The Decade That Learned to Count

In 2021, Saudi cinemas sold about 13.1 million tickets and earned roughly 875 million riyals. Four years later, in 2025, they sold 18.8 million tickets. Revenue that year came to about 921 million riyals.

Those two sentences contain a small puzzle. Admissions rose by more than 40 percent. Box office revenue rose by about 5 percent. The 2025 total is almost identical to the 922.6 million riyals the industry earned in 2023, and it barely clears the figure from four years earlier. Saudi audiences are going to the cinema in greater numbers than at any point since screens returned to the Kingdom in April 2018. They are not, in aggregate, paying more for the privilege.

The explanation is not mysterious. The average ticket price fell from about 68 riyals in 2020 to 52 riyals in 2023 and 49 riyals in 2025. The Film Commission reduced operators' licensing fees in April 2024, competition between operators intensified, and prices adjusted. Even at 49 riyals, a Saudi ticket remains expensive by international standards, roughly 13 US dollars against an American average of about 10.78, according to the report. Lower prices widened access. That was, in part, the point.

But the shape of the cinema curve is worth pausing on, because it is not unique to cinema. It recurs, in different forms, across the most important document the Saudi cultural sector produces about itself: the annual State of Culture report, published by the Ministry of Culture's Research and Cultural Heritage Agency. The seventh edition, covering 2025 and subtitled A Decade of Vision, runs to 288 pages. It is the most comprehensive account yet of what ten years of deliberate cultural policy have built.

It is also, read carefully, an account of a transition the report itself names. Volume is still rising in many places. Value, depth, and frequency are proving harder to move. And the report's authors appear to know it.

A report that grades its own instruments

Most government reports on a flagship policy area are written to be quoted. This one contains a sentence that seems written to be argued with.

In its closing section on challenges, the report observes that counting events and visitors "measures movement, not impact," and that the next phase requires instruments capable of measuring what culture actually changes. The sentence appears near the end of a chapter that otherwise celebrates a decade of growth. It is easy to miss. It may be the most important line in the document.

The admission matters because the report is, by design, a counting exercise. It measures the cultural sector across five dimensions: management and preservation, creativity and cultural production, knowledge and skills, cultural participation, and the creative economy. Its framework draws on UNESCO's 2009 Framework for Cultural Statistics and the organisation's 2019 Culture|2030 Indicators. Its participation data comes from a national telephone survey of 3,009 citizens and residents across all thirteen regions, conducted with the Saudi Center for Opinion Polling in May 2026, with a reported margin of error of 1.99 percent. The rest comes from more than a hundred contributing bodies, from the cultural commissions to cinema operators, publishers, festivals, and broadcasters.

This year's edition adds a sixth chapter. A Decade of Vision looks back across the ten years since Vision 2030 was launched in 2016, reconstructing how the cultural sector was assembled almost from scratch. The Ministry of Culture was separated from the Ministry of Media in 2018. The National Culture Strategy followed in March 2019. Eleven sector-specific commissions, covering everything from film and fashion to libraries and culinary arts, were established in February 2020. A Cultural Development Fund, a Royal Institute of Traditional Arts, a King Salman Global Academy for the Arabic Language, a biennale foundation, and a host of other institutions followed.

The chapter also does something unusual for a retrospective. It closes by asking what the second decade will be measured against. The answer it gives, implicitly, is that the first decade's measures will no longer be enough.

To understand why, it helps to separate two different kinds of growth that the report's numbers blend together.

The visibility dividend

Some of the largest increases recorded in the first decade reflect activity that was created. Some reflect activity that was, for the first time, recognised, licensed, documented, or counted. Both are real achievements. They are not the same achievement, and they do not repeat in the same way.

