LIVE DMA Survey 2015 – LIVE DMA
Author(s): LIVE DMA
Publisher: LIVE DMA
Date: 2015
LIVE DMA is a European network for music venues and festivals which believes that popular and alternative music venues and festivals contribute to the development of our societies. Since 2011, Live DMA has been collecting data to represent the venues on a European level and compare them on different scales.
Live DMA represents more than 1100 music venues in 8 European countries, through 10 representative organisations. For the 2015 Survey, 6 countries participated in the survey: Spain, Belgium, Denmark, France, Norway and the Netherlands.
Live DMA represents mostly small and medium sized music venues. Almost half of the venues featured in this study range in size from 50 capacity to 400.
As reported in the report on Venues Day 2015, one of the most interesting findings was that the bigger the venue, the higher the percentage of programme costs covered by ticket sales. So for small venues (<400 capacity, which make up around 50% of Live-DMA’s members), only 41% of programme costs come from ticket sales, whereas for big venues (+1000), 96% of programme costs are covered by ticket sales, indicating that bar income and subsidy are therefore essential to enable smaller music venues to survive.