2024 Chicago Christmas Music Trends
Midseason report from the 2024 Chicago Christmas music data project — patterns emerging halfway through December.
Midway through December, the 2024 Chicago Christmas music data project has enough data to share some early patterns. Final analysis will come in January when the season wraps.
Where We Are
Three weeks of daily scraping, 47 venues, 287 events captured so far. The scraper is running clean — only lost two days to a JavaScript-heavy site that kept breaking Playwright.
Patterns Through Week 3
Venue concentration is higher than expected. Three venues are running roughly 40% of all December holiday programming. This makes sense economically (they have the booking infrastructure and name recognition) but it means Chicago's holiday music scene is less distributed than I assumed.
Weekend clustering is intense. Fridays and Saturdays account for 67% of events. But here's the interesting part: Friday shows are shorter on average (90 minutes vs 120 minutes for Saturday) and start earlier. The "get home before the parking gets bad" effect is real.
Jazz continues to dominate independent venues. Of the 47 venues, 29 run exclusively or predominantly jazz programming. Blues is a distant second at 11 venues.
The Outlier
A venue I'd never heard of — the Hideout Inn in Wicker Park — is running more holiday events than any other single venue. 23 events in December, ranging from a Johnny Cash tribute to a "Holiday Noise Music" series. Worth checking out.
More in January when the season wraps.