Consider the cultural workforce. The report counts 282,709 people working in cultural professions at the end of 2025, up from 261,671 a year earlier and from about 172,000 in 2021. That is a striking expansion. Yet the report itself cautions against reading it as pure job creation. In June 2020, more than eighty cultural professions were added to the Saudi Unified Classification of Occupations. Practices that had always existed, often informally, acquired official definitions and therefore became visible to the statistical system. The report puts the point directly: part of the increase represents the conversion of invisible work into counted and classified work, not the creation of work that did not previously exist.

The same mechanism runs through the heritage data. The number of sites in the National Register of Urban Heritage rose from 1,023 in 2021 to 2,793 in 2022, then to 27,437 in 2024 and roughly 50,000 by the end of 2025. Nobody built 49,000 heritage buildings in four years. What changed was the scale of the effort to survey, document, and register what was already there. The antiquities register grew more modestly over the same period, from 8,176 sites to 11,577. Both curves describe a state learning, systematically, to see its own past.

Formalisation shows up again in civil society. In 2019 the report counts 24 active cultural nonprofit organisations. By the end of 2025 there were 196, growing by more than 40 percent in the final year alone. Amateur and hobby clubs reached 1,449, up about 76 percent from 2024. Some of this is new activity. Some of it is existing communities of practice, poetry circles, reading groups, craft collectives, acquiring a legal form after a 2021 strategy for the nonprofit cultural sector created a pathway for them to do so.

Then there is the second component of the first-decade dividend: activities that were switched on. Cinema is the clearest example. Between 2019 and 2021, the number of tickets sold roughly doubled, from 6.8 million to 13.1 million, as new venues opened into decades of pent-up demand. Festivals, concerts, and large public events followed a similar pattern. When a society gains access to forms of cultural life that were previously unavailable, the first years of growth are steep almost by definition.

None of this diminishes what was done. Building a classification system, a heritage register, a licensing framework, and a nonprofit pathway is difficult institutional work, and it is the precondition for everything else. But growth that comes from recognition and from first access has a natural ceiling. Once a profession is classified, it cannot be classified again. Once the first cinemas open, the novelty does not reopen with them. The first decade harvested a dividend that, by its nature, is paid only once.

The more interesting question is what the numbers look like where that dividend has already been collected.

Where the curve flattens

The report's headline participation figure for 2025 is 74.8 percent: the share of surveyed adults who took part in at least one cultural activity in the previous twelve months. It is an encouraging number. It is also, in an important sense, not comparable with previous years, because 2025 was the first year the survey counted cinema attendance as a cultural activity.

Strip cinema out, as the report does to preserve comparability, and the trend looks different. Participation rose from 53.9 percent in 2021 to 65.8 percent in 2022, a jump of 22 percent in a single year as pandemic restrictions lifted and the events calendar filled. Then it settled. The comparable figure was about 69 percent in 2023, about 69 percent in 2024, and about 69 to 70 percent in 2025, depending on which of the report's tables one reads. The report describes this, accurately, as stability. It also describes the sector as having moved from "a phase of rapid growth to a phase of greater stability."

Stability at nearly seven in ten adults is not a failure. Many mature cultural economies would be content with it. But a plateau changes the nature of the policy problem. When participation is rising quickly, the task is supply: more venues, more events, more licences. When participation stops rising, the task becomes something harder to engineer: persuading people who already attend occasionally to attend often, and persuading the remaining quarter to attend at all.

The 2025 data offers mixed evidence on both. Among those surveyed, 42.1 percent participated in a limited way, between one and six times in the year, while 32.7 percent participated repeatedly, more than six times. The report notes that the gap between occasional and repeat participants has narrowed over successive surveys, which is a meaningful sign of habit forming.

At the level of individual activities, however, 2025 was a difficult year. According to the report's activity-level chart, participation in concerts and musical events fell by about 27 percent compared with 2024. Theatre and performing arts, museum visits, and cultural festivals each fell by roughly 10 to 12 percent. Art exhibitions and poetry evenings slipped by about 6 percent, and historical sites by about 3 percent. Only two categories grew: visits to nature reserves and parks, up about 4 percent, and public libraries, up about 3 percent. The report's narrative and its chart do not agree precisely on the magnitude of the performing arts decline, which is itself a reminder that these figures deserve careful handling. The direction, however, is consistent.

