Live Events Biz Takes $30 Billion Hit
• Pollstar released its 2020 Year-End Special Issue that shared some truly disturbing results for this year’s COVID-19-marred live events industry, which for the first time in its history, saw losses far outweigh gains. Pollstar puts 2020’s total lost revenue for the live events industry, which was shuttered in March due to the global pandemic, at more than $30 billion. That staggering figure is based on Pollstar‘s box office database, the largest in the world, which would have normally hit a record-setting $12.2 billion in 2020, but instead incurred $9.7 billion in box office losses.
The projected $30+ billion figure includes unreported events, ancillary revenues, including sponsorships, ticketing, concessions, merch, transportation, restaurants, hotels, and other economic activity tied to the live events. Additionally, these calculations took into consideration the losses among the 147,000 live businesses featured in Pollstar‘s industry-leading directories as well as other industry studies, which included 2018’s PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2018-2022 report and The 2017 Arts and Cultural Economic Activity study undertaken by the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the National Endowment for the Arts.
“It’s been an extraordinarily difficult year for the events industry, which has been disproportionately impacted by the Coronavirus,” said Ray Waddell, President of Oak View Group’s Media & Conferences Division, which oversees Pollstar and sister publication VenuesNow. “As painful as it is to chronicle the adversity and loss our industry and many of our colleagues faced, we understand it is a critical undertaking towards facilitating our recovery, which is thankfully on the horizon,” Waddell said. “With vaccines, better testing, new safety and sanitization protocols, smart ticketing and other innovations, the live industry will be ramping up in the coming months, and we’re sure that at this time next year we’ll have a very different story to tell.”
