If you want to get to the bottom of any story, the weather-beaten advice is that you should always follow the money. For the music industry, the Roosevelt Hotel in midtown New York is where this particular breadcrumb trail ends tonight.

Walk past the usual quota of dog-tired businessmen nursing whiskey sours at the hotel bar and the obsequious waiters shipping out bowls of peanuts. Stroll by the room where Michael Douglas made that "greed is good" speech in Wall Street. Follow the crowd with the laminates into the ballroom and join the most profitable sector of the music industry as they take a break from counting tickets and reseating punters.

Welcome to the Billboard Touring Awards. The great and the good of the live music industry have gathered to mark another year of bumper business in clubs, halls, sheds, arenas and stadiums. Before the night is out, many backs will be slapped, countless handshakes exchanged and slightly salty pasta chewed by the men and women who put the show into showbusiness.

As the record industry continues to howl about how changes in taste and technology have rendered it powerless, the live industry chiefs continue to make out like extremely pleasant and amenable bandits. Live music has never been so popular or - while you will hear plenty of arguments to the contrary in various corners of this room - profitable.

People want to go to see live shows and they're willing to shell out cash or credit to do so. People love music, you see, but they're not going to pay €20 for a CD when they can download or burn the best tracks from that plastic disc for free. They will, however, happily go see the live show. No matter what kind of pimping or preening is done about a pay-per- view live concert on your TV or PC, the actual being-there experience will trump it every time.

Yet, like pensioners on the phone to Joe Duffy, the live music lads and lasses grumble about their lot. As with every industry, consolidations, mergers and acquisitions have seen a handful of big players emerge. In this case, Clear Channel and AEG Live are the bogeymen who are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Clear Channel may have hoovered up a huge chunk of independent live promoters worldwide, but it now seems to be having second thoughts about that plan. Having copped on that punters equate Clear Channel with "not very nice people", executives are now trying to revive all those regional, independent brands which they mashed into one big happy family. It seems that there are still things which spreadsheets and earnest talk of going forward just cannot predict.

Naturally, then, indie operators like Chicago's Jam Productions and Dublin's Aiken Promotions/ Vicar St (one of only two non- American finalists on the night) get the loudest applause from

the gathering. But it's Paul McGuinness who walked away with the most glass gongs as U2's Vertigo tour took the honours in four different categories.

The awards are based on actual box-office data collated from venues and promoters, so they're an excellent bellwether for the live sector. Such US publications as Billboard and Pollstar publish hard facts on ticket sales and box-office revenue, so it's difficult to disguise a show or a tour which has flopped. By comparison, try to find out how many tickets have been sold for a show in The Point or Ambassador and see how far you get.

McGuinness alluded to this transatlantic difference in one of his acceptance speeches. When he and U2 first came to the US in 1980, he was aghast by this show- and-tell aspect of the business: "I found the whole idea of the gross to be quite gross."

However, with U2's three- night run at Croke Park this summer deemed to be the highest grossing box-office figure of the year, that gross can now be quite happily flaunted for all to admire. For the live industry, all ticket stubs lead here.