Cultural tourism tells a parallel story. The number of domestic and inbound tourists who took part in cultural activities fell from about 50 million in 2024 to about 45 million in 2025. Domestic cultural tourism dropped by roughly 12 percent, from 34 million to 29.9 million, and its share of all domestic tourist trips fell from 41 percent to 32 percent. International visitors engaging in cultural activities declined more gently, from 16.1 million to 15.1 million. That remains three times the 2019 level of about 5.1 million, and the report rightly treats the decade-long trajectory as one of its clearest successes. But 2025 was the first year since the pandemic in which the line turned down.

The festival data is more nuanced than it first appears. Attendance at the Saudi Film Festival more than doubled between 2022 and 2025, from 16,245 to 38,335. The Red Sea International Film Festival, by contrast, peaked at about 47,600 in 2024 and returned to roughly 34,200 in 2025, close to its 2022 level. Domestic film production moved the other way from audiences: 54 Saudi films premiered in 2025, about half the number recorded in 2023, with drops across feature, short, and documentary formats.

There are reasonable explanations for each of these movements, and the report offers several. Event calendars shift. Festivals change format and venue. A single year of survey data, even with a margin of error under two percentage points, can move for reasons unrelated to underlying demand. Some declines may reflect the end of one-off spectacles rather than any loss of appetite. It would be a mistake to read one year as a reversal.

It would also be a mistake to ignore what the pattern suggests in combination. Across cinema, festivals, live performance, and cultural tourism, the growth of the early 2020s has given way to flatter curves, falling prices, and selective declines. The report's own vocabulary has shifted accordingly. Its earlier editions spoke mainly of expansion. This one speaks of consolidation, sustainability, and impact.

The workforce inside the headline

If participation reveals where demand has levelled, the workforce data reveals something about the structure of supply. Here, the report is unusually forthcoming, and its most important findings are arguably buried in its creative economy chapter rather than featured in its summary.

The headline figure of 282,709 cultural workers is dominated by three occupations. Culinary arts accounts for 139,216 workers, of whom about 98,000 are cooks. Fashion, mainly tailoring, accounts for 76,450. Hairdressing, classified as a shared cultural profession, adds 30,921. Together these three groups make up about 247,000 workers, roughly 87 percent of the total. Every other cultural field combined, from architecture and publishing to film, music, museums, and heritage, accounts for the remaining 13 percent.

This concentration reshapes the meaning of almost every workforce indicator. The overall Saudization rate in cultural professions is just 8.5 percent, against a private-sector national average of about 19.9 percent. But that figure is driven almost entirely by the three dominant occupations, where Saudization stands at 6.8 percent in culinary work, 1.6 percent in fashion, and 1.3 percent in hairdressing. Exclude them, and the Saudization rate across the remaining cultural professions rises to 36 percent, about 16 percentage points above the national private-sector average.

The same distortion applies to gender. Women make up about 10 percent of all cultural workers, rising to 22.2 percent once culinary and fashion work are excluded. Among Saudi nationals working in cultural professions, women are a slight majority, at 50.7 percent.

And it applies to the question of where cultural work actually happens. Only 12.6 percent of people in cultural occupations work inside establishments classified as cultural. The rest work in restaurants, cafés, retail, and other non-cultural businesses. In culinary arts specifically, 93.2 percent of workers are non-Saudi, 95.7 percent are men, and 95.8 percent work in non-cultural establishments. The report draws the logical conclusion itself: workers who fit this profile have characteristics closer to the food and retail labour market than to the cultural sector.

Seen this way, the professional core of the cultural economy is much smaller than the headline suggests, and much more Saudi. It is also where nearly all of the recent growth occurred. Between 2024 and 2025, employment in culinary arts grew by about 2 percent. Museum employment grew by about 58 percent, theatre and performing arts by about 33 percent, film by about 32 percent, libraries by 29 percent, and music by 22 percent.

