Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation (U.S.) — NAICS 71

A Histometrics rollup primer for a general investing audience — public-market and private investors alike. Level figures are U.S. federal statistics from our ground-truth file; company, trade, and forward-looking statements are synthesized from the three child primers and labeled as judgments, not facts.

NAICS = North American Industry Classification System, the U.S. government's standard scheme for grouping businesses by their primary activity. This page covers the two-digit sector 71, the top of the "fun" economy, which rolls up three three-digit subsectors: 711 (performing arts and spectator sports), 712 (museums and similar institutions), and 713 (amusement, gambling, and recreation). Each has its own primer; this page synthesizes across them.

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1. Overview

NAICS 71 — Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation is the government's catch-all for how Americans spend leisure time and money outside the home: watching a game or a show, visiting a museum or a zoo, or paying to do something themselves — gamble, golf, ski, or work out. It is a ~$339 billion, ~2.5-million-worker sector of the U.S. economy [1][2], and it sits alongside its close cousin, Accommodation and Food Services (sector 72), as the two halves of what people loosely call the experience economy.

Three facts frame the whole sector for an investor, and each one recurs in all three children:

• The economic mass and the public-market access sit in different places. Most of the money and nearly all the jobs are in businesses you cannot cleanly buy on a stock exchange — private sports franchises, nonprofit museums, private-equity-owned gyms and golf platforms, a million freelance artists. The deepest, most liquid listed exposure is concentrated in a few pockets (casino operators, a handful of integrated live-events and parks giants), which are a minority of the sector's economics.
• There is no single "buy 71" trade, because ownership has no common answer. Within one sector you find private "trophy" assets, tax-exempt charities, government-owned buildings, private-equity roll-up platforms, sovereign tribal enterprises, a few household-name public companies, and tens of thousands of independent operators. The right vehicle depends entirely on which corner you pick.
• The biggest dollars escape the code. National sports media rights, recorded-music royalties, casino-hotel resorts, and state lotteries — the largest cash engines attached to this sector — are booked in other NAICS codes. So the measured $339 billion is best read as a floor on an activity several times larger [3][5].

What ties the three children together is a shared economic shape: local, fixed-cost venues selling capacity — a seat, a slot pull, a tee time, a gallery ticket — to a customer spending a want, not a need. Demand is discretionary and cyclical everywhere; the deep structural tailwind everywhere is the consumer's long shift from buying goods toward buying experiences.

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2. What's inside — the three subsectors, and how they differ

Sector 71 splits into three three-digit subsectors. The rollup's distinctive value is the contrast across them. "Receipts share" is share of the sector's $339.2B in 2022 receipts; "jobs share" is share of its ~2.49M paid employees; concentration is each child's own four-firm share (CR4 = combined revenue share of the four largest firms) and Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI = a 0–10,000 score that sums squared market shares; U.S. antitrust agencies treat ~1,500 as the line for "concentrated") [1][2][3][4][5].

(PE = private equity, firms that buy whole companies; REIT = real estate investment trust, a listed landlord structure; 501(c)(3) = the U.S. tax code section for charities exempt from income tax. Rows are ordered by NAICS code.)

Four contrasts jump out — and they are the reason to read the sector as a whole.

