Analysis → The field: how few shows the sellouts belong to

The field: how few shows the sellouts belong to

Most shows never sell out once. This page names the head of the distribution the scroll only describes — and shows what happens to that list when the timed-entry listings come out of it. It closes on how much of any of it the rest of the analysis actually explains.

Some figures are temporarily redacted. The measurements of how deeply shows sold into their central box-office allocation are withheld while we review data use with the festival organisers; the sellout rates, sample sizes and everything else are unchanged. Nothing has been deleted, and the figures will return if and when that review concludes.

Snapshot pinned at 1 September 2026. Every figure is a floor — dates we could not verify count as not sold out. This page is the long version of one chapter of the findings; the reading guide and how this was measured cover the whole analysis.

Sellouts are concentrated in very few shows

Selling out is a property of a small set of shows, not something that visits the programme evenly.

58.9% of shows: 2,228 of 3,784 never sold out a single date.
2.6% of shows: produced 45.3% of all sellouts — the top 100 titles.
5.1% of shows: sold out every date they played. A full-run sellout is rarer than a hit.
18.5% of dates: were recorded as sold out. This is counted from the booking record — a live crossing to zero, or a confirmed reading after the performance — and no longer from the availability gauge. The gauge cannot carry this figure: the monitor writes a zero to it whenever a date is marked no-allocation, so it reads a withdrawn allocation and a genuine sellout identically. The gauge-derived figure it replaces was lower, because it could not see sellouts confirmed only after the date had passed. This one is provisional: the faulty post-performance readings described in “What these numbers cannot tell you” are already out of it, and the items still open there can only take it down further.

The pooled 45.3% is close enough to comedy’s own figure to read as a festival-wide fact, and it is not one. Rank each genre’s own catalogue and theatre turns out to be far more top-heavy than comedy:

The top 100 shows in each genre, and what share of that genre’s sellouts they carry

Genre	Shows in the genre	Top 100 = this much of it	Sellouts in the genre	Share from the top 100
Comedy	1,426	7.0%	3,806	49.5%
Theatre	1,103	9.1%	2,924	80.2%

The top 100 within each genre’s own catalogue, not the festival’s top 100 filtered down to a genre — those answer different questions. Four theatre sellouts in five belong to under a tenth of theatre shows. Part of the 30.7-point gap between the two rows is arithmetic, because a fixed 100 is 9.1% of theatre’s catalogue and only 7% of comedy’s: cut both genres at 7% and theatre’s top 77 shows still carry 73.6% of its sellouts against comedy’s 49.5%, a gap of 24.1 points. Like-for-like it is a shade under twenty-five points, not thirty-one. Either way the pooled headline understates how far theatre’s whole sold-out category rests on a small hit list, and is roughly right for comedy, which is why nobody caught it.

This chapter keeps the slot formats in, and the exposure is the finding

Every ranked table elsewhere on this page drops the twelve timed-entry and walk-around listings — see “What these numbers cannot tell you”. This chapter does not, and neither does the genre split above. Concentration is a statement about the sellouts the festival actually had, not a comparison of like with like: a twenty-minute slot that reached zero did reach zero, and taking those listings out would report a less concentrated festival than the one that happened. The exposure is large, and it is the point. One Hundred Voices, one listing at the Scottish Parliament, retired 461 slots and sold out every one — 4.6% of all 10,102 sellouts of the 2026 festival, and 15.8% of theatre’s own, sitting inside the 80.2% in the table above. A programme where a single title carries one sellout in every twenty-two is what this chapter is about.

Everything on this page explains two sevenths of it

Venue, room, price, slot, date, genre and origin together account for a bit over a quarter of how well a show sells. The rest is the act — and that remainder is measurable.

In full

The material the scroll has no room for.

The section above describes this distribution without naming anyone in it, which is the right call for a scroll and an odd one for a reference page. Here is its head. Ranked on raw sold-out dates, the top 25 listings account for 2,913 of the festival’s 10,102 sold-out dates — 28.8% of everything, from a handful of listings.