Those growth rates are impressive. The bases are small. The report counts 915 workers in film, 754 in music, 850 in the visual arts, 394 in museums, and 150 in theatre and performing arts. These figures almost certainly understate the real creative labour force, since much work in film, music, and performance is freelance or project-based and may not appear in occupational employment records. But they indicate how early the formal professional infrastructure of Saudi creative industries remains, even after a decade of investment.

There is also a measurement wrinkle. The Decade of Vision chapter plots the 2024 workforce at 234,147, while the creative economy chapter of the same report gives 261,671 for the same year. The difference likely reflects different reference points or data revisions, but it changes the apparent growth rate for 2025 from about 8 percent to about 21 percent. It is a small inconsistency in a long document. It is also a small illustration of the report's own argument that knowledge infrastructure, including the quality and consistency of cultural data, is itself one of the sector's unfinished projects.

The money behind the stage

Public finance remains the sector's principal engine, and the report's financing data shows both its scale and its concentration.

The Cultural Development Fund increased its support by 93 percent in 2025, to about 376 million riyals. Since its establishment, the fund has committed more than 753 million riyals to over 160 projects across eleven cultural sectors. Film has received the largest share, about 253 million riyals across 55 projects, followed by music at about 225 million riyals. Three investment funds were announced in 2025, including the first cultural investment fund for fashion and a second film investment fund, with total commitments exceeding 1.5 billion riyals. A shared financing product launched with five private financial institutions is intended to move cultural lending toward the commercial banking system.

These are the right instruments for a sector trying to move from grants to investment. They also raise a familiar question about sequencing. Film has absorbed the largest share of public capital. Yet Saudi film production halved between 2023 and 2025, and the preference for watching films in cinemas, among survey respondents, fell from 21 percent in 2023 to 17.8 percent in 2025, while 44.9 percent said they preferred streaming platforms. Exhibition revenue, as the opening of this article noted, has been flat in nominal terms since 2021.

None of this proves that film investment was misallocated. Production pipelines are long, and funds committed in 2023 or 2024 may show up in releases years later. But the gap between capital deployed and output delivered is precisely the kind of question the report says the next decade's measurement system must be able to answer.

Small rooms

If the large-format numbers have flattened, some of the report's most encouraging data comes from much smaller spaces.

The Literary Partner initiative, which places literary programming in cafés, began in 2021 with 20 participating cafés. By 2025 the number of literary cafés had reached 222, an increase of 168 percent over the previous year, distributed across most regions of the Kingdom. The fifth edition of the initiative recorded a 175 percent increase in partners, a 92 percent rise in events, and a 256 percent increase in beneficiaries. It has expanded beyond cafés to publishers, co-working spaces, associations, and hobby clubs.

Public libraries are undergoing a parallel transformation. Under a program to convert them into "culture houses," eight have been redeveloped, with a target of 153. The report notes that the culture house in Dammam has received more than 52,000 visitors since opening, compared with an annual average of 5,076 visitors before redevelopment. Library visits were one of only two activity categories whose participation rate rose in 2025.

The National Museum's visitor numbers grew from about 39,000 in 2021 to about 445,000 in 2025. The Riyadh International Book Fair grew from about 350,000 visitors in 2016 to roughly 1.38 million in 2025, and regional book fairs in Jeddah, Madinah, the Eastern Province, and Jazan have added their own audiences. Despite the steady rise of digital reading, 38 percent of survey respondents said they preferred printed books, compared with 23 percent who preferred e-books.

What connects these cases is not size. It is frequency. A literary café, a local library, a hobby club, and a book fair are places people can return to cheaply and repeatedly, often within walking or short driving distance of home. They fit into ordinary weeks. They do not depend on a single spectacular date in the calendar.