1. Two big children plus a small one — but they employ nothing alike. Subsectors 711 and 713 are near-equal on revenue (~46% and ~48%), and 712 is a rounding-error 6%. Yet on jobs they diverge violently: 713 employs 72% of the sector's workers while 711 employs just 22% for almost the same revenue. That is the sector's central tension in one line — 711 packs huge revenue behind few people (a superstar athlete, a media-rights deal, and a 10%-commission agent move enormous sums with tiny headcount), while 713 is a vast, labor-heavy field of local venues. Receipts per worker run about $286,000 in 711 versus ~$91,000 in 713 [1][2].
2. Pay per worker spans 4x. Average annual pay is roughly $112,000 in 711 (pulled up by athlete and agency salaries), ~$46,000 in 712 (mission-driven, part-time, seasonal), and ~$28,500 in 713 (a tipped, seasonal, part-time workforce) [2][3][4][5]. No single "leisure wage" exists.
3. Ownership mix has genuinely no common answer. This is the sector's defining investment feature. 711 is private franchises, PE-owned agencies, and a few integrated public giants; 712 is almost entirely charity and government; 713 is a mosaic of listed operators, REITs, PE platforms, tribes, nonprofits, and independents. You do not "invest in 71" — you pick a subsector, then a route.
4. Public-market access is thin and mismatched to the money. The deepest listed roster sits in gambling (inside 713); a cluster of integrated live-events and controlled-sports names sits in 711; and 712 has essentially no pure-play stock at all. Two whole domains — nonprofit museums, and the freelance-artist/dance corners of 711 — are unbuyable by design. And no single firm spans two subsectors, so there is no natural "sector champion" to own.

For everything each subsector excludes — sports media rights and league licensing (booked at the league level, NAICS 813990), recorded music and streaming (subsector 512), casino-hotel resorts (721120), state lotteries (government, NAICS 92), and government-owned museums and parks — see the three child primers [3][4][5].

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3. Size — the sector's rollup figures

These are our ingested ground-truth statistics for NAICS 71. The file blends two vintages — the 2022 Economic Census (EC: receipts, firms, concentration) and the 2023 County Business Patterns (CBP, the Census Bureau's annual count of employer businesses: establishments, employment, payroll) — so treat them as a composite, not a single synchronized year or an income statement [1][2].

The rollup is clean. The three children's receipts ($154.9B + $21.8B + $162.5B ≈ $339.2B), establishments (68,638 + 8,178 + 89,540 = 166,356, to the unit), employment (542,145 + 154,570 + 1,794,693 = 2,491,408, to the unit), and annual payroll (~$60.7B + ~$7.1B + ~$51.2B ≈ $119.0B) sum to the sector totals. The only gap is the firm count: 145,976 is about 114 below the ~146,090 you get by adding the children, because firms that operate in more than one subsector are deduplicated and counted once at this level [1][2].

Reading these: the average firm is small (~$2.3M of receipts, $339.2B ÷ 145,976), and the average establishment employs about 15 people (2,491,408 ÷ 166,356). But averages mislead badly here, because — as Section 2 showed — pay and revenue per worker vary roughly fourfold across the children.

Why the concentration numbers look near-zero — and why that is an illusion. A CR4 of 7.3% and an HHI of 20.4 would, read literally, describe near-perfect competition — a market roughly seventy times below the 1,500 "concentrated" line. They do not. The figure is an aggregation artifact: the leaders of the three children never overlap. Live Nation and the sports leagues dominate 711; the Smithsonian and great nonprofit museums anchor 712; MGM, Caesars, Vail, and Planet Fitness lead pockets of 713 — but no firm spans two subsectors, so folding three industries together dilutes every leader's share toward zero. Tellingly, the sector HHI (20.4) is lower than either measured child (712 at 31.2, 713 at 39.3), and far below the concentrated pockets inside them — a national theme-park duopoly, scarce local casino licenses, a Live Nation/AEG touring duopoly, integrated talent agencies. Real competition in this sector is local and segment-specific; the aggregate number is a reminder that 71 is not one market, not evidence that it is a competitive one (Section 8).

Undercount caveat — unusually large here, and largest exactly where small or individual ownership dominates. These are federal employer-business statistics, and the true footprint is several times larger, for three compounding reasons:

