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Median Ages for "High Art" Concertgoers


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Mark J. Stern of the University of Pennsylvania has written a follow-up report on the NEA's audience participation survey: Age and Arts Participation: A Case Against Demographic Destiny.

http://www.nea.gov/r...08-SPPA-Age.pdf

It's a pretty dense thing, and I'm not a statistician, but he links the precipitous decline in arts attendance to the decline of the "omnivore" (who attends a wide range and a large number of arts events) and "highbrow" (who attends a large number of various "high" arts events).

The average number of events attended by omnivores and highbrows dropped sharply between 2002 and 2008. Omnivores' average number of events attended fell from 12.1 to 11.0 events per year, a decline of 9 percent. Highbrow attendance fell by 11 percent — from 6.1 to 5.5 events per year — while other participants' attendance held steady. (See Figure 13, page 53.)

Between 2002 and 2008, a double blow hit cultural participation. First, the proportion of the population that we characterize as omnivores — individuals who attend a variety of different cultural forms — dropped sharply. At the same time, as with the rest of the population, the number of events that omnivores attended also fell — by more than one event per respondent. Taken together, the decline of omnivores' share of the population and their drop in average number of events attended represented 82 percent of the entire decline in individual attendance at benchmark arts events between 2002 and 2008.

(p.52, emphasis added)
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Glad you're still on this, volcanohunter; I think it's a topic closely related to the question of how arts might best be marketed - anyone who wants to think about that needs to understand what the situation is and how and why it changes. But I'm not a statistician either (I actually graduated in mathematics at the University of Chicago, where statistics was in a separate department, so I never learned anything about it) so I hope you and/or Kathleen can put the figures into clear perspective like you two did a couple of years ago. Just at the moment I'm not getting my head around the significance of that last bit, for example.

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I suspect it means that arts organizations are dependent on a relatively small group of people, who go to see all sorts of stuff, and if that core group reduces its attendance just a little bit, the bottom starts to fall out. Since building new audiences seems to be exceedingly difficult, perhaps arts organizations ought to be giving existing audiences incentives to attend more often.

I have a feeling that existing subsciption systems may not be sufficiently flexible. Several years ago my local symphony orchestra included quotes from subscribers in its season brochure. These people ranged from those who'd started subscribing a year or two earlier to those who'd been attending for 40 years straight. The quote that made my blood run cold came from a couple who had "switched" from the ballet to the symphony several years earlier. Perhaps their budget hadn't allowed them to subscribe to both organizations, yet Stern seems to suggest that arts organizations are dependent on people who attend both.

In my city the bare minimum to which a "highbrow" could subsribe would be, say, four symphony concerts, four ballets, three operas and a two-play pass to the Shakespeare festival. Assuming this would involve the purchase of two tickets to each show, that's 13 performances and 26 tickets. This may be more than many budgets can manage, even with the discounts often included in subscriptions.

Perhaps institutions like Lincoln Center ought to introduce a discount card that would allow people to get lower ticket prices at all of its venues and, hopefully, encourage greater attendance at a variety of events, particularly among those unwilling or unable to commit to a subscription. Performing arts organizations in other cities coule devise similar schemes. I know they'd rather have full-season subscribers, but that may not be a realistic option for some people.

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It sure seems obvious to me that any arts presenter who depends on audience members conforming to one profile is limiting their audience/market. Focusing on "omnivores" or whatever they're called seems risky to me. But I appreciate the clarification; it fits the discussion of the survey results.

On the other hand, I've seen some signs of flexibility in the "make your own subscription" plan - buy tickets to any three performances, for example, whether of the same program or of different ones or any combination - and get a rate.

The discount card idea is interesting, but doesn't the test of all these schemes come from whether overall ticket sales bring in more or less money and audience? Discounting some tickets may mean the budget has to be made up some other way; various schemes are helpful if, overall, more comes in, I suppose.

(Another common-sense development I've noticed in recent years is sensitive pricing of seats according to location - remember when main-floor seats were one price, balcony another, and so on? Many theaters now charge less for the ends of the rows than for the middle, less for the back rows and maybe a few of the front ones than half-way back, and so on, to reflect what people show they want. If this sort of thinking keeps up, we may one day pick our seats on interactive seat plans, like we do for airline tickets; indeed some theaters already use this method.)

