While COVID-19 has been a global crisis, the virus has spread and behaved differently around the world and the U.S. With that in mind, TicketIQ — an event ticket search engine and aggregator — has revealed its COVID-19 Safety Index by State.
Plus, using 2019 Billboard Boxscore touring data, TicketIQ has also unveiled a Gross Concert Ticket Sales by State + Safety Score ranking. (See charts, below.)
The two charts present a look at where the live music industry, and fans alike, could first stage a return.
TicketIQ assigned a safety index rating to each state, based on the daily active cases (current/ongoing COVID patients) of Coronavirus weighed against the national average and a real-time measure of how quickly the virus is growing in each area.
The 50 states have been color-coded, green for low risk, yellow for low-to-medium risk, and red for medium-to-high risk. According to TicketIQ’s analysis on June 7, 26 states are coded green, 12 are yellow, and 12 are red. See below for the safety index for all 50 states.
The average safety index in 0.7356.
Looking at the top 10 grossing states from 2019, there is a range of risk, as Nevada, Texas, and Pennsylvania reflect relatively low risk, while California, Florida, and Massachusetts sport the yellow-coded low-to-medium risk. New York and New Jersey have the highest risk factors, at 3.29 and 3.30, respectively.
Of course, fans and concert promoters in these green states should not be rushing out to concerts immediately. Most of the concert revenue in Nevada ($397.5 million) comes from Las Vegas, while the center of Pennsylvania’s concert industry lives in Philadelphia and, to a lesser extent, Pittsburgh. The risk and spread of COVID-19 in these highly populated metropolitan areas are likely much higher than other areas of these states. Also consider that most of the reported grosses comes from arena and stadium concerts, packing tens of thousands of fans into confined spaces, rather than smaller club venues.
