The HETFA Creative Industries Lab has been active in delivering analyses and reports on the live music and festival industry of Hungary since 2016. As the coronavirus pandemic caused a complete and immediate shutdown of the sector, our work has gained even more relevance to understand the impact of the epidemic and to support the sector in financial recovery by formulating recommendations.
The first analysis – prepared in cooperation with the Music Hungary Association – provided a brief report on the impact of the shutdown of the industry following the introduction of restrictive measures in Hungary on 11 March. The report includes a call for immediate action for the government and policy-makers in support of the music industry and lists concrete recommendations. The report in Hungarian is available here, while a short summary in English can be accessed here, by the Budapest Business Journal.
Our second analysis focused on the festival industry, stating that the cancellation of festivals can lead to a serious impact on the Hungarian economy as the crisis will affect employees not only of the festival sector, but also tourism, catering and the hotel industry. In a normal year in Hungary, 70% of all performances would happen between the beginning of March until the end of September. With that proportion of the performances, we estimated a direct revenue loss of about 28 billion HUF in the sector. According to our estimation each HUF not spent on each festival will withdraw about 7 HUF from the economy due to spill-over effects between sectors. Since the publication of the analysis, an official statement prolonged the ban on large events until 15 August (including the largest music event of Hungary, Sziget Festival), meaning that this year’s festival season will be cancelled in Hungary. This means – according to our estimation – an income loss of up to 442 billion HUF that represents almost 1% of the Hungarian GDP in 2019. The article with more details in Hungarian is available here.