But what is so difficult about building new audiences? I'm not implying I think it's easy; I'm saying I don't know the difficulties. From the comments of people in the audiences around me, many who do come in have strange expectations, which I often improve with a few words. Why weren't those words already in their minds? (Obviously, the marketing isn't completely off-target, or I would have been sitting there nearly alone, and at a final performance at that.) If arts presenters depend on established audiences, are they vulnerable to the "one profile" problem I suggested? Or isn't it a problem?

(I'm reminded of a chilling experience of my own. In the late '80s, when NYCB had stopped looking on stage like it had when Balanchine supervised it, I was strolling the Promenade of the theater at intermission looking for solace from one of the familiar faces in the crowd I had known. There were none, and, weirdly, few of the people there were talking, either. One of the marketers - you can often identify them by the clothing and especially the sheaves of paper or clasp envelopes cradled in one arm - pointed to me and said loudly, I suppose to her fellow workers, "He's old audience!" There were plenty of "New Audience" there, and the financial health, if not necessarily the aesthetic quality, of the ballet company founded by Balanchine and Kirstein looked promising: It had developed its new audience.)

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The NEA is promising additional follow-up reports on the 2008 survey, including one on the impact that arts education has on audience participation. There is a well-established correlation between educational level and arts attendance, but a forthcoming report will test the assumption "that participation in arts lessons and classes is the most significant predictor of arts participation later in life." Apparently, the answer is yes, which means that arts education in schools becomes a big issue for arts organizations. If this is true, though, I am at a loss to understand why ballet is having such difficulty attracting young audiences. Did all the little girls who took ballet lessons grow up to hate the artform?

The single scariest stat in Stern's report is in the chart on p.50, which indicates that in 2008 67.2% of American adults didn't attend any performing arts events. That number was 61% in 1982. Either way it's a terrible figure with all sorts of bad political implcations. Of the others, 10.1% are "omnivores" (down from 15.1% in 1982), 5.3% are "highbrows" (6.1% in 1982) and the remaining 17.4% aren't classified. I would assume most in the last group are people who attend a single arts event in the course of a year rather than people fanatically devoted to a single discipline.

Stern is primarily interested in the age issue, and he argues that the preoccupation with "graying" audiences is overblown because baby boomers constitute a disproportionally large part of the population, and every time they move from one age bracket to the next, it skews the stats. However, this doesn't alter the fact that audiences are shrinking across the board, and that some artforms, like ballet and especially jazz, are not attracting younger people in the same numbers they once did. Opera has never attracted many young people, so the fact that it's worst off in this regard is hardly surprising.

I don't see why targeting "omnivores" would be a risky strategy. What characterizes them is that they are not snobs, their tastes are very broad, and they are especially active arts consumers. Averaging up the stats between 1982 and 2008, Stern notes that "[o]mnivores represent the most active segment of the entire arts audience. They go to more types of arts activities than other groups, and they go to more individual events than others. In fact, although the omnivores represented only 13 percent of the population, they accounted for 58 percent of all events attended between 1992 and 2008." (p.20) Wouldn't that make them the target demographic?

Somewhere on this board I remember a discussion about whether there is much cross-genre advertising in the arts (I mean ballet companies advertising in orchestra playbills, and so forth). Our consensus seemed to be that there wasn't, which, in light of the stats, is an extremely stupid oversight. But I notice that in an e-mail I received yesterday from the New York Philharmonic, there was a discount offer for City Opera tickets. (25% off L'elisir tickets priced $40 or higher, March 22-26; code NYP25 for online purchases, if anyone's interested.) Its success or failure would certainly test my theory about encouraging ominvorism and highbrowism.

http://www.nycopera.com/calendar/view.aspx?id=12515&utm_source=s110099&utm_medium=m110003&utm_campaign=c110020

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I don't see why targeting "omnivores" would be a risky strategy. What characterizes them is that they are not snobs, their tastes are very broad, and they are especially active arts consumers. Averaging up the stats between 1982 and 2008, Stern notes that "[o]mnivores represent the most active segment of the entire arts audience. They go to more types of arts activities than other groups, and they go to more individual events than others. In fact, although the omnivores represented only 13 percent of the population, they accounted for 58 percent of all events attended between 1992 and 2008." (p.20) Wouldn't that make them the target demographic?

