Does Anyone Play Your Town? The Geography of the Documented Concert Record in the United Kingdom, 1960 to 2025

Open, crowd-sourced archives are attractive sources for the geography of live music, but little is known about where they look. I place every United Kingdom event in the MusicBrainz database, an open music encyclopaedia edited by volunteers, into its local authority and ask which places this record remembers. The record is thin: 7,615 documented concerts from 1960 to 2025, a median of 120 a year since 1980, a small fraction of the concerts that take place. Following a plan written before any area-level count was made, I model documented concerts across all 361 local authorities with Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood. Documented concerts rise more than in proportion to population (elasticity 1.64, 95% CI 1.21 to 2.08). Areas with an indoor arena of 10,000 or more seats have 3.8 times the documented concerts of similar areas without one (95% CI 1.1 to 13.7), a premium larger than in all but 0.4% of 500 placebo assignments, and the premium is concentrated in tour dates: the 14 arena areas hold 10% of the population and 53% of documented tour dates. The expected shadow of arenas on nearby towns is not found in the planned model; it appears only when London is excluded. 70 of the 167 authorities with 150,000 or more residents have no documented tour date. Crowd-sourced concert data describe the geography of attention to live music as much as live music itself, and need coverage audits like this one.

Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/band-towns/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/band-towns. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/band-towns/.

Sources: MusicBrainz JSON data dumps, 2026 (MetaBrainz Foundation, CC0); Census 2021 (ONS, NISRA) and Scotland's Census 2022 (NRS), local authority boundaries December 2023 (ONS, OSNI), Open Government Licence v3.0; Wikipedia, List of indoor arenas in the United Kingdom (CC BY-SA 4.0); Wikidata (CC0). Text, figures and data CC BY 4.0; code MIT.