MSMN Analysis
Explainer based on published IMRO research and public festival / cultural-policy reporting — not an interview package.

Irish music and festivals on the European live circuit

A European summer now has an Irish date in it even if you never fly to Stradbally or Sligo. Irish artists tour the same sheds and tents as their French, Dutch and Nordic peers; Irish festivals import headline economies that look like European ones; and a rights organisation in Dublin still tries to turn streaming and live into a cheque. The screen industry has Section 481 and a cultural certificate. Music has copyright, touring logistics, and a field that must fill. IMRO’s 2025 Ireland: Music Report is the clearest recent public attempt to price that system.

This is not a listings piece. It is an Ireland/EU desk look at what the published numbers say about live music as an export and as a domestic habit — and why festivals sit on the same discovery problem MSMN keeps describing for film.

A billion-euro habit, concentrated in the live night

On 8 July 2025 IMRO published research compiled by CORE that put Ireland’s music industry at about €1 billion a year and more than 13,400 jobs. The average adult, the report said, spent almost €1,000 a year on music-related products and services. Live events dominated: about €786 million a year of consumer expenditure, against about €375 million on streaming services in 2024. Average spend on music events was €757, with high-capacity concerts the largest slice (about €298) and festivals next (about €194).

Those are consumer-spend figures, not export invoices. They still tell a European story. Ireland is a small market that spends like a live-music country. Streaming is habitual and expensive in aggregate, but the cheque that moves hotels, crews, stewarding and rural retail is the ticket. Dedicated fans, IMRO noted, attend more than the general public. The business is therefore more concentrated than a “everyone streams” headline suggests: a minority of heavy attenders keep the circuit alive.

An earlier Deloitte/IMRO socio-economic study had put the industry’s total contribution nearer €703 million and just over 13,000 jobs, and called for a National Music Strategy. The 2025 update is a step-change in the headline and a continuity in the ask. IMRO’s public recommendations still reach toward the screen playbook: treat music creation inside cultural tests, and consider incentives for using Irish music in audiovisual productions — an explicit nod to amending Section 481’s cultural test rather than inventing a parallel universe.

Festivals as European infrastructure, not just fields

Electric Picnic, Longitude, Sea Sessions, Other Voices’ small-room brand, county arts festivals and a long tail of one-stage weekends are how Irish live music meets European routing. Headliners are booked on the same agency maps as Glastonbury satellites and continental city weeks. Irish artists moving the other way — from a Whelan’s room to a Berlin club to a French festival afternoon — are the export the consumer-spend study cannot fully see, because the ticket is bought in another currency.

Culture Ireland and the Emigrant Support Programme already treat touring and diaspora stages as public diplomacy. Screen Ireland’s festival support is the film cousin. Music’s public scaffolding is thinner and more fragmented: arts-council project awards, local-authority events funding, tourism bodies that want shoulder-season occupancy, and a collecting society that can research but cannot zone a greenfield site.

The European live market after the pandemic is a cost story as much as a taste story. Insurance, policing, artist guarantees and crew rates rose everywhere. Irish festivals feel that as import inflation: the same headliner quote lands harder on a 30,000-capacity Irish weekend than on a German city brand with a larger local catchment. Weather is the uninsurable Irish extra. A washed-out Saturday is a P&L event, not a vibe.

For European audiences the Irish festival is often a programming brand (Other Voices’ artist-in-a-room aesthetic; a folk or trad week; a dance weekend on the west coast) rather than a destination they can name on a map. That is discovery in the CRESCINE sense: presence is not the same as being chosen. A clip from a small Irish room can travel further than a second-stage set that never leaves the site’s app.

Rights, streaming, and the audiovisual crossover

IMRO exists because live and recorded music are copyright events. The festival that pays a blanket licence and the streamer that pays a per-stream fraction are both in the same legal family as the DSM Directive’s platform rules. Irish composers’ complaint in every recent report is not that people stopped listening. It is that listening scaled faster than remuneration, while live — the part that still pays — is exhausting and geographically unfair.

The audiovisual crossover is where MSMN’s beats meet. Irish drama and advertising still need Irish (and European) scores. Festival documentaries and live-session series are how music reaches the same European living rooms as screen fiction. IMRO’s suggestion that Section 481’s cultural test keep music creation visible is an industrial request: if public film money can demand Irish crew, it can also demand a path for Irish composition rather than a library track cleared in Los Angeles.

None of that replaces a National Music Strategy. Deloitte’s earlier four-pillar ask — including a copyright environment that works for creators on SoundCloud-era platforms — is still the policy vacuum. Screen Ireland has Fís Athnuaite. Music has reports.

What to watch on the European circuit

Three tests will say whether Irish live is compounding or merely filling fields. First, whether mid-level Irish artists can route a European spring without a festival-closing hit — the touring equivalent of a second season. Second, whether Irish festivals still break European acts rather than only importing already-broken ones. Third, whether public strategy ever joins IMRO’s numbers to planning, insurance and regional venues the way Screen Ireland joined tax credits to crew academies.

European listeners already have Irish music. The unfinished work is the same as film’s: habit, routing and a right to be paid when the clip outruns the ticket.

Regional venues are the uncounted infrastructure. A 400-capacity room in Cork, Galway or Derry is how an Irish artist tests a set before a European support slot. Those rooms face the same cost inflation as festivals with none of the tourism branding. When they close, the live circuit becomes a jump from bedroom to arena — which is to say it becomes a circuit only for the already-signed. IMRO’s employment figures include those rooms’ staff whether or not a strategy document names them.

Broadcast and session culture is the other Irish specialty Europe already copies. Other Voices, radio live sessions, and television music strands are how a festival weekend becomes a year-round export without a field. They are also how European programmers discover an Irish act without flying in. If public-service commissioning under the 25% independent account treats music television as optional colour, that discovery rail thins just as IMRO’s numbers say live is carrying the economy.

Weather and insurance deserve one more public sentence. A washed-out Irish Saturday is not an act of God in a P&L that already priced European-level guarantees. Multi-year public underwriting of catastrophic weather — or a genuine insurance pool — is the kind of dull instrument Screen Ireland already understands for production. Music policy has not yet written the equivalent. Until it does, festival “success” will keep being a sunny-year anecdote. A European booker already prices Irish weather as a risk premium; Irish policy should not pretend the premium is a personality trait of the Atlantic. The field is infrastructure. The weather is a line item.

Sources

• IMRO, 2025 Ireland: Music Report (CORE Research, 8 July 2025): https://imro.ie/news/new-research-reveals-irish-music-industry-contributes-e1-billion-annually-to-economy/
• IMRO / Deloitte, The Socio-Economic Contribution of Music to the Irish Economy: https://imro.ie/about-imro/research/new-report-reveals-irish-music-industry-contributes-over-e700m-to-economy/
• IMRO, about the organisation and licensing: https://imro.ie/
• Screen Ireland, Fís Athnuaite Strategic Plan 2025–2029: https://www.screenireland.ie/strategic-plan-2025-2029
• Directive (EU) 2019/790 (copyright in the Digital Single Market): https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/790/oj