Probably not, at least from a traditional marketing perspective. Omnivores would probably be considered mile-wide and inch deep. They may go to a large volume of arts events in aggregate, but it's unlikely that they will go to any one kind of event a lot which means you get limited bang for your marketing bucks. The advantage of going after "highbrows" is that they are more likely to go to a limited number of kinds of arts events, but go to them repeatedly year after year which means there is more potential for return on marketing investment.

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the omnivores ... accounted for 58 percent of all events attended ...

My concern was about writing off the remaining 42%, scattered among several profiles though they may be. Better to appeal to them in some proportionate ways - if it's not highly productive, maybe don't lavish resources on them, but not take them for granted either.

Maybe there's a dynamic aspect - individuals migrating profiles, changing as they have experience. Recently I was trying to get a little more insight into performing-arts marketing and started talking about heightening people's appreciation. I was politely brought back to the topic at hand by the person I was talking with: "We're not trying to sell tickets, we're trying to attract donors." Uh, hunh? And never the twain meet?

I'll grant some people support arts because they believe it's a Good Thing or that it's Good For the Community's Image, not because they're addicts like some of us, but still. My point is to wonder whether these figures can catch the phenomenon of personal development, from ticket-buyer to contributor, and whether the numbers only look back, not showing possible directions for future developments.

you get limited bang for your marketing bucks

Could it depend on who "you" are? Whether you're running a struggling ballet troupe, or a whole performing-arts shopping center, like the Lincoln or Kennedy Centers? (Some of the former, of course, try to appeal broadly, offering, say, Balanchine, Taylor, and Tharp, to Mendelssohn, Bach, and Sinatra, all on one program.)

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Here is the report on arts education and arts participation.

http://www.nea.gov/research/2008-SPPA-ArtsLearning.pdf

Researchers Nick Rabkin and E.C. Hedberg admit that they are hobbled by the available data. The NEA's survey doesn't ask especially detailed questions about the sort of arts education people received in childhood, nor have the same questions been asked over the years. As they point out, the collected data doesn't distinguish between someone who received 10 years of one-on-one piano instruction from someone who spent a few months learning to play the recorder in public school, and it doesn't record whether either enjoyed the experience. Likewise, there aren't reliable statistics available about what sort of arts education is actually available in public schools. All that can safely be said is that music and visual arts classes are far more prevalent in elementary schools than drama or dance, and that while the availability of drama classes increases in high school, dance classes become even rarer than before. Furthermore, the arts are often not compulsory subjects in high schools.

What can be gleaned seems predictable enough. Poor children are less likely to get an arts education than wealthy children, and the children of parents who received an arts education are likelier to get one themselves. The more artforms studied, the better. The person who studied piano, ballet and art in childhood is more likely to attend arts events than the person who studied only one of them. Among those who didn't receive an arts education in childhood, 27.3% attended at least one arts event in 2008, as opposed to 51.5% of those who studied one artform, 63% of those who studied two, 73.5% of those who studied three, 76.4% of those who studied four, and 81.2% of those who studied five artforms (p.30). Overall, 57.3% of adults who received some sort of arts education in childhood attended at least one performing arts event, as did 69.5% of those who took arts education classes as adults. Some 90% of people who received arts education as adults had also received it as children, and the more artforms they studied in childhood, the more likely they were to continue studying the arts in adulthood. (So, off to ballet class, everybody!)

The problem for arts organizations is that arts education in public schools has been in decline since the late 1970s, and while it rebounded somewhat by the 1990s, some anecdotal evidence suggests that it has declined further since the introduction of No Child Left Behind in 2001, since schools are urged to concentrate on basic academic skills. However, this cannot be confirmed by the available data, or lack thereof. White children have been relatively unaffected the reduction in arts education in the school system--57.9% of young white adults had received at least some arts training--but the number of minority children receiving arts education has fallen significantly, to 28.1% among Hispanics and 26.2% of African Americans. (fig. 24)

[T]he decline in the rate of childhood arts education among white children is relatively insignificant from 1982 to 2008, just five percent, while the declines in the rate among African American and Hispanic children are quite substantial — 49 percent for African American and 40 percent for Hispanic children. These statistics support the conclusion that almost the entire decline in childhood arts education between the 1982 and 2008 SPPAs was absorbed by African American and Hispanic children. The findings also lend further credibility to the hypothesis that the declines for those children resulted from declines in arts education in the schools, where African American and Hispanic children were the most likely to have received any arts instruction.
(p.47)

The effect is already being felt. In 2008 41.7% of young white adults had attended a performing arts event, while 24.9% of non-whites did the same. This tendency will present additional challenges to arts organizations in the future, as the racial composition of the United States continues to change.

