Thirty-three years,
one buyer,
and 28.7% — not 42.5%.

In one paragraph

The concentration measured everywhere else in this study is agency concentration: a small number of desks selling the same names into a small number of festivals. BMG is the case where a promoter is every bit as repetitive as a festival buyer — more so — without the desks being the mechanism. Thirty-three years under one buyer also produces a closed room. It just closes around different people, and it closes more slowly.

Exhibit A

Thirty-three seasons, and when the door shut

Each bar is one calendar year: total slots, with the darker portion showing how many went to an act that had already played a BMG show in an earlier year. The first decade is almost entirely new faces. From roughly 2010 the dark portion never recedes.

1993–1999 average 13.0 slots a year; 2010–2019 average 20.1. 2020 is the COVID floor. Dates in 2026 are announced and on sale, not all yet played.

Exhibit B

The acts that come back

Ranked by counted slots. The right-hand column is the booking desk of record where one is published — and the striking thing about this table is how many rows are empty.

298 of 568 slots (52.5%) went to an act that had played a BMG show in an earlier year — measured year-over-year, the same basis as every other volume, so a second show inside one calendar year is not counted as a repeat. 156 of 259 acts (60.2%) appear exactly once and never return.

Exhibit C

Who supplied the bill

Slots by booking desk of record. The four desks mapped in The Gatekeepers are shown solid. Chapman & Co. is an artist-management company rather than a booking agency; it is listed as the roster map lists it. Desk percentages overlap and must never be summed — six artists sit on two rosters.

360 of 568 slots (63.4%) trace to no publicly named desk. Some of that is genuine independence; some is simply that blues, classic-rock and tribute acts — which are roughly a third of this series and almost absent from the festival volumes — are not represented by the jazz desks this study maps. Both readings are in the data and neither is resolved here.

Exhibit D

One room, and then two

Slots by venue. The Maxwell C. King Center in Melbourne (2,016 seats, plus a 250-seat studio theatre) has absorbed 61% of everything this promoter has ever booked.

From 2025 a second market opens at the Ormond Beach Performing Arts Center, about ninety minutes north (capacity not independently confirmed) — and the same act starts appearing in both on consecutive nights: Spyro Gyra, Acoustic Alchemy, Tab Benoit, Wishbone Ash, Larry McCray and the Glenn Miller Orchestra all play the pair in 2025–26. One travel day, two bills, two slots in this count.

The record

Every counted show, in full

All 373 shows and 568 slots, newest first. Raw file: bmg-lineups-1993-2026.txt.

2026 — 17 shows, 23 slots

2025 — 12 shows, 21 slots

2024 — 15 shows, 21 slots

2023 — 21 shows, 33 slots

2022 — 17 shows, 26 slots

2021 — 10 shows, 14 slots

2020 — 6 shows, 7 slots

2019 — 13 shows, 18 slots

2018 — 21 shows, 27 slots

2017 — 14 shows, 19 slots

2016 — 18 shows, 23 slots

2015 — 14 shows, 16 slots

2014 — 19 shows, 24 slots

2013 — 14 shows, 24 slots

2012 — 17 shows, 20 slots

2011 — 13 shows, 15 slots

2010 — 10 shows, 15 slots

2009 — 6 shows, 10 slots

2008 — 9 shows, 17 slots

2007 — 9 shows, 19 slots

2006 — 11 shows, 20 slots

2005 — 7 shows, 16 slots

2004 — 3 shows, 8 slots

2003 — 4 shows, 11 slots

2002 — 4 shows, 7 slots

2001 — 4 shows, 13 slots

2000 — 5 shows, 10 slots

1999 — 8 shows, 18 slots

1998 — 11 shows, 19 slots

1997 — 9 shows, 11 slots

1996 — 11 shows, 16 slots

1995 — 11 shows, 13 slots

1994 — 7 shows, 9 slots

1993 — 3 shows, 5 slots

Method

Where the numbers come from, and what they exclude

One appearance = one act on one show's bill. The unit is the show, not the season, because this is a year-round series and an act can play twice in a calendar year — the same unit used for the Spaghettini counter-example. Package and supergroup billings are opened into the individuals named. Standing groups count as one. Tribute and repertory acts count as one act under the touring band's name; the subject of the tribute is not on stage and is never injected as an artist, which would have added roughly forty phantom appearances here. Unrecovered bills are omitted entirely, never estimated. Every figure is a floor.

Forty-three of the 416 entries in the promoter's published archive carry no countable bill and are excluded: seven the archive itself flags as another company's promotions, seven that are not music or where no set was played, and twenty-nine multi-artist events — New Year's Eve packages, festivals and getaway weekends — whose bills are not recoverable in full.

Thirty-three seasons under one buyer — the third-highest repeat rate in the study, and the promoter-run series least supplied by the four desks. Both things are true at once.