwest fashion to include the four cities in this group, resulting in a distinct cluster. At the same time, it also reasonable to assume that audience preferences may be similar within the group compared to cities elsewhere (e.g. the Rustbelt). It is also notable that the Sunbelt Group cities have major universities located nearby (the University of Georgia in Athens, the University of Texas in Austin, and the University of Arizona in Tucson) with slightly different touring characteristics. The Sunbelt Group cities are home to some universities, but attract artists through a more diverse urban audience compared to the demographically narrower range of the college audience. The Canadian Duo also forms a cluster quickly in the dendrogram, meaning that Toronto and Montreal are very similar. The two cities are close enough to each other that it is easy for an artist to schedule a concert in one of the cities one night, and move on to the other the next. Toronto and Montreal are the main markets in Canada, so it makes sense for many artists to behave in such a manner. If there are any cultural differences between largely English-speaking Toronto and predominantly Francophone Montreal that could result in diverging musical preferences, the data do not show it. The Canadian connection appears instead to be much more important than language differences. Canadian bands in the data sample commonly tour both



Figure 3

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Dendrogram: Metropolitan Areas 1 –3 Million.

Montreal and Toronto (and other Canadian cities) in a much more predictable fashion than cities in the United States. San Francisco and Seattle are dubbed the West Coast Hot Beds because of their high per capita scores (Table 1). They are also located somewhat close to each other and are, according to Joel Garreau, part of the same North American region— “Ecotopia”—where cultural attitudes are similar, which may also be reflected in audience preferences. Another commonality is that both also have histories of vibrant local music scenes. Just as Toronto and Montreal appear on many artists’ tour itineraries, travelling from San Francisco to Seattle or vice versa is also a common practice. The West Coast Hot Beds do not, however, cluster as quickly within the tree structure as the Sunbelt Group and the Canadian Duo, which means that some minor


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Figure 4

Dendrogram: Metropolitan Areas 0.5–1 Million (Partial Graphic Representation).

touring differences between San Francisco and Seattle exist, particularly the fact that San Francisco attracts a larger group of artists than does Seattle. The Northeastern Metros cluster is a result of north-to-south orientation touring in the Megalopolis region. Within the group, Washington and Philadelphia have the greatest physical proximity and cluster together more quickly than do Boston and Chicago. Chicago is a geographic outlier in the cluster, but displays a touring schedule more similar to the east coast cities than, for example, that of nearby Detroit. Tier One Chicago attracts many more artists than Tier Four Detroit, which may explain its closer resemblance to Tier Two and Three Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington. The leading east coast city—New York—is distinctly different from any other city. It has more artists and concerts and many unique “one-offs” (e.g. European artists), which means that it does not cluster with any city until later in the dendrogram when it pairs with Los Angeles. Despite having fewer performing artists than Chicago, Los Angeles is still more similar to New York in the composition of artists.



Figure 5

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Dendrogram: Metropolitan Areas ,0.5 Million (Partial Graphic Representation).

The analysis of cities with a metropolitan population between 1 and 3 million residents resulted in the following clusters: “The By-passed Cities” (the cities at the top part of the dendrogram from Buffalo to San Jose), “Tourist Metropoles and Others” (from Kansas City to Milwaukee in the dendrogram), “The Midwestern Group” (Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Columbus), “Secondary Canada” (Ottawa and Vancouver), “East Meets West” (Salt Lake City, St Louis, Cleveland, and Denver), and “Creative Class Cities” (Portland, San Diego, and Minneapolis) (Figure 3). The By-passed Cities are not very similar to each other in terms of which artists performed there; rather, they cluster based on the lack of performances. Most of these cities have below average absolute and per capita scores. Cluster analysis treats nonperformance as a variable and the moderate-to-low attractiveness of the By-passed Cities on the touring circuit generates statistical similarities. The group is geographically diverse, but distinct sub-categories are evident. It includes a Rustbelt group (Buffalo, New York; Rochester, New York; Grand Rapids, Michigan; Hartford, Connecticut), a south-central group (Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; San Antonio, Texas;