Finally, there's this bit at the end.

The arts themselves have changed in many significant ways since the first SPPA in 1982. Some of those changes have been driven by artists who, as artists often do, have rebelled against many of the conventions of the art world. The traditional art forms have been transformed, deconstructed, and integrated. Enormous passion and interest is now directed at media and forms that hardly existed at the time of the first SPPA. Our assumptions about cultural hierarchy — terms like "high" or "fine" art, "pop" and "folk" art — have lost their traditional meanings, or lost their meaning altogether. And new expectations about how we participate in culture have developed in the wake of the computer age, the Internet, the do-it-yourself (DIY) phenomenon, the rock concert, and hip hop. The future of the arts may not lie in the restoration of higher levels of "benchmark" attendance at traditional performances and exhibitions, desirable as those ends may be. Rather, it could lie in new kinds of arts experiences and participation that are more active, that blur the line between performer and audience, that make the beholder a part of the creative process and artists the animators of community life — experiences which, for some people, hold more personal value than sitting in an audience. Those kinds of experiences are being developed by artists and arts organizations, often in their education programs, in communities and schools across the country, and we need to know more about them.
(pp.52-53)

If this is true, it's bad news for ballet companies. However, such a conclusion is completely beyond the scope of the study, and the researchers don't provide the slightest bit of evidence to back up this assertion.

Perhaps it can be found in this report on a "multi-modal understanding of arts participation," but I haven't read it yet.

http://www.nea.gov/research/2008-SPPA-BeyondAttendance.pdf

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I don't understand really well the term "arts education" as it's used here (I skimmed the first dozen pages with Search in Page). That, and "childhood" and "adulthood," seem to be undefined terms, and while the latter dichotomy doesn't bother me too much - does childhood education end when you graduate secondary school or university? - the first one is more important. It seems to be about making or doing, in the sense of making a picture or a garment or playing an instrument or speaking a part. Right? Whatever it is, it seems to correlate with later arts attendance, though (ironically) not with arts performance, which is more doing. (Use of the term "education" as a synonym for "promotion" doesn't seem to fit here.)

Anyway, since the development of my own arts appreciation owes nothing to this kind of activity - I can remember little of it and didn't take to it - I'm tempted to think that although it's worth studying, because of this correlation, it's not the whole story. There are probably other ways people come to an appreciation for the arts and develop a need for that experience. I did get a little coaching in visual composition in my second college, for example, but I think this is outside the view of these studies. More to the point with me was - and is - the application of aesthetics to what I see and hear. Criticism that tells us about the work's life, for example. I never encountered any of this until my second college, so I don't think it's in the purview of these studies.

(My arts attendance may be outside some studies, too: I couldn't answer the first question about what date I seen a ballet program on a questionnaire recently e-mailed to me, because it offered only mutually-exclusive single answers, and I had seen the program multiple times. Not an NEA survey, but another example of flawed data-gathering. I may be a walking statistical anomaly, but nobody knows, if I'm not even counted once.)

That last bit you quote is a little troubling - arts appreciation seems to me always to be participatory. Merce, and Mr. B. too, were pretty explicit about it, regarding dance performance: You make of it what you will. You make your own perception. (They both cared about what their audiences' perceptions were, of course.) Whoever wrote your last excerpt lacks depth of experience.

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Part of the problem with the data is that it doesn't define clearly what arts education is. Public school art classes? Extracurricular ballet lessons? High school band?

