Touring Circuits and the Geography of Rock Music Performance

Abstract

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.

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.

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+ 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 = (n(n+1)/2)+1, where n = the tier level and x = 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.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ola Johansson

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.

Thomas L. Bell

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.