Arts, entertainment and recreation
This sector comprises establishments primarily engaged in operating facilities or providing services to meet the cultural, entertainment and recreational interests of their patrons. These establishments produce, promote or participate in live performances, events or exhibits intended for public viewing; provide the artistic, creative and technical skills necessary for the production of artistic products and live performances; preserve and exhibit objects and sites of historical, cultural or educational interest; and operate facilities or provide services that enable patrons to participate in sports or recreational activities or pursue amusement, hobbies and leisure-time interests. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A
- Establishments · CanadaA
- 18,628
- Under 10 employeesA
- 62%
- Establishments · USA
- 162,960
- Employment · USA
- 2,318,357
- Payroll · USA
- $110.0B
Size and shape
How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.
Canadian establishments by number of employeesA
Of 18,628 Canadian establishments with employees, 62% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.
Where they areA
Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
Market screens and studies
Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.
The pre-screen expected a cut here and the evidence is worse than expected. SMU DataArts, analysing 6,498 arts nonprofits over 2019–2024, found 44% ran deficits — the highest rate in six years — with a median surplus of 1% of expenses; contributed revenue fell 25% between 2023 and 2024 alone; and median working capital fell from 6.75 months of operating expenses in 2021 to 4.25 months in 2024, with 42% holding three months or less [B]. Performing arts centres cover 69.5% of expenses from earned revenue, the best in the sector, and still need the other 30% from donors who are giving less. This is not a market with a bad year. It is a cost structure that has never been covered by ticket prices and is now losing the subsidy that covered the gap. *The same figures should be read by anyone selling to* these organisations: a customer with 4.25 months of cash does not sign a new annual subscription. Statistics Canada now measures the same industry at home, and the average conceals two businesses. In 2024 Canadian performing arts companies took C$3,185.5M of operating revenue at a 12.6% operating margin — but the for-profit half earned 20.9% on C$2,057.6M while the not-for-profit half ran at −2.4%** on C$1,128.0M, and covered only C$419.5M of its C$1,155.3M of expenses from selling anything [A]. A company, in the sense the word is used in this industry, is the second one.
The pre-screen said franchises are not purchasable at entry scale, and the top of the market confirms it with a price: Rogers paid C$4.7B for Bell's 37.5% of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, agreed in September 2024 and closed on 1 July 2025, which values the whole at about C$12.5B [A]. That is one ownership group in one city. But major-league clubs are a handful of the 379 Canadian establishments, 55% of which have fewer than ten employees [A] — the rest are junior hockey teams, minor-league baseball, racetracks and independent athletes, and that is where an entrant would actually look. It still cuts on capital, in a less obvious way. A minor-league team is a league-granted territory whose revenue is tickets and local sponsorship across a short home schedule, played in an arena the team almost never owns, so the municipality or the arena operator holds the lease and the dates. Franchise values at that level are set by scarcity rather than earnings, which makes them a purchase justified by something other than return. Racetracks are land, a licence and a wagering agreement. US payroll runs to about $230,000 per employee [A], which is player salaries — the cost that league rules, not the owner, largely determine.
This code is people, not companies: 97% of the 2,293 Canadian establishments have fewer than ten employees [A], and in the US 38,064 establishments employ 61,989 people — 1.6 per establishment [A]. Those are the ones with a payroll at all; most practising artists and writers have none and are not in the count. Entry cost is effectively zero, which is the problem rather than the opportunity. There is nothing to acquire, because the asset is one person's name and hands; nothing to scale, because output is bounded by that person's hours; and nothing to defend, because the next artist is equally free to start. Income is set by reputation and is extremely unevenly distributed — US payroll per employee averages about $185,000 [A], a mean pulled up by a small number of very highly paid performers and writers, and says nothing about the typical practitioner. The enterable businesses are the ones built around artists rather than being one: agencies and booking (screened as software at 711411), galleries, publishers, and platforms that take a share of many careers instead of depending on a single one.
