{"id":3448,"date":"2026-05-06T09:33:54","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T16:33:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/?p=3448"},"modified":"2026-05-06T09:33:56","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T16:33:56","slug":"so-just-how-big-is-the-culture-audience-comparisons-that-may-make-you-rethink","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/diacritical\/2026\/05\/so-just-how-big-is-the-culture-audience-comparisons-that-may-make-you-rethink.html","title":{"rendered":"So Just How Big is the Culture Audience? (comparisons that may make you rethink)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Luce Foundation Center for American Art at the Smithsonian African American Museum<\/sup><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A few months ago I attended a virtual convening of non-profit arts leaders from across America gathering to discuss the arts model and how it might be strengthened. I wondered why we were just talking among the non-profit arts sector, when it seems to me the commercial creative industry, though bigger, is facing many of the same issues. And that led me to wondering about the comparative size of the non-profit and for-profit culture industries. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we’re going to think about how to fix a culture model that’s not working well, we should try to understand the scale of what we’re actually talking about. So over the past few months I’ve been compiling sources to attempt to find out, and it turns out that it’s a project that requires not just hunting reliable numbers, but making a series of philosophical choices as to what and how you count. Last week I wrote about comparing the economic size of both sectors<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that’s only part of the story. Dollar value is certainly one way of measuring (and what people choose to spend their money on is a good indicator of interest). But we should also consider audience size. And ideally, we’d like to measure the impact or engagement people have with the culture they choose. I’m not sure how to defensibly measure that last part, but we can take a stab at measuring audience, though it turns out doing that requires even more calibration in what and what not to include. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I propose the following not as the definitive accounting, but my best attempt to understand the relative scale of the culture industries. I think the numbers suggest a different way of thinking about making a case for the traditionally non-profit arts sector.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By revenue, the non-profit sector is small \u2014 about $73 billion in organizational spending compared to $1.17 trillion in total US arts and cultural production. Disney’s annual revenue alone is larger than every US nonprofit cultural institution in the country combined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the map of audience shows something entirely different.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Americans visit museums roughly 850 million times a year, according to the AAM. They buy 800 million movie tickets, according to box office numbers. The aggregate scale of nonprofit and commercial cultural attendance turns out to be within shouting distance of one another \u2014 same order of magnitude, similar scale of participation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Same audience, but vastly different economics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The headline numbers, side by side: Total US non-profit live cultural attendance by my accounting (sources and methodology at the end) comes in around 965 million a year \u2014 museums (~850M), nonprofit theatre (27M), performing arts centers and presenting venues (~25M), orchestras (22M), nonprofit festivals like Tanglewood and Aspen (~20M), choral concerts (~10M), university presenters like Cal Performances and UMS (~8M), opera (2M). Total US commercial live cultural attendance comes in around 1.37 billion \u2014 movies (800M), theme parks (158M), the Big Four sports leagues combined (134M), college and minor-league sports (125M), Live Nation US concerts (60M), Broadway and national touring (29M), Las Vegas residencies and shows (~25M), comedy clubs and dinner theatre (20M), commercial music festivals (12M), the WNBA and NWSL combined (4.4M).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Roughly the same order of magnitude. The non-profit number comes in at about 70 percent of the commercial. Compare that to the revenue numbers \u2014 for-profit industry revenue is 16 times larger than the non-profits. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The composition is wildly different. Museums dominate the nonprofit number. Movies dominate the commercial. Live performing arts and presenting venues are small in either column but significant in both. By participation, the non-profit cultural sector is a near-peer of the entire commercial culture economy. So the dollar gap between the two isn’t a popularity gap, it’s a pricing gap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This comparison is built on live, in-person, ticketed or admission-tracked cultural attendance. It excludes digital cultural engagement \u2014 streaming video, broadcast television, video games, podcasts, music streaming, social media. Americans average roughly five hours a day on video streaming alone, and adding screen time would push every commercial figure into the trillions of hours and reshape the comparison around something other than physical participation. That’s a different post for another time. Where category aggregates are published by a trade body or league, I’m using the trade body’s number; where none exists, I’m using documented bottom-up estimates