Jazz fest touts $48.5M economic spinoff
The Montreal International Jazz Festival generated $48.5 million in economic spinoffs 2017, the organization said on Monday.
That’s up from $39.1 million in 2016, according to a study commissioned by the festival and conducted by accounting firm KPMG.
“The best part is to be able to demonstrate that a major event that offers the vast majority of its programming free can generate so much wealth for everyone,” said Jacques-André Dupont, the festival’s CEO.
The spending spurred by the festival generated $10.3 million in tax revenue for the Quebec and Canadian governments, according to the study.
The numbers put the jazz fest’s economic impact ahead of any other single event in Montreal. The Grand Prix was credited with generating about $42 million in economic spinoffs in 2015, the last time its economic impact was measured.
The number of tourists attending the jazz fest also reached a new high in 2017, according to the study: 207,000 in 2017, up from 165,000 in 2016.
Of those, 83,000 came to Montreal in 2017 specifically for the jazz fest, up from 62,000 in 2016.
“It’s the programming, the quality of the offering,” Dupont said.
The festival also got a boost in 2017 from the celebration of Canada’s 150th and Montreal’s 375th anniversaries. The festival — which normally receives about $4 million in government subsidies — received an additional $1 million because of those events, Dupont said.
Since 2016, festivals in Quebec have been studying their economic impact using a formula created by the provincial government.
That formula allows for an apples-to-apples comparison, said Martin Roy, the executive director of the Regroupement des événements majeurs internationaux (RÉMI), an organization that represents many of Quebec’s largest festivals.
Roy said festivals are increasingly studying their economic impact because they’re facing questions about the government subsidies they receive.
While government funding accounts for only 16 per cent of the total budgets of RÉMI members, he said, studies like the one conducted for the jazz fest demonstrate the importance of festivals to Quebec’s economy and the importance of subsidizing them.
For Dupont, the festival’s boost to the local economy isn’t everything.
“The economic windfall number is just one factor I look at about the impact of our festivals,” said Dupont, who is also the CEO of L’Équipe Spectra, which produces the FrancoFolies and Montréal en lumière festivals.
There are also cultural and social benefits that come from things like free outdoor concerts, he said, and festivals give artists a chance to perform for a bigger audience.