Museums, galleries and historic sites are public or charitable institutions almost without exception, and the reason is arithmetic rather than tradition: admissions do not cover a collection's care, a building's upkeep and a curatorial staff. The Department of Canadian Heritage measures the gap. In 2017 the not-for-profit heritage sector took over $2.6B of revenue, of which earned revenue — admissions, shops, rentals — was $869.2M, 33%, while the three levels of government supplied $1.4B, 51.7% [A]; by the 2020 data year earned revenue had fallen to $593M and unearned income was 76% of the total [A]. An entrant cannot reach the other two-thirds: a for-profit museum cannot issue a tax receipt or apply for an operating grant, and visitors have never paid what the institution costs. 1,403 Canadian establishments, 64% with fewer than ten employees [A] describes a field of small community museums run on municipal support and volunteers — who outnumber paid staff nearly two to one [A] — with 62 large institutions above them. Heritage also carries a fixed cost that performing arts does not: a collection must be conserved whether or not anyone visits. The reachable businesses are commercial attractions that borrow the form — a private aquarium, a themed exhibit, a historic-site concession — and those belong with amusement and recreation at 713, where the operator sets the price. Software sold to museums is screened separately at 712.
Axe throwing, trampoline parks, indoor golf and arcades share one arc: a novelty period with strong margins, then a plateau as the format is copied locally and the equipment ages. The build cost is front-loaded into a lease that outlasts the novelty. The formats that survive add food and beverage, which turns the business into hospitality with an attraction attached.
Buying a course is buying irrigation, drainage, fleet and land, then hoping for weather. Rounds have recovered from their long decline and that recovery is already priced into the courses worth having; the ones for sale are usually being valued by the buyer as future land rather than as an operating business, which is a rezoning bet with a maintenance bill attached.
The price ceiling is set by budget chains charging under $20 a month and the cost floor by commercial rent, and the gap has to be filled with instructor-led classes whose members follow the instructor when the instructor leaves. Churn is the business's defining number and it is structurally high. The studio management software at this code is screened separately.
Software serving this industry
The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.
Ticketmaster's $3.1B ticketing business earns on fees against a venue-exclusivity contract, not on a software subscription, so the software is effectively free to the venue that signs. Eventbrite, at $291.8M and shrinking 10%, is the visible ceiling for the self-serve end — and it removed organiser fees to defend it. Both ends of the market are priced by someone earning elsewhere.
Every agency wants the workflow and there are only a few thousand of them that employ more than one agent. The music side has already been taken inside the ticketing majors — Master Tour by Live Nation, Prism by Vivid Seats — which removes the most software-ready segment from the reachable market. Nothing is disclosed here. Every vendor named on this record is private, or sits inside a parent that does not break the line out, so no revenue floor can be built and the market size is genuinely unknown rather than estimated.
Museums buy with grant money and run on an operating budget that cannot carry a subscription, which is why the category still has perpetual licences and why CollectionSpace exists at all. The pain is genuine, the institution is permanent, and the annual cheque is small enough that a venture-shaped business cannot be built on it. Nothing is disclosed here. Every vendor named on this record is private, or sits inside a parent that does not break the line out, so no revenue floor can be built and the market size is genuinely unknown rather than estimated.
