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What happens when opera tickets suddenly drop in price? Spoiler alert: we know exactly what will happen.
Opera Philadelphia offered $11 ticket initiative from the 2024-25 season, where they’re offering pay-what-you-can tickets, starting at $11. The result? Ticket sales surged by more than 25% compared to previous seasons. The diversity of the audience improved significantly, and it brought in more first-time opera-goers. They plan to continue the initiative into the 2025-26 season, despite the hit to their revenue that the initiative caused.
Those were the results they were going for, no doubt: more people, more diverse audience. What’s important to realize is that these are exactly the results we would expect. Why?
- The price change and the publicity communicated that Opera Philadelphia was open to anyone.
- $11 tickets eliminated the price barrier for everyone who could not or was not willing to pay more for opera tickets.
- The initiative made Opera Philadelphia top of mind.
Radically dropping the price of tickets isn’t a new idea. Many performing arts organizations have some form of making pricing for arts events low, transparent, and easy to understand as a way of increasing attendance and improving diversity of audiences.* Sometimes it’s a big gesture like this, sometimes its with always offering a low ticket price, or a lottery, or low prices for people of a certain age (like below 35) or identity (students).
But pricing is actually a rather complicated beast.
Two takeaways on pricing from Opera Philadelphia
#1 Affordability vs. willingness to pay
Many arts management types, including me, like to point out that price is not the main barrier to attendance. We’re not wrong. We can point to research from around the world that supports that price is about #3 on the list of most frequently named barriers. We can also point to the thousands of tickets sold at very high prices to Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and on Broadway.
In audience research price is ranked lower than lack of interest and lack of time as reasons for not attending the arts. (Meaning, the biggest barrier is that most people just aren’t interested in what arts organizations are offering. That’s hard to swallow, but it’s true.) That’s why it was refreshing to hear Opera Philadelphia’s leader, Anthony Roth Costanzo, say it plainly: “We have to be honest that not many people are interested in opera,” He’s right. Only a tiny fraction of Americans attend opera. According to the latest research from the NEA, just 0.7% of American adults attended an opera in the past 12 months. Ouch.
Price IS a barrier for some people, but the reasons vary. Some people truly can’t afford it. But for most people, the show or exhibition is priced too high compared to the value they hold for the event. This is not only true for what could be considered high priced events like typical tickets to the opera. Research** I read for a chapter I wrote on free admission policies even showed that this was true for countries like Germany that significantly subsidize their arts organizations so that tickets are pretty cheap. Interest in what’s being offered is the most important factor, not price.
Willingness to pay for something has nothing to do with the actual price. Whether or not someone chooses to purchase is about the value that a person gets out of the product, service, or experience related to the price. There are some people that won’t go to the opera – even if it’s free.
Here are three scenarios that show the difference between affordability and willingness to pay:
- I CAN afford a ticket to a country music concert. But I’m not interested in country music. It doesn’t matter if the concert is $10 or free, I won’t be going.
- I CAN’T afford a trip to Japan for the annual Kabuki theater festival in Tokyo. (Or, I could afford it, but it would put a big dent in my personal savings.)
- I wanted to see Pearl Jam when they came to Raleigh in May. The cheapest ticket was $275. I CAN afford it, but it was beyond my willingness to pay, even though I was interested.
A person being able to afford something isn’t the same as being willing to pay for it. This means that making opera more attractive —through pricing or marketing or something else —is essential for the survival of the art form at the professional level. It matters that arts organizations reach out to the people who want to come but haven’t yet taken the leap.
#2 Willingness to pay isn’t fixed. Audiences can be moved.
My willingness to pay for a country music concert is zero. But if a friend of mine wants me to go with her, then my willingness to pay increases. I would probably pay up to $50 to go to a country music concert with my friend so we can hang out together. Willingness to pay depends on the circumstances. It’s not fixed.
Opera Philadelphia $11 ticket initiative tapped into a pool of latent demand. Latent demand refers to people who are open to attending but haven’t yet found the right conditions. The new audiences that attended might not have a new found interest in the opera; more likely they have wanted to go, but hadn’t acted on their interest yet.
Why hadn’t they acted? And what changed? Here are some options:
- Price: Price was a barrier, and $11 was within the range of what they were willing to pay.
- Belonging: The $11 ticket initiative was also a signal about access. It sent a message that they were welcome, even if they didn’t have a lot of money or were a person that valued money as part of their identity.
- Awareness: The new ticketing program got a lot of publicity. It may have reminded people that Opera Philadelphia existed. Or maybe it sparked the thought, “I’ve never been to the opera. Maybe I’ll try it.”
The combination of the price, the publicity, and the messages that the program was sending caused the jump in attendance and change in the mix of people who attended.
Takeaway
Pricing is complicated, psychologically. Price is a signal about who’s welcome and bout what the experience will be like. It’s about deeply understanding your audience—what they want personally, emotionally, and socially from their arts attendance—and designing experiences that meet those needs.
Remember, lack of interest is the main barrier. By focusing on the nuances of price sensitivity, the social signals your pricing decisions send, and the latent demand that might be waiting just outside the door, arts organizations can get that audience they’ve been wanting.
* One of the most prominent was Signature Theatre in New York City, who tried it in the early 2000s with $20 tickets, underwritten by Time Warner. They experienced similar results as Opera Philadelphia.
** Kirchberg, Volker. 1998. “Entrance Fees as a Subjective Barrier to Visiting Museums.” Journal of Cultural Economics 22 (1): 1–13.
I love “classical” music written in the last 100 years, so I’m obviously very frustrate and the only way you could get me to a pop concert is if I was drunk as a skunk and/or high as a kite. Of course I-m a professional musician who makes a. living teaching and married to a woman who is a MD.