The 25 listings with the most sold-out dates

Show	Sold-out dates	Dates	Rate	Genre
Giants †	574	696	82.5%	Exhibitions
One Hundred Voices †	461	461	100%	Theatre
To Be Seen †	425	525	81%	Exhibitions
Strange Beauties †	425	625	68%	Exhibitions
DeepFake †	221	248	89.1%	Theatre
Concerts of the Future †	134	284	47.2%	Music
The Ghost Bus Tours Edinburgh †	64	93	68.8%	Events
Bubba-Licious	54	66	81.8%	Childrens_Shows
Into the Dark	52	52	100%	Theatre
Truthmachine †	45	160	28.1%	Theatre
ARCADE †	42	432	9.7%	Theatre
The Lady Boys of Bangkok – Full Moon Tour	41	52	78.8%	Cabaret
CAI – Cadence of Altered Illusions †	34	49	69.4%	Theatre
Coco's Art History Comedy Highlights Tour †	33	36	91.7%	Events
Bath Mat	32	34	94.1%	Comedy
Fun-Size Wine Tasting	29	46	63%	Events
The Captain	28	28	100%	Theatre
Emmaculate	28	29	96.6%	Comedy
Golden	28	29	96.6%	Comedy
Live a Little	28	33	84.8%	Comedy
The Speakeasy Experience	28	52	53.8%	Theatre
Darling	27	27	100%	Comedy
David Elms Describes a Room	27	28	96.4%	Comedy
Creep	27	30	90%	Comedy
FLOW	26	26	100%	Comedy

Marked rows (†) are timed-entry or walk-around listings — 11 of these 25. The page’s method notes detect them by shape rather than by genre: a listing with 5 or more performances on one calendar date is running slots, not a run. They are marked rather than removed, because they do genuinely sell out those slots and a table that quietly dropped them would be picking the population that flatters the headline. Every rate is the floor rate. Titles link to the show’s own page.

That table is mostly a measurement of format. An installation selling twenty-minute slots banks more sold-out dates in a week than a play can in a month, and nothing about that is a demand signal. Rank the same population with the timed-entry listings dropped and the head of the distribution changes completely — the top 25 now carry 733 sellouts, 7.3% of the festival’s rather than 28.8%.

The same ranking, with timed-entry and walk-around listings dropped

Show	Sold-out dates	Dates	Rate	Genre
Bubba-Licious	54	66	81.8%	Childrens_Shows
Into the Dark	52	52	100%	Theatre
The Lady Boys of Bangkok – Full Moon Tour	41	52	78.8%	Cabaret
Bath Mat	32	34	94.1%	Comedy
Fun-Size Wine Tasting	29	46	63%	Events
The Captain	28	28	100%	Theatre
Emmaculate	28	29	96.6%	Comedy
Golden	28	29	96.6%	Comedy
Live a Little	28	33	84.8%	Comedy
The Speakeasy Experience	28	52	53.8%	Theatre
Darling	27	27	100%	Comedy
David Elms Describes a Room	27	28	96.4%	Comedy
Creep	27	30	90%	Comedy
FLOW	26	26	100%	Comedy
The Critic's Way	26	26	100%	Comedy
The Jolly Fisherman	26	27	96.3%	Theatre
Homeland Insecurity	26	29	89.7%	Comedy
Stuart Mitchell – Solo Show	25	25	100%	Comedy
Inside Jokes, Outside Voice	25	26	96.2%	Comedy
A Foot is Not an Appropriate Prize for the Tombola	25	27	92.6%	Theatre
Trans People Are Awful	25	27	92.6%	Theatre
Dog Ear	25	28	89.3%	Comedy
First Class Panic	25	28	89.3%	Comedy
Man Sings the Same Song Over and Over Again for an Hour	25	28	89.3%	Comedy
Quartz and All	25	29	86.2%	Comedy

Conventional runs only, by the same shape test. This is the list most readers mean when they ask which shows sold out most, and it is a far flatter distribution than the one above: no listing here banks triple-figure sold-out dates. Both tables are published because the ranking depends entirely on which population you pick, and saying so is cheaper than being caught choosing. Titles link to the show’s own page.

Method, in full

What this chapter measures, what it excludes, and where it is weakest.

A per-performance rate treats every date as one vote, which is the right unit for "will I get in on Thursday" and the wrong one for "was this show a hit". The concentration section publishes both a per-date and a per-show view for that reason, and the two tables above are the per-date view at its most extreme. Neither is corrected for how long a listing ran.

These two tables are the exposure, kept side by side deliberately. Since 1 September the twelve listings the shape rule catches inside the kept genres are excluded from every COMPARATIVE chart in the analysis — the venue league, the room drill, room size, price, genre, start time, origin, the warning table and the reopen chart — on the argument that a gauge on a twenty-minute slot measures the format rather than demand. What is NOT restated is the census: the population totals, the floor rate and the concentration figures still count every ticketed date, these listings included, which is why the ranked table above still has them in it. Both rankings stay published so the size of the choice is visible rather than asserted, and the analysis appendix quotes the exposure on both populations.

The population, the definition of “sold out” and the two bounds every rate sits between are the same across every page here, and are set out once in how this was measured and what these numbers cannot tell you.