This Week in “What Do Audiences Want”?

January 31, 2016 by Douglas McLennan Leave a Comment

Audience tastes are always changing. Artists are always changing. So how do you determine popularity? The data’s in:

For the first time, old recordings outsold new releases in 2015. This despite the massive popularity of Adele’s new album late in the year. When all of recorded music is available on demand anywhere, it’s not surprising that the back catalogue becomes more valuable.
The audience will not be taken for granted by an algorithm. In 2004 Ryan Kavanaugh took Hollywood by storm by coming up with a way to predict audience taste with math. It didn’t turn out so well.
Why Isn’t Jazz More Popular? Could It Be The Jazz Police? Trying to make this music fit into a neat little box just can’t happen. And that’s tough for some people. We crave definitions for our art, and when we can’t describe or compare it, many get frustrated. Hence, the Jazz Police.

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WALLACE FOUNDATION AUDIENCE RESOURCES

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WORLD MUSIC/CRASHarts Tests New Format New Name to Draw New Audiences
This article and video are part of a series describing the early work of some of the 25 performing arts organizations participating in The Wallace Foundation’s $52 million Building Audiences for Sustainability initiative. Launched in 2015 in response to concerns about a declining audience base for a number of major art forms, the endeavor seeks to help the organizations strengthen their audience-building efforts, see if this contributes to their financial sustainability, and develop insights from the work for the wider arts field.

Think Opera’s Not for You? Opera Theatre of Saint Louis Says Think Again
Analysis showed that while the company’s core audience bought several tickets each year, even tending to schedule their May and June around opera season, newcomers behaved differently.

Can the City's Boom Mean New Audiences for the Seattle Symphony?
In line with the community’s spirit of innovation, Seattle Symphony is using audience research to help target and woo recent transplants.

Denver Center Theatre Company is Cracking the Millennial Code...One Step at a Time
The average single-ticket buyer at the Denver Center Theatre Company is 50 years old and the average subscriber is 63, despite the fact that millennials, a group often defined as people born between 1981 and 1997, compose the largest age group in Denver. Since 2010, the Denver Center has been engaged in an iterative process of experimentation, evaluation and refinement to help reverse this trend.

The Party’s Still a Hit: The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Builds on its Millennial Momentum
That ongoing research has revealed areas to adjust, as well as successes. Soon after the re-opening, for example, the team partnered with a local music school, taking the opportunity to hold 45-minute concerts in Calderwood Hall. But in part through survey results, it realized the approach didn’t work. [read more]

Austin Ballet’s “Familiarity” Problem And How It Learned To Connect With New Audiences

“Encouraging people to attend the ballet more often was less about increasing their familiarity with productions and more about bridging an uncertainty gap. “Familiarity is about information,” notes Martin, “whereas uncertainty about how an experience will feel is much more personal. You can give somebody a lot of information but that’s not necessarily going to reassure them that they’re going to belong in that audience.”

How the Contemporary Jewish Museum
Expanded its Reach

The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco moves to a larger space and secures a nine-fold increase in family visitors of all backgrounds.

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