The central challenge facing arts managers is to fill the ever-widening gap between rapidly increasing expenses and earned income, primarily from ticket sales. This gap continues to grow each year since the number of seats we have to sell does not increase but expenses do.
Unfortunately, the favored technique used to fill budget gaps has been increasing ticket prices. When we increase prices, typically at budget time, we hope that a small increase will not be noticeable and we need the added revenue to break even. However, we have been doing this for so long that tickets prices are now too high for many people to afford regularly. It is not unusual to see tickets for major opera companies cost $250 or more and the best theater tickets are now well over the $100 mark in many cities. For two tickets to an opera you can now buy a computer and watch Leontyne Price and Joan Sutherland on YouTube for free!
No wonder so many people have stopped going to performances. A recent study by the NEA showed that a huge number of people are getting their arts exposure on-line and fewer are coming to the theater. No wonder so many arts organizations are suffering. Without audiences we receive no ticket revenue and the audience members we lose cease to donate as well. The claim that the arts are irrelevant is getting difficult to dispute.
The arts are not irrelevant. I observe this every day during the Kennedy Center's free Millennium Stage performances that attract hundreds of audience members each night with minimal marketing. Our annual Open House in September features performances on each of our stages all day, for free. The most popular events? Ballet and the symphony, which conventional wisdom says are the most irrelevant of all.
If we want to keep, not to mention rebuild, our audiences, we need to rethink our ticket prices and to find other ways to balance our budgets.
We need to find productive ways to lower our costs. Cutting programming is not a good solution, but establishing creative joint ventures and reducing infrastructure are.
And we need to work actively and aggressively to increase fund raising revenue (by producing exciting work and marketing that work well) and use a portion of this revenue to lower ticket prices.
We do not need to lower the prices of all tickets, however. We find that the buyers of the higher price tickets are less price sensitive; they will buy at any cost. That is why the premium price tickets on Broadway continue to sell.
But the audience members who buy lower price seats tend to be very price sensitive; reducing the price of these tickets should have a big impact on audience size.
If we don't, we will find ourselves with fewer and fewer people in our audiences, and an ever-smaller donor base. The arts will, at best, become the exclusive province of the elite, and to the vast majority of people, live arts will become irrelevant.
It isn't about lowering the costs! But rather about upping the rewards of what is “for sale" and how we need to quit talking about perceived barriers to what is free...our imagination.
Please look to the future, Mr. Kaiser...and hand the next generation a yearning and compelling reason to bust a move on your stage, let alone to want to pay to watch someone else!
Let us know that art is for art's sake; for the sake of creating...and for and all that has yet to be imagined...and so free from all of the problems you talk about too often.
And oh,if your goal is to whip your readers into a frenzy with intentional trickery, noting semi-spiteful observations of passive "arts" participation and the irrelevancy of the arts, well OK, at least you got me heated!
But hey, come on...an ink-and-quill-Jeffersonian approach would seem a more imaginative use of your time to get your point across.
The arts are experiential, mind-blowing, determined efforts of receiving or creating.
You know this.
So stop dumbing-down your great outreach experiment and start giving us all reason to read, re-read, and pound our fists with excitement as you spit out what we need to hear and believe in...something pure, new, and hey..."creative"...that pushes the arts forward like a shot to the moon.
Your words can create. They have to create.
Except for opera and a few select performances, hundreds of seats sit unoccupied in each of their theaters, each and every day. Who’s to blame for this sorry predicament – which by the way is not unique to the Kennedy Center – the economy, the public, the times? No, the problem lies with the management. If you are seeing empty seats night after night at your venue, you don’t need to look to an economic model for your predicament; you need to look into a mirror. Instead of incrementally raising ticket prices or justifying their continuance, all organizations should be taking a hard look at cutting ticket prices drastically. A non-profit, paying no taxes, in financial distress: you all need some disinterested oversight, if not a reality check!
Price has nothing to do with cost, but with the value perceived by the buyer. So while much of this article is correct, it's correct about the wrong things.
Arts organizations (and everyone else) should be building the show around the audience, not just building the show and then trying to figure out how to charge enough.
More here: http://bit.ly/6LLFMb
Sadly most art is already the the exclusive province of the elite and most artists have to have an independant income.
With 17 cameras, the close-ups are so much better than the view from the best orchestra seat. The stars are interviewed at intermission and a narrator, always the star of another opera, gives context to the production. The sound systems at movie theaters are notoriously good.
The best part - $20 tickets! And I would no longer trade them for $500 seats at the Met. Try it if you're near one of the selected theaters - you'll love it:
http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/broadcast/hd_events_current.aspx
At out-of-the-way "performing arts center" venues (such as Wolf Trap, for example, but also arguably including the Kennedy Center), where there is little or no competition nearby for food & beverage or parking concessions, the local-monopoly prices that those concessions charge -- just like the online ticketing charges, which "it is me" cited -- can mount up quickly on top of the lowest-priced ticket.
If a low-end patron is to choose to eat elsewhere and/or to get to and from a venue by public transportation (when and where that is a practical option for the entire trip, both before and after a performance), he or she is often forced to put an extremely low value on his or her own time and convenience.
I love the arts! As a musician myself I have a ton of respect and watch most shows in awe. But the costs are limiting the majority of the population from getting to experience and appreciate it. Figure out ways to meet the budget. Many things have changed over the past several decades and if the financial situation of the arts does not change with it, it will become as obscure as many say it should be.
I have worked in non-profit arts, the public sector, and corporate America. The area that uses its resources the best is the non-profit arts sector by a wide margin, followed distantly by Government, with Corporate America not even in sight. If anyone needs to get additional training, it is the MBA's who have run so many corporations into the ground while they themselves have reaped personal profit. Ask any accountant who deals with non-profits and for-profits and they will tell you that the non-profit managers have far more skills in managing money and meeting their communities needs. If the non-profit sector were subsidized to a tiny fraction in the manner that the for-profit sector was, it would be healthy. While there are some poor non-profit managers out there, the vast majority of them are smart, hard-working and have dedicated themselves to serving the public, rather than lining their own pockets. Let's see what happens when the Government stops subsidizing Con-Agra, Shell Oil, General Electric etc... .
Most civilized countries have determined that a healthy and affordable arts community is good for the well-being of their citizens. America gives about fifty cents per-capita to the arts on a federal level. This is exponentially smaller than every other developed country in the world. What is amazing is not that the arts are in trouble here, but that they survive and continue to sometimes produce great work.