Audience betrayal?

Last night I had a conversation with a person who has a ton of credibility in the arts, particularly theatre.  I will not mention this person's name but this person has had significant positions in the arts for decades and is now running a major theatre institution.

So I ask this person "Is it harder or easier now to run a theatre?"

The answer was harder, much harder.  Then we talked about some of the reasons.  The one that stood out to me was this theatre's dramatic loss in subscribers.

At it's peak the theatre had around 16,000 subscribers.  Now it is down to around 6,000.

For many of us in the arts, this is nothing new.  Subscription numbers have been on the decline for some time.

Normally, I look at the loss of subscribers from the perspective of the audience.  This time I looked at it from the perspective of the arts instiution.

Imagine losing 10,000 subscribers.  Or if we want to put it in terms of revenue . . .

Imagine losing over one million dollars in earned income.

That hurts.  I mean that REALLY freakin' hurts.

And it probably hurts even more when you put it into context.

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For decades the subscriber model was THE model for generating earned income for the arts. 

It was a simple arrangement, the arts organization agreed to produce work that couldn't (or wouldn't) be seen in commerical venues.

In return the audience member would commitment to buying a ticket for all the shows in the season before the season actually started.

For a long time this arrangement works out just fine.  Then, pretty much without warning, things change.

Audience members go from arts patrons who subscribe to entertainment consumers who are notoriously less loyal.

Of course there are a thousand very good reasons for that switch but still, from the perspective of the arts organization, I wouldn't be shocked if they saw the loss of subscribers as a kind of betrayal.

I mean here they are valiantly trying to produce work designed to please their subscribers and no matter what they do that subscriber number just keeps dropping.

I have often wonder to myself why some arts organizations seem slow to adjust to the new reality of declining subscribers.

Maybe it is because they are, in a very real but intangible way, still recovering from the shock of seeing a decades long agreement broken.

Comments

[Chris Casquilho]

I always feel like I'm sitting in a boat on a fog-shrouded sea when I try to figure out why things happen in theatre trends - especially when the discussion turns to meta-trends. It's only in the last few decades that anyone has bothered to accumulate numbers in a systematic fashion, (say, the TCG reports) - but even these seem heavy on stats and low on explanations. So we're left to skate down one of the slipperiest speculative slopes I've ever seen - why didn't the show sell better? Where did the audience go?

Is it possible that among the reasons subscribers wandered away to the movies was, that after entering into a contract with the theatres, the subscribers' expectations were gradually disappointed by either too much of the same, or, conversely, too much of the different? What level of culpability do the theatres share in dissolution of this relationship?

[Rolando Teco]

The subscriber question is complex. I do think there is a tipping point, after which people rush to subscribe in order to secure good seats. Take for example, Roundabout here in New York. Everyone knows that unless you subscribe, you'll be shut out of good seats. Period. They're that popular.

Maybe one strategy for increasing subsribers is to reduce the number of performances of any given show, thus increasing competition for great seats.

Is that a nutty idea?

- Rolando Teco
(of Extra Criticum dot com)