The large-park end is held by a listed specialist that is shrinking, and the venue-sized end has already been taken by a well-funded cloud challenger. Filed under 713110 (amusement and theme parks); the same software serves 713120 (amusement arcades) and 713990 (other amusement and recreation: trampoline, climbing, bowling-adjacent and play centres). This is not the event-ticketing market on the 7113 record. There, Ticketmaster earns consumer fees against venue-exclusivity contracts and the venue barely pays for software. An amusement park, water park, trampoline park or family entertainment centre (FEC) sells admissions that are timed, dated, repeat and often bundled into season passes and memberships. It then earns as much again inside the gate: food and drink, game cards, birthday parties, lockers, photos. The software runs the whole operating day, from the online store and timed-entry capacity through waivers, turnstiles, POS, party booking and the arcade's cashless card readers. Nobody sells this venue's demand back to it, so the operator owns the customer and pays the vendor per ticket, per transaction or by subscription. accesso (AIM: ACSO) is the incumbent for large parks. 2025 revenue was $155.1M (+1.8%). 84.6% of it was 'repeatable', defined as a fixed amount per ticket sold or a percentage of the venue's revenue [A]. It claims 1,100+ destinations and venues in 31 countries [C]. The business is not growing. The Board guides FY2026 to about $146M, and H1 2026 Guest Experience (virtual queuing) revenue fell 41.7% after one major customer discontinued LoQueue and another stayed only on revised terms [A]. Customer concentration is visible, but no entrant can attack it from below: a 42-park operator like the merged Six Flags/Cedar Fair [B] buys on integration and scale. Gateway Ticketing (Galaxy, founded 1988, 500+ clients claimed [C]) is the on-premise alternative at this tier. The venue-sized end belongs to ROLLER. The Melbourne cloud platform for FECs, trampoline and climbing parks, bowling and play centres claims 3,500+ venues [C]. It raised US$50m led by Insight Partners in November 2023 [B], on top of a $7M Series B led by Acadian Software in 2018 [B]. CenterEdge (US FECs, own payments since 2019), Semnox (Parafait, 2,800+ sites claimed) and the cashless-card specialists Embed and Intercard surround it, and Convious ($20M Series A in equity and debt [B]) and Clorian are taking European e-commerce and cultural ticketing. Lock-in is physical as well as digital. Card readers sit on every arcade game, outstanding card balances and season-pass holders live in the system, turnstiles and gates are wired to it, and payments are now being bundled in (accessoPay with Adyen live in 2026 [A]; CenterEdge Payments [C]). Every vendor is moving to earn on card volume, so the software price trends toward the payments take. Incumbent vulnerability decides it. accesso's weakness is real, but it sits with the largest operators, who buy on scale. The cloud-native, all-in-one wedge for smaller venues was ROLLER's, and Insight's money has already been spent defending it.
The floor systems that matter are attached to the game content and cabinets a casino already buys from Light & Wonder or IGT, and the hospitality side is Agilysys — a $319.3M business that grew 15.9% in the year to 31 March 2026. Read that number carefully: Agilysys is a hospitality software vendor with one reportable segment and it does not disclose revenue by vertical, so none of the $319.3M can be attributed to gaming from the filing. Casinos head the list of verticals it names and its published reference customers are heavily gaming — Caesars, MGM, Boyd Gaming, Station Casinos, The Venetian, Marina Bay Sands — but the gaming share of revenue is not a reported figure and is not treated as one here. Note also the structural change: Apollo took IGT's gaming business and Everi private on 1 July 2025, so the largest competitor set stops disclosing. Regulatory licensure in each gaming jurisdiction sits ahead of the first sale.
Every layer of this market already belongs to a consolidator, and the public-course end is paid for in tee times rather than cash. Private clubs — member billing, statements, F&B minimums, dues, events — are held by Jonas Club Software, a Constellation Software company since 2003 that says it serves over 2,300 clubs in 20 countries [C, vendor], and by Clubessential, which merged into Advent-backed Xplor in a deal announced in September 2025 and closed in March 2026, creating a group with nearly $900 million of revenue across fitness, golf and club, recreation and field services [B]. Northstar (Alpharetta, Georgia) is the third private-club system, claims 1,500+ clubs and has bought its way into Australia by acquiring MiClub in 2021 [C, vendor]. Public golf is a separate fight, and GolfNow sets its price. GolfNow — owned by Comcast's Golf Channel from 2008 and now by Versant, spun off from Comcast in January 2026 [B] — says it reaches 3.9 million golfers and is connected to more than 9,000 courses [C, vendor; B, encyclopaedic]. It bundles tee sheet, POS and payments and is paid partly by barter: the course hands over tee times that GolfNow resells. The US course owners' association published a 62-page guide in 2020 called 'Beware of Barter' arguing it drives needless discounting [A, association]. Golf Inc. put GolfNow at 61% of the public-course software market in 2021 [B]. The cash-priced alternatives are already consolidated too: foreUP (Clubessential/Xplor since February 2021; claims 2,000+ courses), Lightspeed Golf (Chronogolf, bought by Lightspeed in 2019; 1,800 courses claimed), Club Caddie (Jonas since 2020, sold explicitly as 'cost certainty in lieu of barter') and Teesnap (Allegiant-founded, TELEO Capital growth investment in 2021) [B/C]. The anti-barter wedge exists but has been taken. Every cash-priced vendor already sells against barter, so it is a positioning, not an opening. The newest independent — TenFore Golf, $7M Series A led by Blueprint Equity in January 2026 [B] — is attacking municipal and multi-course operators with exactly that pitch; Whoosh ($6M seed led by Craft Ventures, 2022 [B]) chose the private-club tee sheet. Both are small next to the incumbents, and the lock-in (member ledgers, statement history, the tee sheet, and on public courses a marketplace that brings golfers) makes switches slow. Incumbent vulnerability decides it: neither Constellation nor Xplor is vulnerable, and the barter-fatigue gap is crowded.
