Every year, millions of music fans watch their favorite artists announce tour routing, only to ask the same frustrating question: “Why does everyone skip my city?”

The answer isn't a lack of local demand—it's a breakdown in physical infrastructure. Modern streaming data reveals exactly where fans are listening, but venue bottlenecks, interstate logistics, and radius clauses keep artists from stopping.

To uncover where the live industry is falling short, we built a data-driven model analyzing North America's top streaming markets against actual venue supply.

To determine the most underserved markets in North America, we compared digital demand (Spotify listenership per Designated Market Area, or DMA) against physical supply (venue infrastructure and historical tour stops), essentially creating a "Streaming-to-Touring Deficit Score."

Here’s a more in-depth explanation on how we calculated the list.

This is exactly how sophisticated independent promoters and infrastructure investors find market inefficiencies before major conglomerates catch on. For this chart, we created a scoring system measuring market deficit, then cross-referenced the top 200 Spotify markets against four distinct friction pillars, each representing a reason why a high-streaming market is getting skipped.

From there, we developed four different archetypes of what underserved markets look like, then filtered the initial Spotify Top 200 list down to a shortlist by applying a Radius Exclusion Filter to remove any market within 75 miles of a Top 10 touring city (unless its population exceeds 1 million). This immediately isolates the truly stranded audiences who have to travel to see a show. From there, weeee pulled active event counts from Bandsintown and Ticketmaster to calculate the final "Shows-Per-Capita" deficit and ranked the cities by score.

The result is the list below. Think we missed something? Email us at [email protected] and let us know.

The Disconnect: Features a highly dense, music-centric digital footprint and a legendary independent history, but suffers from geographic isolation.

The Deficit: Because it sits centered tightly between massive multi-night routing anchors like Chicago and Denver, mid-tier bus tours frequently pass straight through it on the I-80 corridor without stopping to preserve travel times.

Standout Venue: The Waiting Room Lounge — An iconic indie room in the Benson Theatre District that has been the backbone of Omaha's indie rock scene for nearly two decades.

Dire Need: A Mid-Sized Multi-Genre Indoor Amphitheater.
Sitting on the I-80 corridor between Chicago and Denver, Omaha needs a modern, flexible 3,500-capacity indoor floor space to convince touring trucks to pull off the highway for an mid-tour weeknight stop.

The Disconnect: High-volume streaming driven by a massive, concentrated regional college population.

The Deficit: An extreme venue bottleneck. It lacks modern 1,500–3,000 capacity commercial theaters or flexible civic arenas, causing routing tours moving through the Carolinas to step right over it to book Charlotte or Atlanta instead.