For the purposes of the study, adult is defined as anyone over the age of majority. I would expect that many of those who reported receiving an arts education in adulthood got it at university. I don't think that my undergrad program was unique in having a mandatory fine arts component. We had a choice of introductory courses in art history, film studies, dramatic arts, music history and, for more intrepid souls, music theory. Hands-on courses in painting, acting or playing an instrument were restricted to majors in those areas. I suspect the reasons for this were entirely practical. It's feasible to lead a historical or theoretical course in a lecture hall packed with 200 students. It would be impossible to teach 50 people at once to play the oboe. To the extent that they were offered, dance courses were restricted to phys ed and drama majors, but then my alma mater didn't have a BFA program in dance. However, the university's recreation department offered extracurricular ballet classes alongside yoga, karate and swimming lessons. There was also a modern dance club that staged a show annually, and there was a social dancing club, of course. My recollection of the ballet and modern classes is that their participants were overwhelmingly female, and I'm told it was the same with the ballroom dancing club.

My mother was music teacher at a large elementary school, so I have some idea of what arts education in her school district looks like. Music classes consist of choral singing and learning to play the recorder (because the plastic ones are dirt cheap), xylophones and African drums. Older children also receive guitar instruction. (My elementary school had a string orchestra, though I understand it's since been "privatized.") This is designed to give children basic music-reading skills and performing experience. There is also a music appreciation component to broaden the pupils' grasp of music. Theoretical and historical courses don't work well with young pupils, though my high school music teacher was of the historical inclination. ("Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg on May 7, 1833...," he would drone on. It didn't go over well.) For what it's worth, what my mother's pupils enjoyed playing most on their recorders was Beethoven's Ode to Joy. They also loved singing Bach chorales, though cheerful children's songs were big hits, too.

Unlike music classes, art classes in elementary schools tend not to be taught by specialists. Apparently, most homeroom teachers find teaching the course "easy," because children sit happily at their desks with their crayons, construction paper, glitter and glue. The teachers have the children execute projects set out in the teacher's handbook, and the art appreciation component comes in having children copy sample works of art. I expect that the extracurricular classes offered by art museums are much more comprehensive.

My mother aimed to give her pupils some ballet appreciation by showing videos of child-friendly ballets. The Nutcracker was an obvious choice, especially since it fit nicely into the lull between the Christmas concert and Christmas holidays. Some children would watch, say, Damian Woetzel spin at dizzying speeds and scoff, claiming that they could do the same. Others, the ones enrolled in extracurricular dance lessons, would protest that their classmates could do no such thing. I think that illustrates how arts lessons increase appreciation.

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Could it depend on who "you" are? Whether you're running a struggling ballet troupe, or a whole performing-arts shopping center, like the Lincoln or Kennedy Centers? (Some of the former, of course, try to appeal broadly, offering, say, Balanchine, Taylor, and Tharp, to Mendelssohn, Bach, and Sinatra, all on one program.)

Well, no. Say you are a dance company deciding which consumers to target your marketing campaign towards. If the question comes down to whether you want to go after an omnivore who may spend on average $5,000 on arts performances in a given year, but that $5,000 is spread among 25 different events, of which an average of 5 are dance events. This year those 5 dance events are Troupes A, B, C, D, E, and F. Next year, our consumer attends dance events, B, G, H, I, J, and K. The following year, the consumer attends dance events, J, L, M, N, and O. From a marketing perspective, the consumer has very little loyalty; he or she is a "grazer" who samples many different products but rarely repeats their business, so once those marketing dollars are spent, the return on them is limited.

A practiced marketer would probably recommend going after someone who may have a more limited arts budget, but is much more likely to return such as a "highbrow." My guess is that highbrows are seen as folks who may spend less overall on arts, but are seen as potential return customers either in the same season or year after year. Even though the marketing dollars to get them to come initially may be greater than an omnivore, if they come three times a season or can be counted on to buy ticket(s) year after year, the marketing investmen to get them to come is "evergreen." And of course for non-profits, a loyal patron is much more likely to make a gift or bequest than one who only comes once every several years.

You can think of it as single ticket customers vs. a subscriber base. Single tickets are nice, but almost any arts organization is eager to build a subscriber base to work from year after year.

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The NEA publishes information on American arts-going with some regularity. Now here is smidge of data from the UK. This study seem to focus primarily on the difference between "arts consumption" and "arts participation." It seems to me that the NEA regards "consumption" as "participation."

http://www.psmag.com/business-economics/participation-in-the-arts-driven-by-education-not-class

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