Popular Venues for Concerts

Insight

As COVID-19 became a global pandemic and the world went on lock down, most, if not all, planned tours and concerts were getting canceled, and the remaining events had strict capacity policies and seating measures. As COVID-19 cases began to lower in 2022, concert tours began to get rescheduled and people started attending shows again. As the demand for concert events continues to increase, artists and event planning teams have to search for venues to book for shows and events. It’s important for event planners to find venues that are popular for concerts. The more popular a venue is for a concert, the more likely it is to have a good seating system, sound system, organization, prepared staff, etc. To help artists and event organizers search for popular venues, I developed code that will find popular venues across the US.

Data Collection

To find popular venues, I used Ticketmaster’s API to fetch information about concert events across the United States. The information fetched from the API included the names of venues for the concerts. I used Python’s Requests library to request information about 200 concert events. Because Ticketmaster’s Discovery API includes an abundance of information about events, I only added a few parameters so that I would not have to filter several variables. When requesting the data, I included parameters to only collect information about events in the US classified as concerts. After sending a request for data, I retrieved the event name and date, as well as the name, city, and state of the venue for each event. I also included a statement to keep track of the count of each venue. After printing the information for each event, I sorted the venues and printed the top 10 most popular venues. One possible error that someone could encounter is issues with the API key. A unique API key is needed to request data, which you can only access by signing up for Ticketmaster.

Data Analysis

As seen in the graph, the top 10 most popular venues were Lambeau Field, Sphere, Bakkt Theater at Planet Hollywood, Footprint Center, Kia Forum, Smoothie King Center, United Center, MetLife Stadium, Lincoln Financial Field, and SoFi Stadium: 7 events

Limitations and Biases

One of the limitations of this analysis is that only 5 requests per second are allowed and only 5,000 API calls per day are allowed. Additionally, there was a limitation on the access that I had to Ticketmaster’s API resources. Most of the API resources were restricted to Partners, Clients, and Internal APIs. Another limitation of this analysis is that popular venues are not calculated for each state. Users of this data may want to search for the most popular venue for each state. However, this won’t be possible since the code only calculates the top 10 venues across the US. Top venues may be in the same area or near each other, which is not ideal when it comes to booking venues for a tour.

One of the possible biases that can be found in this data and analysis is the lack of information about the size of the venue, as well as other features. Although this code calculated the top 10 venues for concerts, it did not take into account the popularity of the artists performing at the venue and the size of the venue. Not every artist that is going on tour and booking shows is popular enough to book the top popular venues. Moreover, not every artist may want to book a big venue and may prefer smaller or intimate venues. Therefore, the code may not give the best recommendations for every artist and their events team.

You can find the code for this analysis here: https://github.com/adasti/INST414