Houston Wedding and Event Music Statistics

Texas recorded 5.8 marriages per 1,000 residents in 2024, below the US rate of 6.3 and down 38% from 9.4 in 2000. This page gathers the figures behind Houston wedding and event music, each with its source and period.

By Avalon Music. Published November 13, 2026.

• 5.8marriages per 1,000 Texas residents in 2024, against 6.3 for the USCDC/NCHS, provisional, 2024
• 2,128,446marriages recorded in the US in 2024CDC/NCHS, provisional, 2024
• $39.67median hourly wage for Houston-area musicians and singers on a payrollBLS OEWS, May 2025
• 41 and 40 of 71song lists of the acts Avalon Music books include “Brown Eyed Girl” and “Play That Funky Music”, the two most-listed songsAvalon Music act pages, Nov 2026

Weddings in Texas

• Texas recorded 5.8 marriages per 1,000 residents in 2024. The US rate was 6.3.
• The Texas rate has fallen from 10.5 in 1990 and 9.4 in 2000, a drop of 38% since 2000. The US rate fell from 8.2 to 6.3 over the same years.
• The Texas rate dipped to 4.9 in 2019 and 5.3 in 2020, and has held at 5.8 every year from 2021 to 2024.
• In all, 2,128,446 marriages were recorded in the US in 2024.

Rates are provisional counts of marriages by the state where the wedding took place, per 1,000 residents. A Texas couple who marries in another state counts there, and a couple from elsewhere who marries in Texas counts in Texas.

Houston's working musicians

• Employers in the Houston metro had 530 musicians and singers on payroll in May 2025, paid a median $39.67 an hour, against $33.59 in Texas and $47.80 in the US (BLS OEWS).
• Their pay runs from $21.64 an hour at the 10th percentile to $83.34 at the 90th percentile (BLS OEWS).
• Harris County had 26 musical groups and artists with employees in 2025, with 363 jobs between them, against 29 and 341 in 2019. Their average annual pay was $81,992 (BLS QCEW).
• In 2024, 11,476 independent artists, writers and performers and 1,222 performing arts companies in Harris County worked with no employees (Census Nonemployer Statistics), against 67 performing arts companies with a payroll (BLS QCEW). Both industries also take in actors, writers, visual artists and theater and dance companies, so these counts are upper bounds for musicians and music groups, not counts of them.

Full tables, method and limits: Houston's Working Musicians: Jobs, Pay and Bands.

The songs Avalon Music's bands list most

• Two songs lead the 71 distinct song lists published by the acts Avalon Music books, one list apart: “Brown Eyed Girl” (Van Morrison) is on 41 (58%) and “Play That Funky Music” (Wild Cherry) on 40 (56%).
• Another 3 lists write only “Funky Music”, with no artist, and are left out; counting them would put “Play That Funky Music” first, on 43.
• 12 songs appear on at least half of the lists.
• The median act lists 171 songs. Between them the lists name up to 5,694 different songs, and up to 61% of those appear on only one list (a spelling we did not match counts as a separate song, so both figures are upper bounds).

The full ranking, the genre tables and how we counted: The Songs Avalon Music's Bands List Most.

Planning your event's music

• See what a wedding band costs in Houston and the Houston wedding music guide for each moment of the day.
• Browse the acts we book by style at All Bands by Genre, or ask us through the contact page.

How we counted

Marriage figures come from the CDC National Center for Health Statistics tables of provisional marriage rates by state (1990, 1995 and 2000 to 2024) and of US marriages and rates (2024 back to 2000). The musician and song-list figures are reused from our two studies, which publish their own method, sources and limits.

A script builds every figure on this page from the CDC spreadsheets and the two studies' data. A second script re-reads the Texas and US rates and the US marriage count from the CDC's PDF editions of the same tables, recomputes the change since 2000, and confirms each reused figure against its study's data and that study's own second-script check (for the song lists, a separate recount from the live act pages), except the median list size, the distinct-song count and the one-list share, which that recount does not cover; the study gives the last two as upper bounds. All checked figures matched before publication.

Limits

• The CDC table is state level only, so this page shows the Texas rate, not a Houston or Harris County rate.
• Marriage figures are provisional. US totals for some years leave out a state that did not report: Georgia in 2013 and 2014 and Louisiana in 2006, as the CDC footnotes.
• The Texas rate for 2019 is lower than for 2020. The CDC table gives no reason, so read that single year with care.
• Musicians' wages count only people on an employer's payroll; self-employed musicians are not in them. Dollar figures are as published, not adjusted for inflation.
• Song-list figures count songs listed by the acts Avalon Music books, not songs played or requested.

Sources

• CDC/NCHS National Vital Statistics System, marriage rates by state and US marriages and marriage rate (provisional). 1990, 1995 and 2000 to 2024. www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/marriage-divorce.htm
• BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), musicians and singers, Houston metro, Texas and US. May 2025. data.bls.gov/oes/
• BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW), Harris County, private ownership. Annual averages, 2019 to 2025. www.bls.gov/cew/
• US Census Bureau Nonemployer Statistics, Harris County. 2019 to 2024. www.census.gov/programs-surveys/nonemployer-statistics.html
• Avalon Music act pages, Song List sections. As published November 2026. theavalonmusic.com/genre/

Cite this study