with ranges. Methodology, source links, and cautions for the numbers are at the end of this post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what can we learn from this? The notion that non-profit culture is much smaller than for-profit because fewer people participate is flat wrong. In popularity, it turns out that pop culture industries aren’t that much more popular. In fact, museums are much more popular than many kinds of “pop” culture. When you look across the vast array of different cultures that Americans consume, it looks like a mosaic, admittedly anchored by museums and movies, but otherwise distributed across a wide range of interests. “Pop” culture, as we thought of it in the 20th Century in the TV era, as a monolith of popular choice, no longer dominates the national psyche. We have fragmented our attention, for good and bad, and we have many kinds of fame now, not just the pop culture celebrity version.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What sticks out in the comparison is the disparity in culture monetization. Per-attendee economics, in round numbers, are instructive. Disney’s domestic parks pull about $190 from each guest in admissions and in-park spending. An NFL game with concessions runs $150 or more. A movie ticket: roughly $11. A nonprofit theatre seat: $25 to $50. A museum visit: $0 to $25, average closer to $10 once you weight free admission and discounted hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So a single Disney park visit is monetized roughly twenty times as aggressively as a museum visit. An NFL game extracts about fifteen times what a museum visit does. Disney’s global parks-and-experiences division produced $34 billion in revenue last year off 140 million park visits and the surrounding Disney machine of hotels, cruises, and merchandise the parks anchor. Disney’s most-popular park, in Florida, attracted $17.8 million visitors. The Smithsonian drew 17 million visits and generated effectively zero visitor revenue. Both organizations are doing precisely what they were designed to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The commercial cultural economy isn’t bigger because more people show up. It’s bigger because each attendance gets monetized at a very different scale. This isn’t a moral judgment: extraction at scale is what for-profit models are built to do and they do it well. But it means the non-profit sector’s economic “smallness” is structural on purpose, not evidence of marginal cultural standing. The free museum, the priced-for-access regional theatre, the subsidized concert ticket \u2014 these aren’t bugs in the design, they are the design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But here’s where I think the story gets dark. The frame for non-profits is rigged by the language. We call commercial culture “free-market capitalism” and non-profit culture “subsidized.” Both descriptions are wrong. Public dollars flow into the commercial cultural economy at massive volume. NFL and MLB stadiums have absorbed roughly $33 billion in taxpayer subsidy over the past three decades. Film and TV production tax credits cost US states about $25 billion a year. Stan Kroenke’s new $5 billion Rams stadium in Los Angeles got a reported $400 million in public subsidy. Georgia’s film tax credit alone puts $1.3 billion a year on the public ledger (shout out to “Walking Dead” fans).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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These dollars don’t pay for the games or the movies. They reduce the capital and operating costs of for-profit enterprises whose profits flow to private owners \u2014 Kroenke, Disney shareholders, studio shareholders. The subsidy capitalizes the owners, with the public return the privilege <\/em>of being allowed to buy a ticket on the owner’s terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Public dollars flow into the non-profit cultural sector in a fundamentally different way. NEA grants expand accessibility. State arts council appropriations subsidize ticket prices, fund commissions, support touring, and build infrastructure that’s permanently held in public trust. The Met Museum cannot be sold to a hedge fund (at least officially). The Smithsonian cannot be taken private. The mission is the property.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same word, “subsidy,” is doing two different jobs. One capitalizes private wealth and routes the cultural output through paywalls. The other produces public goods that are legally bound to public purposes. Treating them as morally equivalent \u2014 or worse, pretending one is free-market, earning its way, while the other is government largess or charity \u2014 is just wrong. And yet that is the frame that the non-profit arts industry so often accepts in its funding arguments. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s a thought experiment: what if the subsidies were reversed and government subsidized benefits to the cultural products that generated the most returns to the most people instead of a tiny number of billionaire NFL owners and oil company execs and Disney? A non-profit culture subsidy comparable to that for stadiums annually would quintuple the size of the NEA budget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be fair, we have to acknowledge that non-profits are subsidized by not paying taxes that commercial entities do. But resetting the language makes it clearer how the business frames work. There are examples of this subsidy distortion across the American economy. Oil companies earn billions of dollars a year in profits. But the industry is also heavily subsidized. As is agriculture. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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So what?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n