The cultural and creative industries (CCIs) are significant for their value generation, including profits, innovation, and employment. Among these, the music industry and more precisely the live music remains under-studied, even though it is crucial for artists' income and post-pandemic recovery. Live music is mainly structured by festivals that act as socio-technical spaces, fostering innovation and interactions between stakeholders inside spatial and temporal boundaries. Festivals contribute to the creative industries by structuring resource transactions, symbolic capital and social dynamics. But beyond economic contributions, festivals' survival and growth depend on the structuring of a social impact, which remains little studied. To address this, we rely on a longitudinal case study of a major French extreme music festival: the Hellfest Open Air. Using primary and secondary data, including 128 interviews and more than 15 years of observation, we show how the structuration of the festival’ boundaries shape the social impact and how it is int intertwined with the economic over the time. This research enhances the understanding of festivals' roles in creative industries and the complexities of analyzing social impact over time. Overall, we contribute to the CCIs and boundary work literatures and provide recommendations to festival organizers.