1. The largest revenue pools are booked in other codes. Sports media rights and league licensing (the single biggest engine in pro sports) sit at 813990; recorded-music royalties, streaming, and publishing in subsector 512; casino-hotel resorts (most of the Las Vegas Strip) in 721120; and state lotteries as government activity (NAICS 92). Read $339.2B as the classified employer core, not the size of the leisure economy [3][5].
2. Government, nonprofit, tribal, and nonemployer operators fall out of the surveys. Where individual and small ownership dominates, the gap is widest. In 711, the Census's separate Nonemployer Statistics program counts on the order of 1.04 million independent-artist proprietorships alone (~$25.4B of receipts, 2023) — roughly doubling that piece — and the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted ~169,800 musician jobs in 2024 against far fewer the Census sees [3]. In 712, the grant-maker IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services) counts roughly 35,000 active museums against ~5,480 paid-employer ones, and the Smithsonian alone runs on a budget above $1 billion [4]. In 713, government golf courses and pools, the YMCA, charitable bingo, sole-proprietor guides, and sovereign tribal casinos are only partly captured [5]. Sector-wide, nonemployers were about 91% of all Arts, Entertainment & Recreation establishments in a recent count [3][5].
3. Scale benchmarks confirm the floor — but do not add them up. As rough yardsticks against the $339.2B (each a different measure, so these mark scale, not additive revenue): U.S. commercial gaming gross gaming revenue (GGR = what casinos and books keep from wagers) ~$78.7B (2025); tribal gaming ~$46.2B (FY2025); state-lottery sales $100B+; the trade group IAAPA sizes U.S. attractions at ~$52.8B; Disney's Experiences segment alone reported $34.2B (FY2024); the American Alliance of Museums puts museums near $50B of GDP (gross domestic product) [4][5].

Our ground-truth file provides no sector-wide figures for profit, margin, attendance, endowments, or growth — where those are absent we say so rather than estimate. Note too that CBP counts jobs in the pay period including March 12, so the 2.49M employment line is a seasonal trough for the outdoor-heavy pieces (parks, skiing, marinas, golf, sports); summer-peak headcount runs materially higher [2].

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4. Investable universe — where value concentrates across the children

The single most useful fact: there is no security that gives you "NAICS 71." No firm spans the three subsectors, and there is no dedicated U.S. arts-entertainment-recreation exchange-traded fund (ETF, a listed basket of stocks). Listed access is deep in one corner, moderate in another, and near-absent in a third — and it maps poorly onto where the money actually is. Tickers below are for orientation, not recommendations; full company maps live in the child primers.

• Deepest listed menu — gambling, inside 713. Roughly a dozen U.S.-listed casino operators (MGM Resorts, Caesars, Wynn, Boyd, PENN, Red Rock, Churchill Downs, Bally's — few are pure plays, since most also own hotels), plus two casino-landlord REITs (VICI Properties, Gaming and Leisure Properties) that turn casino real estate into contractual rent, and one neighborhood pure-play route operator (Accel Entertainment) [5].
• Household-name but shallow — live events, parks, and controlled sports, inside 711 and 713. For live events, Live Nation Entertainment (~$25B revenue; promotion + venues + Ticketmaster) and venue pure-play MSG Entertainment; for combat sports, TKO Group (UFC/WWE). For parks, pure-plays Six Flags and United Parks, plus diversified giants where world-class parks are one segment (Disney, Comcast). Team exposure exists only through controlled, thin-float, often dual-class names (Atlanta Braves Holdings, Madison Square Garden Sports, Manchester United) [3][5].
• Thinnest — recreation and the freelance economy. In 713's recreation group (the biggest single slice of the whole sector by revenue), listed operators exist in only three of six segments — Vail Resorts (skiing); Planet Fitness, Life Time, Xponential (fitness); Lucky Strike (bowling) — with golf, marinas, and the long tail reachable only through equipment/retail proxies or landlord REITs. In 711, independent artists have no direct equity; value sits in the "rails" that clip a fee off the creative flow — music-rights owners (Universal Music, Warner Music, Sony) and platforms (Spotify, YouTube/Alphabet) [3][5].
• Essentially unbuyable — museums (712). The marquee owners (the Smithsonian, the National Park Service, endowed foundations, great municipal zoos and gardens) issue no stock; the only listed proxies are mixed leisure companies with a zoo/aquarium overlay, and the genuine for-profit equity (immersive-experience venues, aquariums) is small and private. Historic sites and nature land are reached only indirectly, through the 20% federal Historic Tax Credit and conservation real estate [4].