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Memphis, Tennessee), and two California cities that appear to be in the performance shadow of San Francisco (San Jose and Sacramento). The most notable aspect of the Tourist Metropoles and Others cluster is that Las Vegas and Orlando join together relatively quickly in the tree structure. It indicates not only that tourist cities have an elevated per capita level of performances, but the type of artists that play there are similar as well. The cluster is also quite diverse, however, and “beach cities” such as Tampa and Virginia Beach are included, as are cities with an average level of attraction on touring circuits in different regional performance markets of the United States (Kansas City, Missouri; Charlotte, North Carolina; Milwaukee, Wisconsin). Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Columbus link together as a Midwestern Group. Artists often design regional tours and, therefore, cities located close to each other usually display significant similarities. To paraphrase geographer Waldo Tobler’s observation that is commonly called the First Law of Geography: phenomena near each other are more likely to be related than are distant phenomena. The Midwestern Group is probably similar both because of spatial proximity and cultural similarities derived from shared historic developments. In the next level of the dendrogram, the Midwestern Group links with two cities on the east coast (Baltimore and Providence) and Nashville to the south, which partially resemble the Midwestern Group. Ottawa and Vancouver make up the Secondary Canada cluster similarly to the way that Montreal and Toronto linked together in the large city grouping. One difference is that Ottawa and Vancouver are not easily connected from one day to the next on a tour; instead, the Ottawa and Vancouver link suggests that the “Canadian effect” is strong. The cluster is explained by Canadian artists who predominantly tour in Canada and/or that US bands schedule both cities on their tours when they decide to play to the Canadian market. East Meets West is the result of the similarities among Salt Lake City, St. Louis, Cleveland, and Denver. Two of them (Salt Lake City and Denver) are western cities that have intermediary positions on the touring circuits. The other two cities, St. Louis and Cleveland, did not cluster with the Midwestern Group as one might expect. Cleveland scores relatively high in both Figure 1 and Table 1, which position it closer to Salt Lake City and Denver than to its Ohio neighbors. St. Louis may have a more direct touring connection with Salt Lake City and Denver: some bands travel from St. Louis to one of the two western intermediaries. Tier Five St. Louis is apparently still a “Gateway to the West” more so than its Missouri neighbor Kansas City, which scores too low to be included in the Figure 1 tiers. Among the 1 – 3 million population metropolitan areas, we also identified a group of Creative Class Cities. San Diego, Portland, and Minneapolis are perennial highscoring cities in economic development expert Richard Florida’s creative class rankings, which analyze various economic and demographic variables to determine which cities are the most innovative and creative. It is not surprising that cities with a particular type of creative workforce are also fertile markets for similar artists. At the



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same time, geographic location is also relevant: the west coast cities of San Diego and Portland link together more quickly in the dendrogram than does Minneapolis. Lower in the urban hierarchy with metropolitan population sizes less than one million, fewer distinct clusters are noticeable. As is shown in Figures 4 and 5, cities tend to link, at the most, two-by-two on the left side of the dendrogram and then progressively link up with other cities on a one-by-one basis. This means that the cluster analysis algorithm had a hard time identifying coherent clusters of cities. As the two smaller city-size categories involve a very large number of cities, Figures 4 and 5 are only partial graphic representations of the dendrograms generated by the SPSS cluster analysis function. The complete tree structure continues from the top of Figures 4 and 5 and upward. The omitted part includes many cities that link immediately to each other because they have few, if any, performances (similar to the rationale discussed previously with regards to the By-passed Cities cluster), and are, therefore, not particularly interesting from an analytical perspective. Despite the less-than-clear results regarding these smaller metro areas, some conclusions can be drawn from Figure 4. One group includes three cities with a “partial” college character (Knoxville, Tennessee; Raleigh, North Carolina; Albany, New York). The cities have sizable universities but are too large be considered college towns per se (Gumprecht); they are, rather, diverse mid-sized cities that attract similar artists on the touring circuit. The 0.5 to 1 million population metropolitan areas also contain two Canadian cities that link together—Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Hamilton, Ontario. Surprisingly, Quebec City does not cluster with those two cities, but rather with a diverse set of cities both on the east coast (Poughkeepsie, New York, and Worcester, Massachusetts) and the west coast (Fresno, California, and Oxnard, California), which, for the most part, are in the performance shadow of larger metropolitan areas such as New York, Boston, and Los Angeles. The upper section of Figure 4 does not exhibit distinct clusters, but a Sunbelt connection is nevertheless evident. For example, southern cities such as Columbia, South Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia, link together quickly and connect on the next level in the tree structure with south-western cities, such as El Paso, Texas, and Bakersfield, California. The smallest cities with a metropolitan population under 500,000 continue the trend with poorly defined clusters (Figure 5). There are certainly links on the macroregional scale—for example among western cities (Santa Barbara, California; Spokane, Washington; Reno, Nevada) and north-eastern cities (New London, Connecticut; St. Catharines, Ontario; Utica, New York). On the other hand, St. Catharines on the US-Canadian border connects only rather late in the dendrogram with other cities in eastern Canada (London, Ontario, and Halifax, Nova Scotia). College towns in this size category are not necessarily similar to regional neighbors. Lansing, Michigan (next to East Lansing, home of Michigan State University) is more similar to Lexington, Kentucky, than its University of Michigan college rival Ann Arbor. Ann Arbor in turn links with Madison, Wisconsin, more than any other place. And, despite being located at separate corners of the United States, Eugene, Oregon, has touring characteristics similar to those of Tallahassee, Florida.

