Prodiss, the French concert promoters’ association, has said that record revenues from ticket taxes shows that the nation’s live music market is recovering following the effects of the terrorist attacks in late 2015.
While the official concert and festival attendance figures for 2016 have not yet been released, Prodiss president Luc Gaurichon said that the live music sector bounced back in the second half of the year, after losing more than an estimated €100m in value from January to June, French website, Le Monde reports.
The second half of the year boost came from tax on concert tickets increasing to a record €33m last year.
“The impact of the attacks [on the Bataclan and Stade de France in November 2015] was felt very violently on concert attendance until June 2016,” Gaurihcon told delegates at a Prodiss conference earlier this month, reports Le Monde, “[but concertgoers] returned in the second half of the year.”
France’s top music festivals attracted their highest combined attendance in the last five years in 2016, despite the threat of terror and the competing attraction of Uefa Euro 2016.
Some 3.5m music fans attended the country’s 30 biggest festivals, which is an 11 per cent increase on 2015 figures.
Les Vieilles Charrues, in Britanny, and the two-week Jazz festival in Marciac saw an attendance in excess of 250,000. The Solidays, Jazz à Vienne and Festival de Carcassonne events all attracted more than 200,000 attendees. The smallest of the top 30 attracted 55,000 people.
Despite the improvements in the market, doubts surround the status of the approximately €7m Emergency Fund for Live Entertainment, introduced after the attacks in 2015, as being a key factor in the strength of the festival market.
“There is no guarantee of its renewal in 2017,” said Rock en Seine founder François Missonier.
An Emergency Fund committee will meet to discuss its future on April 27.
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