The pattern: the two cross-segment landlord REITs (VICI, EPR Properties) are the nearest thing to a diversified "property" bet on the sector — you own the dirt and the lease, not the operating cycle. Otherwise, the same short list of vertically integrated names (Live Nation, TKO) does most of the work in 711, a dozen operators plus two REITs cover gambling, and the largest economic mass — participatory recreation, freelance artists, franchises, and nonprofit institutions — is private or philanthropic. Public investors reach a minority of the sector; the majority is private.

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5. How the money works

Despite the surface variety, the sector runs on one financial template with several revenue engines bolted onto it — and it is not the language of regulated utilities (rate base), REIT funds-from-operations at the operating level, or mining (all-in sustaining cost); use experience-business economics instead.

The revenue engines differ by child:

• 711: scarce-asset ownership (a franchise, a venue, a song or show catalog) that appreciates; the distribution/promotion take around the ticket (per-fan food, drink, premium seating, sponsorship, and the high-margin ticketing fee); the representation commission (~10% for agents); and hit-driven production, where ~80% of Broadway shows lose money and nonprofit dance and theater run structural deficits [3].
• 712: a revenue portfolio against high fixed costs — earned income (admissions, memberships, retail, events), contributed income (gifts, grants, and a ~4–6% annual endowment draw that ties budgets to equity markets), government support, and subsidized financing (the Historic Tax Credit, conservation easements) [4].
• 713: sell perishable capacity, then layer high-margin extras — attendance × per-guest spend (parks), handle × hold (gambling GGR), or utilization × membership (recreation), with food, drink, and lessons carrying the economics [5].

What they share is more important than what differs, and it is the sector's real investment logic:

• High fixed or upfront costs, discretionary demand, and no productivity offset make utilization / fill rate the master lever — the incremental guest, bet, member, or visitor is near-all-margin when a venue is full, and a soft season drops straight to the bottom line. The live-performance and nonprofit corners additionally suffer Baumol's cost disease (it takes the same performers the same hours to stage a work as a century ago, so labor productivity cannot rise to offset wage inflation) [3].
• Durable value sits in assets and rights, not in operating the activity. The franchise, the building, the copyright, the license, the certified historic structure, and the coastal permit are where wealth compounds — which is why the sector's payroll ($119B) is small against its receipts ($339B), and why the real estate is a separable second asset that REITs and infrastructure funds increasingly own via sale-leaseback.
• The asset-light layer earns the fattest margins. Franchisors and managers (talent agencies, golf-course managers, gym franchisors) run venues and rosters on other people's capital and capture fees and royalties well above the operating unit.

Because the anchor product differs, so do the key metrics — there is no single sector KPI. Underwrite each subsector on its own dashboard (event-days, per-caps, recoupment, and franchise multiples in 711; earned-vs-contributed mix and endowment draw in 712; per-caps, GGR/hold, and membership retention in 713).

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6. Demand drivers

Every part of the sector sells discretionary, cyclical, experience-economy spending, and all three children ride the consumer's structural shift from goods toward things to do, see, and attend. Beyond that shared floor, the clocks diverge — which is precisely why the sector as a whole is more resilient than any one child:

• Household discretionary income and confidence. Everything here is a want; leisure spending is among the first cut when budgets tighten and the first to rebound.
• Media rights and the linear-to-streaming shift (711). Live sport is the last content that reliably draws a mass, real-time audience, so streamers now bid against broadcasters and push rights fees higher each cycle — the single most important variable in the sector's fastest-growing pocket [3].
• Legal sports betting and the migration of play online (711 wagering; 713 gambling). Post-2018 legalization enlarges the money flowing around games; the open question is whether digital gambling complements or cannibalizes the physical casino floor [3][5].
• The mega-event and anniversary calendar. The 2026 FIFA World Cup across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico and the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics are multi-year catalysts for sports, venues, and promotion; the 2026 U.S. 250th anniversary lifts founding-era historic sites [3][4].
• Wealth effects on philanthropy (712, and nonprofit dance/theater in 711). Roughly 60% of nonprofit-arts and much museum revenue is contributed, and giving plus endowment draws both track equity markets, so donor wealth is itself a demand driver [3][4].
• Segment-specific participation stories (713). Golf at a generational high (~545M U.S. rounds in 2024), fitness near record membership (~1 in 4 Americans, with GLP-1 weight-loss drugs a net tailwind so far), against climate-threatened skiing and secularly declining bowling [5].
• Tourism, weather, and seasonality cut across all three; the outdoor-heavy pieces are sharply seasonal and weather-exposed.

