A Mixed Recovery

Thanks to new AI-enabled art form coding of performances in Audience Answers (with thanks to the Turing Institute and Dr Spyros Samothrakis for their support in being able to do it), we can see how different artforms have changed over the past few years, using a ‘consistent cohort’ of 224 venues (of a range of sizes, types and geography). 

What we see is a mixed picture of programming by artform: 

• There’s a shift towards programming performances with less traditional artforms (‘General Entertainment’ and ‘Other Artforms’ in our classification). The number of these performances programmed has grown 27% and 137% respectively. 
• There’s a shift towards programming of some more specific event types too, especially Children’s and Family performances and Christmas Shows (up 46% and 75% respectively). 
• The programming of some other artforms is flatlining (e.g. Music, Musicals, Dance, Literature and Film). They’re back to previous levels, which is encouraging, but there are underlying challenges in several cases (e.g. for Plays/Drama, despite 24% more performances being programmed). 

Of course, it’s not just about what performances are put on, but how many people go. On the surface, the number not just of performances, but also bookings, bookers, tickets and income – as well as the amount of income – is at least as high as it was before. This is true for most artforms in most measures, if not higher in many cases. But nonetheless, the picture is less consistently rosy than this sounds. 

For a start, income has no longer held up for five artforms when inflation is taken into account1. Instead, we see the following decrease: Dance and Plays/Drama down 5% and Literature, Christmas Shows and Film down 18%, 19% and 24% respectively. Given the increases to programming, that means that the real terms income per performance is down for most artforms, except Musical Theatre (+13%) and Music (+7%)2. For Christmas Shows in particular, there’s a drop of 54% of real income per performance, driven by fewer and lower value ticket sales, spread across more performances. 

This then lets us identify four groups of artforms (among those most frequently programmed): 

1. Fewer tickets sold, for a lower price (despite more performances, meaning that each has a smaller audience): Christmas Shows 
2. About the same number of tickets sold, but for a lower price: Plays/Drama and Dance 
3. More tickets sold, for a lower price (but making more money overall and with more tickets per performance): Music and Musical Theatre 
4. More tickets sold for a higher value each (but across more performances with fewer attenders at each): Children/Family Shows. 

This has a range of implications:

• Venues can have confidence in some artforms (e.g. Musical Theatre) which continue to perform strongly.
• There is a specific challenge around Christmas Shows that merits further exploration (both at a summary and individual organisation level), especially where venues have been heavily reliant on those events for financial sustainability.
• Cost of living pressures are clearly affecting yields in several artforms, which may affect the viability of increased programming levels.
• The balance of audience choices seems to be shifting between artforms.

This also shows that headline sales figures mask a great deal of variation. In a future article, we’ll explore how engagement has varied by different types of audience and what that could tell us about the changes taking place.