The booking marketplace won, and it has just been recapitalised to take the back office too. Dockwa began in Newport in 2015 as transient-slip booking for boaters and now says it serves nearly 4,000 marinas, 97% of the top 95 US harbours and more than 450,000 boaters [C, vendor]. In June 2026 it took an undisclosed strategic growth investment from PSG to turn that into a full operating system — contracts and billing, fuel-dock and ship-store point of sale, electric metering, dry-stack launch scheduling, dynamic pricing and a consumer marketplace in Marinas.com — and named Canada and Europe as the expansion targets [C, vendor release]. It publishes its prices: a free leads tier, then modules from $169 a month for transient booking, $180 for contracts, $249 for POS, $199 for fuel and $99 for dry stack [C, vendor, checked 2026-10-08]. That is the price an entrant would have to undercut, and it is already low and modular. The back office is held by two consolidators rather than a startup. DockMaster — the 1983 system for marinas, boatyards and dealers, claiming 1,000+ marinas [C, vendor] — has been inside Valsoft since 2017 and added its own payments product [C, acquirer]. Storable, the EQT-controlled self-storage platform, bought Molo in 2021 and now sells it as Storable Marine alongside its payments and rental products [B]. Outside the US the field is owned by roll-ups and old desktop vendors: Pacsoft in New Zealand went to Jonas Software in 2019 [B], and Havenstar and Harba (Denmark) each claim one to two hundred marinas [C, vendor]. Payments are the business model in every case, so a new vendor would be selling software that the incumbents treat as a loss leader for card and ACH volume. The Canadian angle is real but closing. Dockwa's own Canada page says that for years it did not support Canadian dollars and boaters had to pay in US dollars; that gap is now fixed and the PSG money is aimed at Canada [C, vendor]. The local alternatives found were thin: Swift Harbour, a BC-made booking app, now returns an unconfigured site, and Sentinel Hill's Marina Mate domain is parked. A Canadian wedge would have been plausible three years ago; today it means racing a funded incumbent into its stated next market.
Heavily contested with payments attach as the revenue model. Studio churn is high, which makes customer acquisition expensive and retention structurally poor. Nothing is disclosed here. Every vendor named on this record is private, or sits inside a parent that does not break the line out, so no revenue floor can be built and the market size is genuinely unknown rather than estimated.