Common counterforces: an emerging affordability ceiling (much recent growth is price-led, not attendance-led), competition for leisure time and dollars from at-home substitutes (streaming, gaming, home fitness), and, in the arts and museum corners, an aging core audience and retreating public funding.

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7. Regulation

The sector has no single federal regulator; each child sits under a different regime, and product regulation is generally light while the weight falls on labor, antitrust, tax, licensing, safety, land, and funding. The contrasts are stark:

• Antitrust is the defining story in 711, aimed at the firms that span the live-events chain: the Department of Justice (DOJ) and dozens of states sued Live Nation and Ticketmaster (2024), with a DOJ settlement in 2026 (a ticketing-fee cap and limited divestiture, but no forced break-up) and separate state litigation ongoing; on top of decades of special sports-antitrust treatment (baseball's exemption, the Sports Broadcasting Act that lets leagues pool national TV rights, cartel-style franchise governance) [3].
• Gambling (in 713) is the most heavily regulated consumer activity in the country — licensed state by state (scarce, expensive, revocable licenses are the core moat), with tribal gaming under the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA, 1988) and federal anti-money-laundering rules [5].
• Labor unions set the cost floor across live performance and sports (Actors' Equity, IATSE, the musicians' and screen-actors' unions, and the players' associations); a strike or lockout can erase a season [3].
• Nonprofit tax status — 501(c)(3) — governs most of 712 and the dance/theater corners of 711: tax exemption, deductible donations (in effect a public subsidy), and Form 990 disclosure. Public arts and museum funding is politically exposed — both the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and IMLS faced sharp 2025 threats [3][4].
• Safety, land, environment, and consumer rules fill out the rest: a state-by-state amusement-ride safety patchwork (no federal regulator for fixed-site parks); water, wetlands, and U.S. Forest Service permits for golf, marinas, and ski resorts; the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) "all-in" ticket-fee disclosure rule (2025) and Franchise Rule; and the Americans with Disabilities Act across every public venue [3][4][5].

The through-line: regulation here raises operating cost only modestly but often protects incumbents by making new supply hard to build — whether the scarce resource is a gaming license, a league-approved franchise, a coastal permit, or a Forest Service lease. Full detail is in each child primer.

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8. Consolidation

Private-equity and infrastructure roll-up is the common engine across the sector — but the three children start from very different concentration levels, so "consolidation" means something different in each, and the sector-wide numbers (CR4 7.3%, HHI 20.4) hide all of it because the leaders never overlap [1]:

• 711 is integrating vertically at the points where the money is. Live Nation combines promotion, venues, management, and Ticketmaster; national touring is effectively a Live Nation/AEG duopoly; UFC and WWE merged into TKO; the "Big Three" talent agencies have gone private under deep-pocketed PE and family-office owners; and music catalogs and Broadway landlords are being financialized [3].
• 713 rolls up segment by segment. Amusement parks are already an oligopoly that got tighter (the 2024 Cedar Fair–Six Flags merger); scaled casino operators keep acquiring while REITs buy the buildings via sale-leaseback; and the fragmented recreation tail (golf, marinas, fitness, bowling, youth sports) is being professionalized by PE platforms, with asset-light franchising and management outrunning ownership consolidation [5].
• 712 does not consolidate for market share. Nonprofits do not merge and governments do not sell landmarks; the field is near-atomistic by structure, and what scale-building exists is at the edges (for-profit aquariums and immersive venues, tax-credit syndication, land-trust mergers) [4]. The freelance-artist and nonprofit-dance corners of 711 likewise stay atomized or contract by attrition.

