§ Lord Aveburyasked Her Majesty's Government:
How they were able to select the venues studied in MORI's survey of live music staged in England and Wales in 2003–04 which did not have a core business of staging live music in arriving at the conclusion, given in a Department of Culture, Media and Sport press release of 25 August, that "an estimated 1.7 million gigs were staged in the past year alone in bars, clubs and restaurants whose main business isn't putting on live music"; and whether they will give details of the calculation. [HL4624]
§ Lord McIntosh of HaringeyThe venues included in the sample were randomly selected by MORI, using theYellow Pages database (yell.com). The venue types from which the sample was drawn were provided by DCMS. These reflected the range of venues where music can be staged, but where the public also go for reasons other than live music. Some public houses may, for example, stage live music on a very regular basis, but they do not exist purely to stage live events. Other forms of entertainment are an option, and the venues could exist with no live music at all.
The other factor involved in selecting the range of venues to be included was the likelihood of there being any impact on live music provision resulting from the new licensing arrangements. The venue types included in the sample were also those on which the department and, through advice from the Live Music Forum, the industry more generally felt that the new licensing arrangments might, if anywhere, have an impact. The estimated figure of 1.7 million live music events in England and Wales in the previous 12 months, was calculated through first establishing the average number of live music events which venues had staged 34WA in the previous year, and multiplying this figure by the estimated number of venues which exist of the types included in the survey.