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Conclusion The geographic dynamics of touring are influenced both by the size of metropolitan markets and by other factors such as the relative location of cities and their demographic and cultural characteristics. Industry decision-makers are important in designing tours, although on the aggregated level employed in this article, the sometimes arbitrary effect of individual decisions is probably eliminated. Statistically, 50 per cent of where artists choose to play is explained by the population size of different metropolitan markets, which means, for example, that the largest cities typically have the most concert opportunities. But, when the number of concerts is measured on a per capita basis, the results are different. Combining high scores for both absolute and relative (per capita) measures, we conclude that the best places for contemporary rock bands to tour are San Francisco, Austin, and Portland. These “cool” cities are known to have lively indigenous music scenes. The development of local music artists and a receptive audience that attracts touring acts from across North America appear to be two sides of the same coin. This result supports our thesis that a hierarchy based on musical culture will differ from one that is based only on the sheer magnitude of population. In a broader sense, the differences that exist among cities in their touring draw also reflect underlying cultural, economic, and political differences. For example, San Francisco, Austin, and Portland are also at the top of Richard Florida’s list of creative class cities. These are privileged places of youthful, white prosperity which, somewhat ironically, coexist with “alternative” rock. So are college towns, which typically are important stops on touring circuits, although the data indicate a great degree of unevenness among them. On the other hand, the dynamics of touring have an inescapable spatial, Cartesian logic. Where cities are located with respect to each other and the larger geography of North America affect how attractive they are on the touring circuits. We have identified concepts such as positive proximity, intermediary positions, the peninsular effect, and performance shadows, which indicate that purely locational variables also play a role in tour decision-making. The cluster analysis results further showed how differences and similarities among cities seem to be both spatial and socio-cultural in nature. The use of statistics in this article has been mainly exploratory; thus, there are opportunities for future research to verify statistically how different local population variables and economic characteristics correlate with touring patterns. Touring databases such as Celebrity Access also include concert dates and venues, which allows for future research to explore the exact routing of tours as well as at which venues different artist choose to play. Qualitative research can also be employed to address the audience and society’s engagement with the music in different touring locales. Acknowledgements Ola Johansson has learned a great amount about concert promotion and touring artists as a volunteer stage manager at the Flood City Music Festival in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, for many years. He would also like to thank Lacey Behe and Christopher Walker, both former students at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, who helped with the collection and processing of the touring data.


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Thomas Bell acknowledges his debt to Stuart Ross, tour manager for several modern rock touring groups for sharing his valuable insights about organizing band tours. He also wishes to thank his son Brian from whom he learned much, albeit at second hand, about the inner workings of the music industry. Brian “paid his dues” in his early days as a professional modern rock musician on tour. Those “dues” often involved sleeping in backs of vans and in bathtubs of cheap motels shared by artists and roadies alike. That was before he was signed to a successful major-label mainstream rock band playing in venues that would not, by and large, be included in the present study. But more importantly, I admire his willingness to pay his dues all over again with an unsigned side project band with which he is currently involved and touring.


Notes [1] David Bowie says, “Music itself is going to become like running water and electricity . . . . You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left” (Pareles, quoted in Krueger). [2] The hierarchy based on the total number of performances has a closer association with city population size, although the urban hierarchy based on this measure is very similar to the one based on the number of artists frequenting the place (Figure 1). Those results are not presented here, but suffice it to say that no city moved up or down more than one tier when the number of performances replaced the number of artists as the variable used to create the urban hierarchy. In large cities, artists often schedule multiple performances in the same venue or they return more frequently to satisfy the market demand. Los Angeles, for example, has more total concerts than Chicago. One exception is Austin, Texas, that, despite its relatively modest size, has the fifth highest number of concerts in North America and would be a Tier Two city, largely a result of the 400 þ musical venues ranging in size from concert halls and arenas to honky-tonk bars and small clubs that are used during the South by Southwest festival. [3] When we started the process of creating hierarchical tiers we soon realized that neither an arithmetic series (in which the number of cities in each tier does not progress quickly enough) nor an exponential series (in which the number of cities in each tier progresses too quickly) were suitable. We settled, therefore, on a “compromise” series. The empirical data strongly suggested that Tier One should consist of only two cities—New York and Chicago. The number of cities contained in each subsequent hierarchical tier was determined by the following triangular number series equation: xn ¼ (n(n þ 1)/2) þ 1, where n ¼ the tier level and x ¼ the number of cities in each tier. [4] This phenomenon was suggested to us by a contact person in Salt Lake City before the research was conducted, and the data bear out that observation.

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Notes on Contributors Dr. Ola Johansson is Associate Professor at the Department of Geography, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. Dr. Johansson’s main research interests are the geography of indie rock, urban politics and redevelopment, and energy policy. He is the co-editor with Thomas L. Bell of Sound, Society and the Geography of Popular Music (Ashgate 2009). As a recent guest scholar at Linnaeus University in Sweden, Dr. Johansson researches Swedish popular music in the context of cultural globalization. Dr. Thomas L. Bell is Professor Emeritus from the Department of Geography at the University of Tennessee. Since 2009, he has been an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Geography and Geology at Western Kentucky University. Dr. Bell’s main research interests are in marketing, economic and urban geography and American popular culture. He is the co-editor with Ola Johansson of Sound, Society and the Geography of Popular Music (Ashgate 2009). He lives in Bowling Green, Kentucky.