Glasgow is a world-renowned music city. The city’s economy benefits from music tourism, but there’s potential to grow this value. In 2017 Inner Ear won a Scottish Enterprise tender to research and write a report with recommendations on how music tourism in Glasgow could be developed.
Inner Ear has been immersed in the music business since it was established. As media producers, journalists and storytellers, research, analysis, problem solving and communication are part of our process for every project. Our methodology included a mixture of primary source interviews and case studies, round table discussion and focus group qualitative research plus survey, analysis and original quantitative research.
UK Music’s Wish You Were Hear music annual tourism research report was cited as a useful reference. It valued music tourism in Glasgow at £101M in 2016. Studying the Oxford Economics research agency who conducted the report, we found that this data was only based on venues with 1,500 capacity or greater and thus missed out the grassroots music venue contribution — a big piece of Glasgow’s music offering. We conducted our own research using the same methodology as UK Music, gathered data from a representative sample of venues and identified a further £59M for the same period.
Our report has been used by policy makers and politicians and studied by music business students. It was the basis of a Scottish parliamentary debate on the same topic in August 2018.