A few years ago I got a trivia question wrong. Q: What percent of Americans own a passport? I forget what answer I chose, but I remember overshooting the correct answer by a country mile. The correct answer is: About 20% of Americans own a passport.

Seems low, but even less regularly attend music events. Coolfer was taken aback when I read a post at Hypebot about the concert business. According to Live Nation's Michael Rapino, who was a keynote speaker at the annual annual Concert Industry Consortium, a paltry two percent of Americans attend three or more concerts a year. Rapino broke down the numbers.

"Of the total American population, 71 percent did not attend a live concert last year...That means only 29 percent of the population do attend live concerts every year....we can group these fans based on the number of shows they attended in the past year. What we call our Occasional Goer, those who only attended one concert in the last year, represent 23 percent of the population. Our Concert Goer group, those attended two concerts in the past year, represent just four percent of the population. And finally, our heavy fans, those we have called our Concert Aficionados, who attend three or more concerts a year, represent a meager two percent of the population."

Rapino then asked why they spend millions of ad dollars trying to reach just the 29% who do go to concerts. "We've got a lot to do," he argued, "and we must re-engineer our business to service the new fan of today."

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