New survey finds that DFW basically hates live music

As someone who spends plenty of nights in (often sold out) local music venues, listens to lots of promising local bands and radio stations that play said acts, it comes as something of a shock that anyone would classify the Dallas-Fort Worth area as not being a particularly great place to hear and/or see live music.

Yet that is just what a new survey, conducted by personal finance website Value Penguin, suggests.

Relying upon 15 different data points — ranging from the hourly median wages for musicians to the number of venues, bars and records per every 1,000 people — Value Penguin crunched its numbers for 200 different metropolitan areas, culled from the U.S Census Bureau and, um, Thrillist, among other sources.

The website arrived at the conclusion that Honolulu or Madison, WI are better cities for music fans than either Dallas or Fort Worth. (The lone Texas city to crack the top 50 was — as you can probably guess — Austin, which checked in at number five overall.)

The DFW area barely made the top 100, checking in at number 98, behind both Lubbock (no. 76) and San Antonio (no. 78), with other Texas cities appearing further down the list (Amarillo: 108; Houston: 151).

So for all the progress DFW music has made in the last decade, and particularly the last two-three years, is it a case of so close, yet so far? Or are we simply defining the health of our creative culture differently than the statisticians?

(H/T: Consequence of Sound)

This story was originally published July 15, 2016 at 1:58 PM with the headline "New survey finds that DFW basically hates live music."