A few weeks ago I did a post (see here) where I hypothesised that the explanation behind the increasing price of concert tickets was due to the decline in revenue generated from the sale of music. Streaming sites have made it far cheaper for fans to pay for their music and as a result, musicians are charging more for their live shows.
Well this week, taking inspiration from UCC senior lecturer Dr. Eoin McLaughlin, I decided to go look and see if this was the case. I collected data on the proportion of global music revenue generated from physical music sales and the average price of concert tickets from 2011-2019. I found these in the global music report and statistica respectively.

As can be seen from the graph above there is a clear negative relationship between the amount of revenue which is generated from the sale of physical music and the average price which is charged for a concert ticket. Meaning the less money that can be made from selling music, the more has to be charged for performing music.
There is only a small sample size of 9 because data on this topic is not as ubiquitous as I would like, however, the results of a regression and robust regression analysis show that there is a statistically significant relationship between the two variables (P<0.01). The coefficient for these tests were -0.49 and -0.48 respectively indicating that for every one percent increase in the proportion of global music revenue from physical music, there would be a $0.48 or $0.49 decrease in the average cost of a concert ticket.
If you are interested in keeping up with more analysis of the Irish music industry, please give Music Economics a like on Facebook.
Leave a Reply