Notes
At present these figures are probably quite a good guide to the UK countries but clearly in other parts of the world we need more events on the map before the stats will be useful.
- Total Events/Year: Weekly events counted as 50/year, bi monthly as 23/year, monthly as 12 and variable or “other” as 12.
- Guest performers at events: The ‘policy’ field of the club form provides various standard expressions which can be combined to describe the club. I decided that if the word “guest” or “concert” appeared in that field it was a reliable indicator that guest performers were booked
- Occasional and regular guests: For clubs that book “occasional” guests the total number of events/year was divided by 5, I will do a sample of clubs like that to see if that is a reasonable assumption. These figures are not intended to be definitive but they are a useful guide.
To distinguish between “‘Occasional Guest’ clubs and those that have guest performers at each event I searched for the term “Guest Performers at some events” in the ‘policy’ field so this depends on the person submitting the form selecting that option among others. - Opportunities for the Public to Perform: This may be underestimated as the data collected has changed over the life of the map so there may be some leftover terminology not counted although I’ve tried to update the descriptions with ‘search and replace’.
It counts all events which include “Singaround”, “Session”, “Open Mic”, “Floor Singers” and similar in their policies. This is also made difficult by different terms used in different countries.
I’m hoping to simplify this in future and encourage the use of “Open Stage” for all events where individuals may give performances and “Jam Session” for playalong/singalong events. Learning events (eg workshops, dance group meetings) are not included.
4068 different people have visited the Map in since it started in February 2015
data from wordpress.com
The map and these statistics are compiled by Chris Rust, Emeritus Professor of Design, Sheffield Hallam University. chris (at) chrisrust.net
Folk Music Map 
Eum, I’m kind of confused. To my knowledge there are, more or less, 10 folk festivals in Belgium every year. Yet these stats claim there to be only one… Am I misunderstanding something or are these stats just outdated?
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Hi, This is a crowd-sourced map, it only shows those events that people have added. If you know of an event you can add it yourself. There’s a link to do that. All the events there are added by members of the public, I try to encourage people to add their events.
In the UK and some parts of the USA there is good coverage, elsewhere it’s pretty random.
Thanks for your interest.
Chris
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