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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Use of social and digital by Audience Spectrum
July 2024
Use of digital media and digital varies between Audience Spectrum, suggesting different potential routes to reach different segments.
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Attitudes to heritage
June 2024
We asked the extent to which people agreed or disagreed with a range of statements about history and heritage, to better understand the attitudes which people bring to their engagement. These results were surprising in a number of ways: neither consistently conforming to a traditional nor a progressive perspective.
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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.
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Shifts in audience behaviour are likely to be longer term – but may bring new audiences
September 2021
People are expecting to keep attending less culture in-person than they used to, with audiences likely to skew towards younger, more urban groups, or families.
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Increased wellbeing is offset by continued worry
September 2021
While people's sense of wellbeing continues to slowly improve, the same audiences' concern about falling ill with Covid-19 is growing, and most expect further lockdowns both this year and next.
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Digital Audience Survey | Findings
July 2021
Latest findings from The Audience Agency's Digital Audience Survey show how audiences have responded to arts, culture and heritage organisations moving so much of their offering online during the COVID-19 lock-down period.
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Indications Audience Behaviours May Change After the Pandemic
July 2021
There are already indications that audience behaviour will be different in the 'new-normal' after the pandemic, particularly in relation to more local attendance, greater digital engagement (alongside, and in some cases replacing, live attendance) and openness to changes in event formats from significant minorities of the population (e.g. through blended digital and live events).
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Report | The adoption of digital technology in the arts
December 2019
This report is intended specifically to help Welsh arts organisations adopt and make use of new digital technologies – and to transform their business models as a result.
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.