This is the 'kids software' record: software sold to anyone who runs paid activities for children and teenagers — and in every one of its four segments an owner already sits on the customer base. The buyer is the provider, not the parent: (1) youth sports clubs, leagues, teams and tournaments; (2) day, summer and overnight camps; (3) class and enrichment providers — gymnastics, swim, dance, cheer, martial arts, art, music and STEM/coding schools — who need class scheduling, enrolment, recurring tuition billing and attendance; and (4) indoor playgrounds, play cafés and kids' entertainment venues, who need timed bookings, digital waivers, memberships and birthday-party sales. The NAICS code stays 71399 (other amusement and recreation) because sports clubs and play venues sit there, but the same vendors sell across camps (7212) and sports and arts instruction (611620, 611610). Parents pay most of the fees, so pricing is usually per-registration or payment-processing rather than a seat licence. Sports clubs and leagues — rolled up. In June 2025 Genstar Capital bought PlayMetrics (Morrisville, North Carolina; founded 2017; about 2,500 clubs, tournaments, leagues and governing bodies across 10+ sports) from Blue Star Innovation Partners and PSG and combined it with Stack Sports, which Genstar has controlled since 2017 [B, Weil; Private Equity Wire]. Stack Sports alone claims about 50,000 sports organisations, 100+ national governing partners and over $1 billion of payments a year, and runs Sports Connect — the registration system behind Little League and AYSO logos on its site [C, vendor]. Then on 1 May 2026 PlayMetrics completed the purchase of substantially all of SportsEngine from Versant, the Comcast cable spin-off — SportsEngine HQ, Motion, Tourney, Play and AES, terms undisclosed [A, Versant release; B, TheWrap]. SportsEngine (the former Sport Ngin, bought by NBC Sports in 2016) claims 16 million athletes, 1.2 million teams and 45,000 organisations; an insider had put it at $400–500M before the sale [B, TheWrap]. One private-equity group therefore now holds the governing-body registration layer, the club operating system and the largest legacy platform at once. Below it sit two other sponsor-backed platforms: TeamSnap (Waud Capital majority since April 2021; about 25 million users claimed) [A, release] and LeagueApps ($35M raised by 2021, then an undisclosed 'significant' equity investment led by Accel-KKR with Arctos Partners in October 2024) [A/B]. GameChanger, owned by DICK'S Sporting Goods since 2016, is the one with a disclosed number: about $100M of revenue in 2024 and $150M projected for 2025 [B, Pittsburgh Business Times] — but it earns it from parents' streaming and stats subscriptions, not from clubs. Camps are a separate, older layer: CampMinder, UltraCamp (Niles, Michigan), CampBrain (Ontario, ~30 years), ACTIVE Network's Camp & Class Manager (Global Payments since a $1.2B deal in 2017 [B, Kirkland]), Sawyer for Business (≈$20M venture-funded, now a DaySmart brand) and CourseStorm — mostly small, mostly founder-run, and sticky because a camp's health forms, cabin assignments and returning-family records live there. Classes and enrichment — founder-run leaders, a roll-up arriving. Two private, never-venture-funded vendors lead the after-school class segment: Jackrabbit Technologies (Charlotte, North Carolina area; since 2004; dance, gymnastics, swim, cheer and music; a Certified B Corporation) [C, vendor] and iClassPro (Longview, Texas; since 2008; gymnastics, cheer, swim and dance; '100 million class and event registrations') [C, vendor]. Neither discloses funding or revenue. Around them: Pike13, now owned by Jonas Software (Constellation Software) — its own footer reads '© Pike13 Inc. & Jonas Software' [C] — selling to sports, performing-arts and education businesses (1,700+ claimed); DaySmart, private-equity owned (LLR Partners and Parthenon Capital growth recapitalisation, October 2019 [A, LLR]), which bought Sawyer for Business in November 2023 [B, Fenwick] and now groups Dash (facility, league and booking software for sports and rec centres), TeamUp and Sawyer under 'DaySmart Recreation & Fitness' [C, vendor]; Amilia (Montréal, 2009), which raised $35M led by Vertu Capital in May 2025 after a $30M round led by the Canadian Business Growth Fund in 2022 and serves YMCAs, JCCs, parks departments, camps and after-school programmes across 6,600 facilities [B, BetaKit; A, CNW]; Upper Hand (Indianapolis; sports-training facilities; $4M by its 2018 Series A, then an undisclosed oversubscribed