No Einstein
I am not enough of a mathematician to be insightful about what all this means and I don't have the memory or resources to compare this to last year or to pre-COVID, but is theSpaceUK's average 60% capacity audience sufficient to pay all those involved enough to cover their costs and go home with something in their pockets at the end of the month that doesn't involve bankruptcy?
Does the Pleasance's 480,000 ÷ 273 events—a per event average of 1,758 tickets—or the Gilded Balloon's 189,177 ÷ 3,354—a per performance average of 56—justify the physical and mental effort of being at the Fringe?
Nothing lies quite like a statistic, so do the figures, any of them, actually say anything at all about these venues except about their marketing budgets, booking power and hard-earned reputation?
Needless to say, but importantly, it is not all about the big players. They may be the backbone, but the heart of Edinburgh Fringe is to be found amongst the independents who orbit the multi-space producers and who, it is fair to say, as a cohort struggle to get their share of media attention, they form a vital microcosm apparently without spokespeople.
Focussing on the information we have been given, what we do know is that tickets sold were down 13% and tickets issued were down 19% on 2019, even though there were 10% fewer events on offer this year, and where you start on the 'whys' of this depends on your perspective.
You could begin with the increasing cost of fuel, train fares and air travel on local and international tourism then factor in the devastating consequences of a global pandemic and the social changes that it wrought. And don't forget a prolonged period of sustained funding cuts.
Add to that mix a decade of wage stagnation, unaffordable housing, a conservatively estimated 10% of the working population being in severely insecure employment and a cost of living crisis crushing all but a tiny privileged minority and we have a picture to compare to 2019's landscape where the pixels blur unrecognisably in places.
Any one of these components is going to have an impact on the Fringe as it does on all the arts. There is nothing about the Fringe that makes it immune to these forces and the same is true of the other festivals that take place in Edinburgh over August. Most of the issues that ail the Fringe will afflict them all.
But the greatest of these is accommodation. Over the last year or so, many column inches have been dedicated to the rocketing costs around finding somewhere to live for artists, visitors and even that necessary evil: the media.
But to my mind, the accommodation crisis is talked about in rather homogenous terms and with headlines screaming extreme examples of desperate measures, and there is one aspect that hasn't got much coverage in the context of the festival city. It is that annual rental growth in Edinburgh has been running at more than 20%.
To be exact, in the last year, average rents in Edinburgh have gone up 24.2%. That is nothing to do with one festival or another and all to do with supply and demand and landlords, often still in pandemic recovery mode, having to negotiate both cost of living increases and rapid, steep mortgage rate hikes.
The cost of living increases impact everyone. Even the festival's biggest single landlord, the university, has to face its energy bills.
I am not a champion for landlords, be they private, corporate or academic, and of course I recognise that the leisure industry-wide practice of maxing out profits, profiteering even, from its peak season exacerbates the problem for artists and visitors alike, but that is true of all leisure accommodation right up to the luxury Edinburgh Grand Hotel.
For Festival-goers, there is a sour cherry on top of the already unpalatable cake. Scotland's tenants and its non-resident student population have benefited from tenancy reforms that impact the market generally and especially so during festival season, and the City of Edinburgh Council in particular has made moves to stall the growth of that scourge on affordable housing, Airbnb.
Unless concessions on all sides are made for the festival season, accommodation costs will become increasingly prohibitive, locking providers and users into a vicious spiral. In the end, it all boils down to cost, but we need to see the context in order to recognise success when it's on the table. It seems to me that 24.2% of the problem is unresolvable.
But accommodation is only the biggest destabiliser in a Buckaroo-style problem that needs tackling quickly before the Fringe morphs irrevocably into a festival of established work or new work by artists sufficiently funded, successful or well-heeled to be there, to be enjoyed by locals and a visiting middle-class audience.
Making ends meet by living in tents on farmers' fields is more a testament to what ails society than it is a tribute to the pluck and resilience of the artists, and the only shock about The Stage's headline that an artist funded their Fringe event through sex work is that such desperate measures hadn't emerged sooner.