Jazz festival growth trend

One of the Mother City’s biggest annual music events draws a multi-national audience

RESEARCH statistics for the Cape Town International Jazz Festival (CTIJF) show steady growth over the past 17 festivals and a week away from the 18th edition, early indications are that the growth trends are set to continue.

The research conducted by Tourism Research In Economic, Environs and Society (Trees), a unit based at North-West University, found that 37 600 people attended the two-day festival last year just to enjoy the jazz in a beautiful city.

In 2016, 3 542 jobs were created, of which 298 people were employed directly to work at the festival, and 3 244 to work indirectly in jobs which range from marketing to social media campaigns.

Dean le Grange, Cape Chamber of Commerce spokesperson, said: “We haven’t heard anything from members regarding income spikes over the Jazz Festival period. I would imagine this would have a great effect on the tourism and hospitality sectors.”

The Jazz Festival is not only a festival of music, but a time to train and develop budding musicians, entrepreneurs and media people through professional skills transfer programmes and public engagement such as a free concert, exhibitions, debate and a fashion extravaganza.

For a genre known for its “cool understatedness,” media exposure value was a massive R285 million, of which online platforms got the lion’s share at 53%, print media at 30% and broadcast media at 17%.

Of the outbound global news the US disseminated information to 40.89% interested parties while Germany followed with 29.76%. It also made news in France, Spain, Swaziland, Kenya, Ghana, India, Australia, Argentina, Brazil, China and a further 18 countries.

Tickets were sold out nine weeks before the 2016 event to a multi-national audience of which 36% came from South Africa with 54% of that group coming from the Western Cape and 21% from Gauteng.

The US was next in line with 10%, Mozambique and Botswana visitors followed closely at 8% and 9% respectively.

The audience was mostly English-speaking with more females attending at 56% and the 35-49 age group dominating at 41%.

The researchers found that the festival garnered 26% of its interest via social media – 20 000 on Facebook, 1 880 on Instagram, 18 500 on Twitter and 18 500 on YouTube – 49% heard about the festival via good old fashioned word of mouth.