Forming a companion piece to Frith’s 2007 article on why live music matters, this paper argues that there is a need to refine accounts of the music industries to reflect live music’s growing dominance. It does so by focusing on the rock/ pop concert promoter and posits that in contrast to traditional definitions, the role of the promoter is astonishingly flexible and adaptable. The authors argue that the promoter necessarily ‘wears many hats’ and offer three promotional models to understand the work that promoters do. To illustrate this and to understand the development of live music promotion in the UK from 1955 onwards, the article compares and contrasts historical research with contemporary ethnography. Introduction News headlines announcing a ‘crisis’ in the recording industry have been commonplace since the beginning of the 21st century, but 2008 and 2009 saw the first reports of another watershed: Britons spent more on live music concert tickets in 2008 than they did on recorded music (CDs and downloads combined), making the live industry the largest source of revenue in the British music industries (Prynn, 2008; Music Week, 17 March 2009). 1 In fact, live music has always been an important consideration for popular music and its related industries, and yet it has been surprisingly neglected in research, which has tended to privilege the recording industry, or indeed, imply that the ‘music industry’ is synonymous with the recording industry (we will therefore be referring to the ‘music industries’ in plural for the remainder of this article). 2 There is now a clear need to challenge and refine existing record-industry based accounts of music as a creative industry (Frith, 2007). Even in academic scholarship of popular music, research on live music has tended to focus either on artists (in performance) or audiences (in participation), rather than on the necessary elements that allow these two groups to assemble together for a live music event. Our concern here, then, is to lay the groundwork for an understanding of live music as an industry, the result of a production process in which the commodity—the concert, broadly defined—is the result of the activities of a particular kind of entrepreneur, the concert promoter. This article presents research from an ongoing project designed to investigate the activity of concert promoters in Britain since 1955 and to develop a more sophisticated and nuanced explanation of their position in the music industries than previous attempts. 3 It uses two contrasting methodologies, his- torical research and ethnography, as it is important in this initial study to bring together these different ways of understanding the promoter’s role. Historically, as we will show, this has changed according to Scottish Music Review Volume 2 No. 1 2011 Matt Brennan Research Assistant, Live Music Project, University of Edinburgh Emma Webster PHD Student, Live Music Project, University of Glasgow Why Concert Promoters Matter Scottish Music Review