So the sector-wide takeaway: concentration and financialization are real but localized — found in the distribution, representation, rights, gaming-license, and top-park layers, and in scarce private franchise and venue assets — never in the aggregate. The roll-up runway that remains is longest in the fragmented recreation, arcade, and freelance tails.

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9. Risks

The sector's risk profile is the union of its children's, weighted by how you gain exposure:

• Discretionary cyclicality and an affordability ceiling (shared). None of it is defensive; recurring-revenue models (season passes, memberships, dues) cushion but do not repeal the cycle, and price-led growth has a ceiling [3][5].
• Operating and financial leverage (shared). High fixed costs magnify downturns, and many operators carry debt and — after sale-leasebacks — fixed rent to service through soft periods [5].
• Capital intensity and deferred maintenance (shared). Coasters, slot floors, lifts, docks, aging museum buildings, animal habitats, and venue infrastructure are lumpy, ownable-but-expensive assets whose deferred upkeep is a hidden liability in any acquisition [4][5].
• Regulatory / antitrust / funding overhang (child-specific). The ticketing remedy reshapes 711's highest-margin pool; gaming-tax and compact risk hangs over 713; NEA/IMLS and endowment-tax pressure threatens the nonprofit corners [3][4][5].
• Media-rights and digital-substitution dependence. A weak next sports-rights cycle stalls 711's fastest engine; at-home streaming, gaming, and fitness compete with parks, arcades, and gyms; iGaming may cannibalize physical casinos [3][5].
• Weather and climate (outdoor-specific). Acute and one-directional for skiing; rising storm and insurance costs for coastal marinas; cancellation risk for outdoor events [5].
• Key-person and talent concentration (711). Agents can leave and take clients; a star's injury or cancellation dents grosses across the chain [3].
• Tail / total-shutdown risk (shared). When audiences cannot gather, revenue goes to near zero while fixed costs persist — COVID-19 pushed Cirque du Soleil into bankruptcy in 2020 and was near-fatal for many museums [3][4].
• Illiquidity, opacity, and measurement risk. Most real ownership is private (franchises, agencies, catalogs, venue operators) or in controlled public companies with thin float; and the employer-based federal statistics materially understate the true footprint, so underwriting from receipts alone misleads [2][3].

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10. How to invest, and the outlook

Because the three children have different investable surfaces, there is no single "buy 71" trade — you choose a subsector and a route.

• Public exposure clusters in two corners. The deepest, most liquid menu is gambling (leveraged, cyclical casino-operator equities; contractual, dividend-paying casino REITs at lower operating risk; one route pure-play). The second cluster is live events, parks, and controlled sports in 711 and 713 — Live Nation and MSG Entertainment for live events (with the antitrust risk on the former), TKO for combat sports, the parks pure-plays and diversified giants, and thin-float controlled names for teams. Every one is partly a conglomerate: model it by business segment, and only here do market multiples matter — review price, free-cash-flow and dividend yields, and enterprise value to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EV/EBITDA), normalizing first for tour-year strength, one-off hits, event and season timing, deferred season-pass revenue, and maintenance capex [3][5].
• The direct economics are private. League-approved franchises (now including capped PE minority stakes), venue and course real estate, PE stakes in agencies, gyms, marinas, and ski/golf platforms, production limited partnerships and Broadway landlords, music and literary catalogs, and — for museums — for-profit immersive venues and Historic-Tax-Credit real estate. Underwrite on the asset (franchise scarcity, break-even occupancy, rights ownership, catalog yield, license moat), not on brand fame, and price in illiquidity [3][4][5].
• Two corners are not conventional investments. Independent artists have no direct equity (buy the aggregators), and supporting a nonprofit museum, dance, or theater company is a tax-deductible donation, not a stake [3][4].

There is no dedicated U.S. sector-71 ETF; index exposure comes only diluted inside broad consumer-discretionary and leisure funds. The two cross-segment landlord REITs (VICI, EPR) are the nearest thing to a diversified property position on the sector.

