The show must go on: proposals to measure the economic value of Grassroots Music Venues

ABSTRACT

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on private grassroots music venues (GMVs) increased the difficulties in their business model, showing the vulnerability of their economic sustainability. This paper proposes ways to measure the economic value of GMVs in the city of Rio de Janeiro (RJ), Brazil, seeking to highlight the important role of such venues and of public and private support for their maintenance. To this end, an online survey was applied to 180 GMVs goers and 188 non-goers, based on the contingent valuation method. The data shows GMVs play an important role within the musical ecosystem and generate positive externalities for the city. Both goers and non-goers tend to understand this importance and identify GMVs as businesses that generate cultural and economic value for the city, showing a non-use value of the good.

KEYWORDS:

• Contingent valuation
• music
• grassroots music venues
• Rio de Janeiro
• economic value of culture
• cultural economics‌

JEL CLASSIFICATIONS:

• Z10
• H23
• H44
• D12

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Compliance with ethical standards

Human and animal rights

The authors declare that the research involve human participants and has been approved by the ethics committee, assuring the human rights. The research does not involve animal participants.

Informed consent

The authors declare that written informed consent was obtained from the respondents of the survey and is available for review by the Editor-in-Chief of this journal on request.

Notes

1 https://inamu.musica.ar/cemv/.

2 https://clubcommision.de/

3 Goers’ and non-goers’ perception of live music venues, converted into monetized issues, seeks to capture the advantages and disadvantages of the existence of the venues. This means that some respondents may have assigned lower values as a result of perceived disadvantages.

4 In Rio de Janeiro, the sanitary measures adopted to prevent Covid-19 from spreading prohibited any type of agglomeration and visits to homes during the survey period. Hence, several surveys were carried out over the internet in order to protect research participants, as recommended by the Committee on Research Ethics. However, as Bethelehem (2010) shows, web surveys are increasingly replacing other formats, including face-to-face surveys, due to some advantages like low cost, agility to launch the survey and reduction of the time needed to treat data. On the other hand, the main disadvantage is the sampling bias due to two problems: under-coverage and self-selection. The first means the survey is not able to select some elements of the population because internet is needed to respond it and the second means that the researcher doesn’t have the control of the selection because the survey is spread over the internet and the respondents are those who decided to participate. To reduce sample bias we distributed our survey on various online channels and the questionnaire was designed and tested to increase the response rate. So, our results have some limitations due to sampling bias of online survey.

5 One possible bias due to COVID is that people in quarantine, because they miss social interactions more, may have increased the amount they would pay in their answers.

6 The survey is attached as supplementary information.

7 Equivalent to USD 2.02 considering the exchange rate from 23 June 2021 of USD 1.00 for 4.96 Brazilian Reais.