Study | Audience Behavior: Reopening Season Trends

Trends in Audience Behavior: Reopening Season Trends

The 2021-22 season was full of ups and downs—the exhilaration of seeing audiences in our halls again, and the frustration of COVID continuing to interfere with our age-old moto “the show must go on.” We had many questions as we embarked on this season, especially following our winter study Trends in Audience Behavior: Reopening Sales Trends.

Top of mind as we embarked on this season was—is our audience going to be different? Will they literally be different people? Will their behaviors have changed? Will there be as many, or more, audience members? How do we adjust to new behaviors?

To answer these questions, we at JCA Arts Marketing set out to get empirical data. We gathered transactional data from 15 of our client organizations using the RMA (Revenue Management Application) and conducted analysis on the data.

We hope this study provides insights regarding the audience behavior research needed at your organization, as well as ideas for adjusting your strategy to accommodate behaviors in our new—at times chaotic—world.

Key Findings

• Ticket sales were down more than revenue relative to before the pandemic.
• Subscription and discount sales have dropped, while full-price ticket sales have remained constant.
• There is no indication of increased price sensitivity amongst audiences in 2021-22 relative to pre-pandemic.
• The number of new audience members declined more than returning audience members.
• People are not buying later (closer to the performance) than pre-pandemic.