The rest of this study counts what gets booked. This page checks what gets said about it — the claims made to artists and agents about legacy names, headliners and where the money comes from. Each one is set against a primary source: the trade press, the peer-reviewed literature, Form 990 filings, a state enforcement action, an on-the-record interview, or the festival’s own bill. The figure quoted most often turns out to have no source at all.
Eighty per cent of our revenue comes from the legacy artists.
It is stated with the confidence of a metric. It is not one. Searched, August 2026: Pollstar, Billboard, IQ, Music Business Worldwide, the peer-reviewed events and cultural-economics literature, ticketing-company research, and the published material of every relevant industry association. No study, trade report, ticketing dataset or promoter disclosure anywhere in the public record contains it.
The only 80% figures that surface in festival research are unrelated — the share of first-time attendees at certain events, the share of attendees who buy food on site.
This matters because of where it puts the burden. A promoter making a specific quantitative claim about their own business is either reading it off a report or they are not. There is no report.
We know which artist sells the tickets.
To attribute revenue to an individual artist you need either single-day tickets tracked against lineup announcements, or purchase-intent data captured at the point of sale. Most of the events in this study sell neither.
This is the same mechanism the rest of the study documents from the other side. The legacy act receives the top billing, the marketing spend, the press-release headline and the Saturday-night slot. The weekend then sells. The sellout is booked to the legacy act. The support artist was never placed in a position where they could have been credited with anything. The variable was never manipulated, so the result cannot be read.
The lineup is what sells the ticket.
Leenders, van Telgen, Gemser and van der Wurff (2005), International Journal on Media Management 7(3–4), modelled festival success against content variables — audience scope, lineup, festival age, theme — and format variables — budget, ticket price, location, capacity cap — across 47 music festivals.
Budgets (and star lineup and ticket price), theme, and location are largely nonsignificant predictors of success.
Leenders et al. (2005), abstract
What did predict attendance growth was being relatively new and having a narrow, defined niche. Stated with its limits: one study, n = 47, Dutch market, 2005, and the abstract’s parenthetical suggests star lineup may have been grouped with budget in the model. It is one study. It is one more than Claim 01 has.
Bowen and Daniels (2005), Event Management 9(3), ran on-site intercept interviews (n = 374 valid) and cluster-analysed the results into four attendee segments.
| Segment | Share | Music motivation (of 5) |
|---|---|---|
| Just Being Social | 13.4% | 2.08 |
| Enrichment Over Music | 36.4% | 3.21 |
| The Music Matters | 35.8% | 4.32 |
| Love It All | 14.4% | 4.86 |
Only 35.8% fall in the music-primary cluster. Across the whole sample the Enjoyment factor scored 4.19 against Music at 3.70. The Music factor explicitly included the item “this year’s musical artists have a special appeal to me” — the lineup-specific question was asked directly, and it still landed in the minority.
It is risky for event managers to rely on the music itself or a specific artist to draw large festival crowds. Equally important is creating a fun and festive atmosphere that offers ample opportunity to socialize.
Bowen & Daniels (2005), abstract
Connolly and Krueger, Rockonomics: The Economics of Popular Music (2006), analysed 232,911 Pollstar box-office reports covering 270,679 performances, 1981–2003. They confirm extreme concentration — the top 1% of artists took 26% of concert revenue in 1982 and 56% by 2003. Then they test whether star power explains it.
The return to superstardom has indeed increased over time, but that the timing does not coincide with the increase in ticket prices. He concludes that we must look at other factors to explain the rising prices.
Connolly & Krueger (2006), summarising Krueger (2005)
Krueger does not find that star power is worthless. He finds that the rise in the return to superstardom does not line up in time with the rise in ticket prices, so something other than star power is driving the revenue growth. He is also frank about the difficulty: “we are skeptical that current methods of measuring talent will shed much light on the superstar model.” Overstate it and a well-read promoter takes the whole page down with it.
One Krueger finding worth keeping in the pocket, because it is about this genre directly: “from 1996 to 2003 concert prices increased by only 20 percent for jazz musicians, but by 99 percent for rock and pop performers.”
You can’t sell a festival without a legacy headliner.