This is an interpretation, not a finding the report states in these terms. But it is consistent with the data. The activities that grew or held steady in 2025 tend to be low-cost, local, and repeatable. The activities that declined tend to be ticketed, event-driven, or travel-dependent. If the second decade's challenge is converting occasional participation into habitual participation, the small rooms may matter more than the large stages.

Geography, income, and age

The plateau in national participation also conceals persistent differences between groups, and the report is direct about them.

Cultural infrastructure remains heavily concentrated. Riyadh alone accounts for about 47 percent of cinema revenue and 43 percent of tickets. Riyadh, Makkah, and the Eastern Province together account for about 89 percent of revenue and 87 percent of tickets, leaving the other ten regions to share roughly 11 percent. Four regions, the Northern Borders, Al-Baha, Najran, and Al-Jouf, still have no cinemas at all. The number of cinema venues nationally fell from 64 in 2024 to 62 in 2025, which the report attributes to competitive and investment factors. Ticket prices follow the same gradient, averaging about 54 riyals in Riyadh and about 33 riyals in Hail. The report reads this as evidence that the industry's expansion still moves from the major cities toward the periphery.

Income matters in a similar way. Among respondents with monthly incomes above 15,000 riyals, 14.5 percent reported no cultural participation in the past year, and 42.9 percent reported repeat participation. Among those earning less than 5,000 riyals, 31.2 percent reported no participation. The pattern is familiar from cultural participation surveys in many countries, where higher income, education, and urban residence tend to predict higher engagement.

Age produces the sharpest divide. Among 18 to 24 year olds, 83 percent participated in at least one cultural activity. Among those aged 55 and over, 37.8 percent did not participate at all. The report recommends greater attention to cultural content suited to older audiences. The finding also raises a demographic question. A sector whose strongest audience is young can grow with its population, but it can also find that programming designed for one generation does not automatically travel to another.

Gender, by contrast, shows near parity. In 2025, 75.8 percent of women and 74.1 percent of men participated in at least one cultural activity, although men were somewhat more likely to be repeat participants. A decade after the reforms that opened public cultural life more broadly, the participation gap between men and women has effectively closed. That is one of the decade's most significant changes, and it receives less attention in the report than it arguably deserves.

An old warning about measurement

The report's admission that counting visitors measures movement rather than impact connects to an old problem in public policy.

In 1975, the British economist Charles Goodhart observed that statistical regularities tend to break down once they are used as targets for control. His point, later generalised into what is now called Goodhart's law, was that when a measure becomes a target, institutions begin optimising the measure rather than the underlying reality it was meant to capture. Visitor counts, event numbers, and licence volumes are useful indicators of cultural activity. Treated as goals in themselves, they can encourage more events rather than better ones, larger crowds rather than returning audiences, and one-off spectacles rather than lasting institutions.

There is no evidence in the report that Saudi cultural agencies have fallen into this trap. The relevance of Goodhart's observation is different. It explains why the report's own call for impact measurement is significant. A cultural system that measures only throughput will eventually be governed by throughput. A system that begins measuring repeat participation, audience retention, regional access, professional sustainability, and creative output has a better chance of governing for those things.

A second historical reference is useful, with clear limits. In 1966 the American economists William Baumol and William Bowen published a study of the performing arts showing that live performance faces a structural cost problem. A string quartet requires the same number of musicians and roughly the same amount of time as it did centuries ago, so its productivity cannot rise in the way manufacturing productivity does. As wages rise across the wider economy, live performance becomes relatively more expensive and tends to depend on subsidy, patronage, or philanthropy.

Baumol and Bowen were describing mature Western markets, not a rapidly developing sector shaped by state investment. The parallel should not be pushed too far. But their insight helps explain why the report repeatedly identifies the financial sustainability of nonprofits as a challenge, and why theatre and live performance remain among the smallest professional sectors in the data. Cinema can lower prices through scale. Live performance cannot do so as easily. A cultural policy that wants a durable theatre, music, and performance ecosystem will have to finance something that does not become cheaper as it grows.

