Future Audiences
Get insights on emerging trends in audiences behaviour, including changing demographics, new forms of digital engagement, and future projections.
Audience profiles, behaviours and attitudes change over time, though it can be difficult to observe them changing as it happens. Recent years have seen some substantial changes, and we have been tracking them as they happen, as well as looking to the future for their potential implications.
They can be driven by social and demographic changes (such as generational shifts in attitudes and engagement patterns), the impact of external events (e.g. the pandemic or economic circumstances), or innovations in cultural forms and formats (e.g. the rise of hybrid engagement). Cultural sectors (perhaps most acutely, but not exclusively, live events) are dependent on balances of factors that make particular types of culture flourish at different times. In this section, we look at those factors and try to look forward to their future combinations.
From The Audience Agency
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Audiences prefer live events, but how much varies by artform
January 2024
Data from the CPM suggests that the more popular an artform is the more open audiences are to viewing it in different formats other than live. This report presents insights into how the popularity of an artform and the initial audience interest can determine how engaging people find non-live events for a particular artform.
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Younger audiences prefer more relaxed behavioural codes
November 2023
Younger people are generally more tolerant of all divisive behaviours at live events, though some activities are universally off-putting (smoking/vaping, talking on the phone), while being 'allowed' to do others (eating, drinking, taking photos) actually makes people of all ages keener to attend.
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Social issues and climate concerns matter to audiences
July 2023
People (especially younger ones and better off families) say that they care whether venues share their own social and environmental values - particularly when it comes to the Climate Crisis - and that they are more likely to attend if organisations take an active stance on these issues.
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Late booking trends
March 2023
Panto season pre-sales stand out as being back on track, though this goes against an overall trend towards later booking, with over 40% saying that they now tend to book more last minute than they used to.
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Social media behaviour
March 2023
More than 1/3 people say they follow an 'arts and culture' organisation on social media, though report being more inclined to do so out of interest in the broad topic or artform, than in that specific organisation and its events.
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Nearly half of people engaged with arts and culture digitally during the pandemic
April 2022
Nearly half of people say that they engaged with arts and culture online in some form during the pandemic, weighted towards audiences who are younger, typically high cultural engagers anyway, or disabled.
Thinking about the future of audiences brings in many different areas. It means thinking about examples of innovation that are happening now, and how changes to technology could relate to changes to engagement. It also means being alert to what young people do, value and believe (since those are young now will [still] be audiences well into the future).
It also pushes us to look beyond what we can say about the present and the past based on observation, to using what we know to think about what could happen - and what we want to happen - in the future.
Related videos
TEA Break | Following Arts and Cultural Organisations on Social Media
Watch nowSources from elsewhere
Communications Market Report
Ofcom
Interactive data portal and key findings data collected from industry by Ofcom.
AMA Digital Marketing Day 2023 Collection
AMAculturehive
A selection of resources from the sponsors of AMA's Digital Marketing Day 2023 - The Future is Here.
VR/AR Technologies in the Art World
Exor Technology / Art UK
Art UK report arguing that the growth and market penetration of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) has the potential to transform the experience of art in the coming decade.
