The Audience Triple Threat

We all know about one issue with arts audiences, and specifically ones for classical music - age. Look around any concert hall in North America or the UK and it’s undeniable that it’s those in their senior years which are turning up. How much the audiences are replenishing is open to debate, but evidence from the US certainly points to the audience ‘ageing out’. That’s polite language for ‘getting older and dying’. Of course a concert hall is never going to be populated with a majority of 30 somethings - they have other stuff going on like families to bring up, but its undeniably depressing going to a concert where the main impression is not of the music but of a vast sea of zimmer frames (Walkers in North American), sticks, grey hair and slowly shuffling audience members.

However I don’t believe that an ageing audience is our only problem. There are at least two more:

Participators not receivers 

This report got widely shared when it first came out, looking at the changing nature of arts audiences - described as a arts revolution. The theme of this revolution? “"the exuberant expression of self.”

Young people now are increasingly unhappy at just being a passive observer. They want to create. They want to make music, write, make art. Everyone is a critic, able to share their opinions on social media, blogs and websites. As the author Chris Jones states, “Young people don't just want to talk about our culture, they want to be engaged in the storytelling and, most definitely, in the process of judgment.”

So how do we respond to this? Well the theatre world is probably most ahead of the curve. Organisations like the Theatre Royal Stratford East have involved audiences in programming while the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester has stablished an ‘Audience Manifesto’.

This is harder for classical music. Of all the art forms we’re perhaps the most ‘We perform, you listen’. There’s less obvious scope for participation, and we should be investing serious thought and energy into how we address this issue.

As Chris Jones also observes, despite the millions pumped into audience development programme for what can be termed ‘legacy’ organisations, audiences have both declined and also stayed resolutely white, old and monied. It’s probably the subject for another blog but I’d suggest this is due to the failure to radically change product and business models to adapt to changing tastes, instead focussing efforts on trying to get people to come to an experience (the current one) they’re clearly not interested in, in sufficient numbers at least.

A poorer generation

While sitting in the opera the other night I was musing on some of this, and observing the audience. I was also thinking of a friend of mine who absolutely loves the opera. He used to have a subscription, attending multiple shows a season. But then, he got too old. He’d been attending on an under 30’s package, where you could buy four operas for $86, getting pretty decent seats if he booked early. Suddenly he hit 30 and was too old for the programme. So now it costs him over $100 for one equivalent seat to one show. It’s not as if his salary sky-rocketed overnight when he hit 30, so it just means he doesn’t go as often now.

Obviously $86 for 4 shows is not a sustainable ticket price. Opera is an expensive business. But the situation does reflect another trend - that for the first time, the younger generation is likely to be poorer than their parents, with the current younger generation in the UK apparently earning £8,000 a year less than their parents. If this trend continues it will have major repercussions not just for audiences but also for fundraising.

So what do we do?

There are no easy answers and no magic wand. But I would suggest that the combined effects of a declining, ageing audience, and a potential younger, poorer audience with different needs present the arts with a serious challenge that can only be addressed through radical action. It won’t be enough to do a side project on audience development that ticks a funders box. We can’t pretend that we can somehow keep offering the same product and continue to attract audiences in the same numbers as before. If ‘legacy’ organisations (the big, established opera, ballet, orchestras and theatres) want to survive they have to radically re-envisage their artistic product, while staying true to their mission, and at the same time have to countenance some serious changes to their business models as a result. Unpalatable as this may seem, this may well involve taking the decision to lose some of their current audience in order to serve and develop a future audience.

This is hard and it often won’t be popular. I’m not confident that many organisations will do it, but it can be done and it has been done - just witness what Executive Director Nina Simon has done at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (and do read her brilliant book The Art of Relevance).

I first wrote this blog in 2017, and in that time I feel the audience trend has only accelerated, yet arts organisations, and particularly orchestras, continue to, at best, timidly tinker around the edges of their product rather than plunge whole-heartedly into change. The present situation with Covid-19 presents an opportunity for such radical change - but that’s something for another blog.