Our latest analysis of the live entertainment industry had these repeating themes of repeating concerts.
We went pretty deep into these themes in the two linked posts, but here's the tl;dr.
Residency is multiple concerts in same venue over a long period of time
Concert series is a bunch of gigs over a weekend
It's increasingly common to have one artist booking cover multiple performances.
Here's an example: The UK leg of Sam Smith's upcoming tour The Thrill of It All goes as follows:
- 1x performance in Sheffield
- 1x in Newcastle
- 2x in Glasgow
- 2x in Manchester
- 2x in Dublin
- 2x in Birmingham
- 4x in London
Only two of Smith's booked performances are actually single events, most of them are a set of two; and then there are four performances in London.
Looking through the statistics for the Top 100 Tours of 2017 shows that these sets are becoming increasingly common. Before we landed on concert series we also heard the phenomenon referred to as:
- sets of shows
- run of shows
- a string of shows
- "a booking" i.e. regardless of how many performances take place, it still counts as one booking in the biz
We're sticking with concert series.