round led by Lometa Capital Partners and Park Ten Capital in January 2023) [A, vendor releases]; and Omnify ('the modern OS for programs, camps and parties', 45+ countries claimed) [C]. Dance is the most fragmented niche: Akada, a 30-year family business, told customers in May 2026 that it is 'joining Studio Pro' and will move them there, with Akada supported through 2027 [C, Akada help centre] — a small consolidation, not a funded one. Indoor play — owned by the attractions vendors. Indoor playgrounds and play cafés buy the same stack as family entertainment centres: ROLLER (Melbourne; US$50M led by Insight Partners in November 2023; 3,500+ venues) lists 'Playcenters and Softplay' as an industry and sells parties, waivers and memberships [C, vendor; funding per the 713110 record]. That segment is researched in 713110-attractions-and-fec-software and is only cross-referenced here. How this differs from the neighbours: 713110 (attractions and FECs) is ticketing and POS for venues, including large kids' play centres — the play-café vendors live there; 6116 (driving, music and skills instruction) is a services market screen of lesson businesses themselves, not their software, and adult skills dominate it; 624410 (childcare centre management — Brightwheel, Procare) is licensed daycare with ratios, subsidies and daily reports, so Brightwheel is excluded here; 713940 (fitness studio management — Mindbody, ABC Fitness) is adult class-pack and membership booking; 6117 (tutoring and coaching software) covers academic tutoring centres. This record is the child-facing activity provider: seasons, terms and sessions, guardian accounts, medical and consent forms, waivers, sibling discounts and parent communication. The cheap and free end is crowded too: TeamLinkt (free to start, 3,500+ organisations claimed), Jersey Watch (2,800+), Thapos, GameSheet (hockey and lacrosse scoring, Newmarket, Ontario) and Hello Club for adult clubs all compete on price against payment-fee-funded platforms. Incumbent vulnerability decides it: sports registration is held by one private-equity group with the governing-body contracts; camps by sticky, decades-old specialists; classes by two founder-owned leaders plus DaySmart and Jonas as consolidators; indoor play by the FEC vendors. The cross-segment idea — one parent account across sports, classes, camps and parties — was Sawyer's marketplace thesis, and it ended inside DaySmart.
And what every business buys · 25 generic categories
Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.
Companies in this industry · 130
Every company this research names that is filed here or beneath — the operators, and the vendors that sell to them — largest disclosed revenue first. The rank is within the company’s own six-digit industry.
| Company | Filed under | Revenue | Rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Warner Music GroupPrivate | Independent artists, writers and performers7115 | $6.7B | 1/4 |
| Light & WonderPrivate | Gambling industries7132 | $3.3B | 1/5 |
| Planet FitnessPrivate | Fitness and recreational sports centres713940 | $1.3B | 1/20 |
| AgilysysNASDAQ:AGYS | Gambling industries7132 | $319M | 2/5 |
| Xponential FitnessPrivate | Fitness and recreational sports centres713940 | $315M | 2/20 |
| EventbriteNYSE:EB | Promoters (presenters) of performing arts, sports and similar events7113 | $292M | 1/6 |
| GameChangerPrivate | Other amusement and recreation industries71399 | $100M | 1/26 |
| Active NetworkPrivate | Other amusement and recreation industries71399 | — | 2/26 |
| DaxkoPrivate | Fitness and recreational sports centres713940 | — | 3/20 |
| DaySmartPrivate | Other amusement and recreation industries71399 | — | 3/26 |
| DockMasterPrivate | Marinas713930 | — | 1/13 |
| IclassproPrivate | Other amusement and recreation industries71399 | — | 4/26 |
| JackrabbitPrivate | Other amusement and recreation industries71399 | — | 5/26 |
| MINDBODYDelisted | Fitness and recreational sports centres713940 | — | 4/20 |
| Pike13Private | Other amusement and recreation industries71399 | — | 6/26 |
And 115 more on the companies page.
Who works here
The occupations employed in Arts, entertainment and recreation, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.
Tagged to this industry
Concentrated in this sectorA
These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.
And the jobs every business has
Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.
Inside this industry
3 rows sit directly beneath 71, and 73 in all once every level is counted. Each has a base report of its own.