The Ministry's newer instruments appear designed with this problem partly in mind. The "Support for Performance" program links funding to verified results and institutional capacity rather than simply financing activities. The Culture Incubator program and grants from the Literature, Publishing and Translation Commission target nonprofit organisations directly. The report also lists the need for diversified revenue, corporate social responsibility, endowments, and tax incentives to bring more private money into culture.

These are sensible directions. The test will be whether they produce institutions that persist after the grant cycle, rather than activity that ends with it.

What the second decade will be judged on

The report's final chapter sets out its own agenda for the years to 2030. It identifies human capital as the first priority: attracting, training, and retaining Saudi cultural professionals through clearer career paths, stable employment conditions, and recognition of expertise. It identifies knowledge infrastructure, including archives, research, and especially data, as the second. It calls for broader geographic access, stronger roles for the private and nonprofit sectors, better market and distribution systems for cultural products, and closer attention to the effects of artificial intelligence on cultural production and Arabic-language content.

The human capital pipeline is visibly under construction. The Cultural Scholarship Program has sent 881 students abroad since its launch, 393 men and 488 women, and 328 have graduated. Cultural commissions have run more than 800 training programs for over 70,000 participants. The Royal Institute of Traditional Arts has registered about 5,750 learners in more than 270 programs. Women now account for about 37 percent of published academic research in cultural fields, up from 27 percent in 2020. Arabic-language initiatives have expanded through the Tarjim translation program, which reached 3,154 translated books by the end of 2025, and through new tools for Arabic computing and evaluating Arabic-language AI models.

The international record is also substantial. Eight Saudi sites are now on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Eighteen Saudi elements appear on UNESCO's intangible heritage lists, including Arabic kohl and the bisht, added in 2025. Five Saudi cities belong to UNESCO's Creative Cities Network. Archaeological work during the decade included the 2025 discovery at Masyoun in Tabuk of what the report describes as the oldest architectural settlement yet identified in the Arabian Peninsula, dated to between 11,000 and 10,300 years ago.

These achievements belong to the visible column of the ledger. The harder question the report raises is what the invisible column should contain.

If the first decade asked whether a cultural sector could be built at scale, the second will ask whether it can sustain itself without the momentum of novelty. That shifts the meaningful indicators. The share of repeat participants matters more than the number of total visitors. Revenue per ticket and audience retention matter more than total admissions. Saudization and employment growth in the professional core matter more than the headline workforce count. The survival rate of nonprofits after five years matters more than the number founded this year. The number of regions where cultural life is ordinary, not occasional, matters more than the number of events staged in the capital.

Several of these indicators are already present in the report, scattered across chapters. They are not yet assembled into a single account of depth. That may be the most useful task for future editions.

The meaning of a plateau

It is tempting to read flat or falling numbers as a warning. In this case, the more accurate reading may be that they are a sign of arrival.

A cultural sector growing from almost nothing will show spectacular percentages because almost every new venue, licence, festival, and classified profession counts as growth. A sector that has passed through that stage will show smaller numbers because the obvious openings have already been made. Seven in ten adults participating in cultural life, near-parity between men and women, a national museum receiving nearly half a million visitors, a book fair approaching 1.4 million, and a cinema market selling almost 19 million tickets a year are not the statistics of an absent culture. They are the statistics of a culture that now has a baseline.

What changes after a baseline is the type of effort required. Opening a cinema creates an audience. Keeping that audience requires films people want to see, at prices they can afford, in places they can reach. Founding a cultural nonprofit creates an institution. Keeping it alive requires governance, revenue, and a reason for people to return. Registering 50,000 heritage sites creates knowledge. Making those sites part of public life requires interpretation, conservation, and access.

