Exclusive Dealing and Its Effects: The Impact of Large Music Festivals on Local Music Venues

This paper examines how local music venues are affected by exclusive contracts used by four of the United States’ most prominent music festivals. By utilizing a unique industry and multi-year dataset, as well as variation in the use of exclusive dealing across the country determined by the location of large music festivals, this paper adds to the paucity of empirical analysis of exclusive dealing and provides new insight into an ignored sector of the music industry. Results show that exclusive contracts correlate with a decrease in the number of venues in affected cities by 7–28 % when compared to those unaffected cities, with smaller cities being disproportionately affected.