Outlook (forward-looking editorial judgment, not a reported figure). The long-run case rests on a durable, shared tailwind — the consumer's shift toward out-of-home and live experiences, which lifts all three children and keeps PE consolidation running. But the health is sharply bifurcated, and the sector is best read as a barbell of healthy giants and troubled tails:

• 711 is the growth leader, pulled up by spectator sports (scarcity + institutional demand + a rights-and-betting tailwind, with the 2026 World Cup and 2028 LA Olympics as catalysts); promotion and venues are constructive but lumpy and regulation-clouded; the freelance economy grows but stays brutally unequal, with value accruing to consolidated intermediaries, not the talent.
• 713 is constructive but uneven — fitness at record participation, golf at record rounds, and the strongest parks and casinos with real pricing power, coexisting with climate-threatened skiing, declining bowling, and the open digital-cannibalization question.
• 712 is durable but cost-pressured — resilient cultural demand against incomplete attendance recovery, rising labor/insurance/construction costs, mounting deferred capital, and politically exposed public funding; the bright spots (botanical gardens, for-profit immersive venues, conservation finance) are real but small.

The through-line: NAICS 71 is a culturally vital, resilient, but structurally low-margin sector where the money and the jobs live in different places, ownership has no single form, the durable value sits in scarce private assets and rights, and the very biggest dollars — media rights, royalties, casino-hotels, lotteries — are booked outside the code entirely. Public investors reach only a minority of it, and mostly through the same handful of integrated names and casino operators. For the complete treatment of any one corner, read its child primer.

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Sources

Level figures in Sections 2–3 are our ingested ground-truth statistics for NAICS 71; supporting company, trade, and forward-looking detail is synthesized from the three child primers (711, 712, 713) and their own citations. Numbering is local to this page.

1. U.S. Census Bureau. Economic Census 2022, Concentration of Largest Firms — NAICS 71 (receipts $339.210B; firms 145,976; CR4 7.3%, CR8 9.8%, CR20 15.1%, CR50 22.1%; HHI 20.4). Histometrics ground-truth federal file for this level. https://data.census.gov/table/ECNSIZE2022.EC2200SIZECONCEN
2. U.S. Census Bureau. County Business Patterns 2023 — NAICS 71 (establishments 166,356; employment 2,491,408; annual payroll $119.014B; Q1 payroll $25.909B). Histometrics ground-truth federal file for this level. https://data.census.gov/table/CBP2023.CB2300CBP
3. Histometrics rollup primer — NAICS 711, Performing Arts, Spectator Sports, and Related Industries (receipts $154.90B; five children 7111–7115; media-rights/betting engine; Live Nation–Ticketmaster antitrust; ~1.04M independent-artist nonemployers; Baumol's cost disease). Draws on the 2022 Economic Census, 2023 CBP, Broadway League, Forbes valuations, the American Gaming Association, DOJ Antitrust Division, and company filings.
4. Histometrics rollup primer — NAICS 712, Museums, Historical Sites, and Similar Institutions (receipts ~$21.8B; single child 7121; CR4 9.0%, HHI 31.2; overwhelmingly nonprofit/government; ~35,000 active museums vs ~5,480 employer museums; Historic Tax Credit; IMLS 2025 funding episode; 2026 U.S. 250th anniversary). Draws on the 2022 Economic Census, 2023 CBP, IMLS/American Alliance of Museums, and the Association of Zoos and Aquariums.
5. Histometrics rollup primer — NAICS 713, Amusement, Gambling, and Recreation Industries (receipts $162.52B; three children 7131/7132/7139; CR4 9.3%, HHI 39.3; commercial GGR ~$78.7B and tribal gaming ~$46.2B booked elsewhere; casino operators + REITs; PE roll-up). Draws on the 2022 Economic Census, 2023 CBP, the American Gaming Association, the National Indian Gaming Commission, IAAPA, National Golf Foundation, National Ski Areas Association, and company filings.
6. U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission. 2023 Merger Guidelines (HHI concentration thresholds). https://www.justice.gov/atr/merger-guidelines