This is the claim that falsifies most cleanly, because it makes a prediction and the prediction fails in both directions at once.
Pollstar counted roughly 90 US festivals shuttering in 2024. Music Festival Wizard logs 89 confirmed cancellations that year, about 107 in 2025 and 47 by August 2026. The UK’s Association of Independent Festivals recorded 78 cancellations in 2024 and 43 in 2025, and at least 253 UK festivals lost since 2020. These counts do not record the composition of each event’s lineup.
| Event | On the bill | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Lollapalooza 2004 | Morrissey, Sonic Youth, PJ Harvey, Flaming Lips, Pixies, Wilco | All 16 dates cancelled before opening night on slow sales |
| Woodstock 50 (2019) | Jay-Z, Miley Cyrus, The Killers, Dead & Company, Santana | Cancelled; the financier had committed up to $49.1m and withdrew about $17.8m from the festival account |
| Splendour in the Grass 2024 | Kylie Minogue | Cancelled 27 March 2024, about a week after on-sale |
| Soundside 2025 | The Killers, Hozier, Weezer, Vampire Weekend | Cancelled July 2025 |
| Blue Ridge Rock 2023 | Slipknot, Megadeth, Pantera | About 60,000 attended; the final two days were cancelled; refunds were unpaid as of April 2024 |
There’s no evidence current artists can carry a jazz festival.
Christian McBride, as artistic director of the Newport Jazz Festival, deliberately raised the current-artist share of the bill — Samara Joy, Julius Rodriguez, The Roots, Khruangbin, Cory Wong — while keeping living legends on it. He then discussed the finances on the record with Ashley Kahn in DownBeat, 20 August 2024.
McBride: The most obvious thing is that this is Newport’s first full, three-day sellout — selling out all tickets in advance — since 1969.
Kahn: So, the box office covers the costs of the festival?
McBride: It surely did this year! It’s gotten better each year. Up until last year the jazz festival broke even… We went into the black for the first time last year, and of course this year is the first time we’ve had an advance, three-day sellout from what I’ve heard in 55 years.
DownBeat, 20 August 2024
Into the black in 2023. First advance three-day sellout since 1969 in 2024. Sold out again in 2025, and again in 2026 — the 2026 sellout under a new artistic director, Nate Smith, in his first season. McBride on the method: “You gotta go out on a limb and book people who you know people need to see… Look at somebody like Samara Joy or Julius Rodriguez.”
Newport did not go legacy-free. Herbie Hancock headlined 2026. And McBride’s “up until last year we broke even” describes recent years, not all fifty-five. The defensible claim is not that legacy artists are unnecessary — it is that the festival’s first profitable year and its first advance three-day sellout since 1969 both landed during the period it increased its bet on current artists. McBride’s own framing is the model: “We will always have the primary directive of booking these living legends, but the focus is also to build legends for now and in the future.”
Booking a new artist is the risk.
Birth years for the active core of the touring roster, ages computed at August 2026.
| Artist | Age | Artist | Age |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bob James | 86 | Russ Freeman | 66 |
| Jay Beckenstein | 75 | Keiko Matsui | 65 |
| Jeff Lorber | 73 | Boney James | 64 |
| Peter White | 71 | Jonathan Butler | 64 |
| Rick Braun | 71 | Marion Meadows | 64 |
| Gerald Albright | 68 | Euge Groove | 63 |
| Najee | 68 | Norman Brown | 63 |
| Kirk Whalum | 68 | Dave Koz | 63 |
| Marcus Miller | 67 | Brian Culbertson | 53 |
Median 66.5. Mean 67.3. Seventeen of the eighteen are 63 or older. The roster has been thinning for a quarter century: Grover Washington Jr (d. 1999), Wayman Tisdale (d. 2009, aged 44), George Duke (d. 2013), Joe Sample (d. 2014), Chuck Loeb (d. 2017, aged 61), Nick Colionne (d. 2022), David Sanborn (d. 2024).
The stable events on this circuit are stable because of non-ticket subsidy, not lineup. Detroit Jazz Festival runs a $4.5–5m budget underwritten by the Valade endowment. Jacksonville is municipally funded and free.
Our audience wants the legacy artists.