The State of Culture Report 2025 does not claim that this second kind of work has been completed. Its value lies in showing, with more candour than reports of this kind usually allow, that the first kind of work is largely done. Its data shows the visibility dividend being exhausted. Its chapters show the institutional tools being built for a different phase. And its own sentence about measurement points to the central question of the coming decade.

The first decade taught Saudi culture to count what it had. The second will test whether it can measure what lasts.

Sources and editorial notes

All figures are drawn from State of Culture in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia 2025: A Decade of Vision (Ministry of Culture, Research and Cultural Heritage Agency). Page references are to the PDF edition.

• Cinema tickets, revenue, and prices: pp. 183, 205, 211; executive summary p. 19. Average price of 68 riyals (2020), 52 (2023), 49 (2025); US comparison of 10.78 dollars; regional concentration and ticket prices by region, p. 183.
• Cinema venues (64 to 62) and regions without cinemas: executive summary p. 11; p. 211.
• Viewing preferences (streaming 44.9%, cinema 17.8%, print books 38%, e-books 23%): executive summary p. 19.
• Report methodology, survey sample (3,009), margin of error (1.99%), fieldwork dates (4 to 18 May 2026): Appendix 1, pp. 230 to 231, 237.
• "Movement, not impact" observation on measurement: "The Road to 2030" section, p. 218.
• Institutional timeline (2016 to 2026): pp. 200 to 203.
• Workforce totals, classification effect, and sector distribution: pp. 172 to 177. The Decade of Vision chapter (p. 209) gives 234,147 workers for 2024; the creative economy chapter (p. 173) gives 261,671. This article uses the latter for the 2025 comparison and flags the discrepancy.
• Saudization (8.5%, 36%, 19.9%) and rates by occupation: p. 177.
• Workers in cultural establishments (12.6%; 29.8% excluding culinary and fashion) and culinary workforce characteristics: p. 175.
• Heritage registers (urban heritage 1,023 to about 50,000; antiquities 8,176 to 11,577): p. 213.
• Nonprofits (24 to 196) and hobby clubs (1,449): pp. 17, 23, 208.
• Participation trends (53.9% to about 69%; 74.79% including cinema): pp. 146 to 147, 204. Two tables give slightly different comparable values for 2025 (69.24% and 69.8%); the article reports "about 69 to 70 percent."
• Participation by gender, age, and income: pp. 147 to 148.
• Changes by activity in 2025: p. 149, Figure 6. The narrative text on p. 148 gives a different figure for the largest decline in performing arts; the article follows the chart and notes the discrepancy.
• Cultural tourism (50M to 45M; domestic 34M to 29.9M; inbound 16.1M to 15.1M): executive summary p. 19; p. 212.
• Festival attendance (Saudi Film Festival and Red Sea International Film Festival, 2022 to 2025): p. 205, Figure 9. Charts in this report read right to left, with 2025 on the left.
• Film production (54 films premiered in 2025): executive summary p. 13.
• Cultural Development Fund support and sector allocation: executive summary p. 11; pp. 210 to 211.
• Literary cafés, Literary Partner initiative, culture houses, National Museum, book fairs: executive summary pp. 11, 17; pp. 204 to 207.
• Scholarships, training, research output, translation, UNESCO listings, and archaeological discoveries: executive summary pp. 11, 15; pp. 78, 209 to 216.
• Goodhart's law: Charles Goodhart, "Problems of Monetary Management: The U.K. Experience," 1975.
• Baumol's cost disease: William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma, Twentieth Century Fund, 1966.

Fact-check flags before publication:

1. Confirm the 2024 workforce baseline with the Ministry, since the report gives two values.
2. Confirm the activity-level decline in performing arts and concerts for 2025, since the chart and narrative text differ.
3. Confirm whether the Ministry or the Film Commission describes the 2024 licensing fee reduction in the same terms used here.
4. Verify the final English titles of Saudi programs and institutions against their official English usage.
5. Apply standard commercial disclosure if any Arbaaa client relationship exists with a body cited in the article.