Premier and Tourism Minister Dr. Ewart Brown and his Ministry officials have outdone themselves with the line-up for this year's Bermuda Music Festival.

In the past, the Festival has tended to skew to a slightly older age group, but the bookings of Beyonce and Alicia Keys will put paid to that and means the Festival has two top rank performers headlining the weekend. Saying that the rest of the line-up is pretty strong as well would be an understatement.

There's little doubt that the festival will do well and that there will be strong take-up on the tickets, especially as they are being made available to Bermudians first.

Having said that, it would be negligent not to raise concerns both about the overall cost of this event – which has never been made public – and just how it is paid for.

Then too, it is not clear, given that this is first and foremost an event designed to attract more visitors to Bermuda, just how many visitors come specifically for this event.

And the Ministry of Tourism has not revealed these figures since 2005, when a total of 1,155 tourists purchased all-inclusive packages for that year's festival, compared to 1,193 in 2004.

Since then, we have had silence, although visitor arrivals in October 2007 fell compared to the same month in 2006, in spite of the staging of the Music Festival and the PGA Grand Slam of Golf.

That at least suggests that these kind of high profile events do not have a direct impact on visitor arrivals.

Of course, that's not the whole story. It has been argued that these events help to raise Bermuda's profile through media coverage, and in the case of the Grand Slam, TV coverage as well. This helps to generate both interest in the Island and should raise bookings throughout the year.

There's a good deal of merit in this, but the difficulty comes in measuring just how many people are influenced by these events to come to the Island and whether the cost of staging them is justified by it. A similar debate can be held concerning the recent New York Mets promotion, which is costing the taxpayer $500,000.

No one could dispute the excitement locally that having top performers like Beyonce and Alicia Keys will generate, nor that last year's festival was extremely well organised and produced.

But at the risk of sounding like the Grinch, it should not be forgotten that the Festival's primary reason for being is not to entertain Bermudians but to attract visitors.

And on that basis, the public has the right to know what the event will cost, how much of the costs are being funded by private sector sponsors and who they are, and how the event – along with the PGA Grand Slam and the New York Mets deal – has benefited the tourism industry.