The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts is the only rigorous longitudinal data on the American jazz audience.
| Year | Mean age |
|---|---|
| 1982 | 33.1 |
| 1985 | 35.2 |
| 1992 | 39.6 |
| 2002 | 42.6 |
| 2008 | 45.2 |
| 1982 | 1992 | 2002 | 2008 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 35 | 67.0% | 42.8% | 30.7% | 29.2% |
| 60 and over | 5.5% | 11.9% | 12.9% | 17.5% |
Jazz is the most dramatic example. In 1982, two-thirds of its audience was under the age of 35; by 2008, the fraction had slipped to three-tenths.
Mark J. Stern, NEA Research Report #53
Jazz aged 12.1 years in 26 calendar years, going from the youngest benchmark arts audience in America to merely average. The attendance rate followed: 9.6% of US adults in 1982, 10.8% in 2002, 7.8% in 2008, 8.6% in 2017, 6.3% in 2022 — the lowest figure recorded in the survey series. And across 2002–2012 the largest increase in jazz attendance rate was among 55–64-year-olds, from 8.8% to 10.0%. Every band under 55 declined.
A promoter can turn this around: the audience is old, so book old artists. That reading has the causation backwards, and this study is the reason why. An audience does not age because of taste. It ages because nothing renewed it — and the volumes here document, event by event, exactly how little renewal there was. The 2022 participation rate is the receipt for thirty years of that policy.
We book the smooth jazz legends because that’s the format.
This one is checkable in thirty seconds on a phone, which is what makes it useful. The biggest names on the 2026 contemporary jazz festival posters are largely not legacy smooth jazz artists at all.
Set that beside what this study counts elsewhere. Vincent Ingala holds 39 slots across eight event series in the master file — sixth overall in The Gatekeepers table, fifteen years in — and is still billed as emerging, still in a support slot. The Carousel is the long form of that finding. There is no promotion available on this circuit. There is only rebooking.
The same discipline that governs the counting governs this page. Overreach here and everything above it goes too. Three things are not established and must not be asserted.
What the page does establish is narrower and harder to move: the 80% claim has no source and no mechanism; the only research that has regressed star lineup against festival success found it non-significant; roughly a third of attendees are lineup-motivated; festivals sell out before naming anyone and cancel with the biggest names available; the one festival that ran the experiment published a profit; the incumbent roster’s median age is 66.5; and the posters already contradict the policy.
The festival volumes count lineups. This page checks claims, so its method is stated separately rather than borrowed. A claim is recorded here only where it is one this circuit demonstrably makes to artists and agents. Each is then set against a primary source — the study itself, a peer-reviewed paper, a Form 990, a state enforcement filing, an on-the-record trade interview, or the festival’s own published bill.
Where a supporting figure could not be traced to a primary source it was cut, not softened. That is why Claim 01 is an absence rather than a rebuttal: the search returned nothing, and nothing is the finding.
Two figures carry their caveats in the body rather than in a footnote, because they are the two a hostile reader goes after first: the Leenders result is a single study at n = 47, and the Krueger finding is about the timing of the superstar return, not its existence. Both are stated at their real strength and no higher.
One acknowledged weakness: the 2026 bills cited in Claim 08 come from published festival listings, not from all-appearances.csv. They are the only figures on this page not reproducible from the study’s own files.
Academic sources retrieved August 2026. NEA figures from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, 1982–2022. Financial figures from IRS Form 990 filings and the Maryland Office of the Attorney General. Festival outcomes from Pollstar, Variety, Billboard, the BBC and the Association of Independent Festivals. Ages computed from published birth years at August 2026.
The rest of this study shows that the experiment is never run. This page shows that the reasons given for not running it do not survive contact with the record. The revenue figure has no source. The ticketing product cannot produce the attribution the figure claims. The research that has tested lineup star power against festival success found it non-significant. Festivals sell out before naming anyone and collapse with the biggest names alive. The one major jazz festival that deliberately raised its current-artist share posted its first profit and its first advance sellout since 1969. And the roster the whole argument protects has a median age of 66.5.
This page checks what gets said. The volumes count what gets booked — and the counting is what the claims have to survive.