If you are a theatre lover, you’ll no doubt be accustomed to putting a portion of your income aside to make sure you have enough for your special nights at a show.
But with cost of living pressures biting hard, you may be adopting some new budgeting habits, including scrimping on things that previously you would not have thought twice about spending on.
This penny pinching is not good news for our performing arts companies, which rely on our discretionary spend to keep going, especially in the face of unprecedented cost pressures at their end as well.
As a spokesperson from Malthouse Theatre told ArtsHub in 2023, ‘The cost of producing new Australian theatre has grown exponentially,’ and that ‘every budget line has increased’, adding that the company ‘continue[s] to seek support through fundraising to ensure that [they] don’t push these costs onto audiences’.
These comments echo a common dilemma facing so many Australian arts companies currently, as they attempt to keep their shows affordable amid skyrocketing costs that are draining their hip pockets dry.
Read: Alarming cost increases for arts organisations not in line with funding levels
One intriguing idea to help fix these problems is for more of them to offer their cash-strapped patrons discounted ticket deals to ensure these loyal audiences don’t miss out on their arts experiences during tough times.
Perhaps the most radical version of such a scheme is the “pay what you can” model, where companies set a low minimum ticket price and allow audiences to pay what they think is fair based on how much they can afford at the time.
In Australia, venues and companies currently offering such deals include Arts House in Melbourne, La Boite Theatre in Brisbane and State Theatre Company South Australia in Adelaide. Other companies offer variations on the idea through reduced price tickets for concession holders and other groups, and some also have “rush-tix” deals on certain days, but very few have actual “pay what you can” offers.
But the big question is: do these altruistic “pay what you can” models actually work for performing arts companies? To what extent do they boost companies’ audience reach and their bottom lines?
Are performing arts ticket prices too high?
According to Live Performance Australia’s (LPA’s) latest ‘Ticket Attendance and Revenue‘ report (published in December 2023, based on 2022 data), the average ticket price to see a show in Australia – across all genres of theatre, dance, circus and music – is $90.96.
This fairly high price point begs the question of how much is too much for performing arts audiences in economic downtimes?
The answer to that depends largely on the kind of theatre or dance company you are, and what your mainstay audience is like. For example, are your fans mostly retirees with no mortgages who haven’t noticed a big difference in their expenses of late? Or are they younger people with large loan repayments, HECS debts and/or many other pressing essential costs to cover every month?
Regardless of your audience, the latest big picture story reveals that, in fact, there is still fairly strong demand from Australian audiences for paid live arts experiences right now. The latest LPA report puts the number of tickets sold across all live art forms in Australia in 2022 at near equal levels to the number sold in 2019 (pre-COVID), which is a good result. That said, the LPA’s latest data is now almost two years old, so is hardly a real-time snapshot.
Also, Creative Australia’s 2023 Audience Outlook Monitor shows that, in 2023, four in 10 people surveyed said they were limiting their attendance at paid arts events due to financial pressures, and more than half of the under 55s said they felt financially worse off in 2023 than the year before.
It’s therefore likely that our theatre and dance companies have been experiencing sales dips recently, but these companies are, for obvious reasons, tight-lipped around specific sales data, so there is no way of knowing the exact flow-on effects of these financial barriers.
Where pay-what-you-can models make a difference
No matter which way you look at it, there is clearly a sizeable portion of the Australian public that is not attending theatre currently for no other reason than that they can’t afford the price of a ticket.
So, how could a “pay what you can” ticketing scheme help solve this dilemma?
Evidence of the success of these schemes is quite hard to find, but a research study conducted in 2018 by university students in Texas surveying six different not-for-profit theatres in the US is quite illuminating.
Their results show that on the nights where these companies offered “pay what you can” deals, in most cases, the numbers of tickets sold went through the roof. For the Joyce Theater in New York, for example, there was an 85% increase in tickets sold on those nights.
But on the flipside (and this was especially true for the most well-established theatres in the survey), the “pay what you can” nights saw ticket revenue drop dramatically on those nights. In the worst case, ticket revenue dropped by around 80%, presumably because the majority of ticket holders to those shows chose the cheapest options on offer.
Overall, the study showed that, while all the theatres found these schemes a very good way to get more people into the theatre (especially first-time audiences), even with the extra tickets they sold on those nights, their takings generally suffered as a result, and in some cases there were huge declines in ticket sales revenue on their “pay what you can” nights.
The moral of this story? If you are a high price point company offering “pay what you can” deals, it’s best to limit them to certain nights when you can tolerate low box office revenue, and make sure you can offset those financial losses with healthy sales of full-price tickets on other nights.
But if your tickets are normally priced at the lower end of the scale (say, around $30 to $70), having some “pay what you can” nights in your season presents you with less of a financial risk, because there is not so much difference between what your tickets normally cost and what people are likely to pay on those discounted nights.
Overall, this model appears win-win for companies with lower price point offerings, but if handled correctly, it can pay off for larger, higher price point companies as well.
Other ways to encourage theatre for all
Aside from “pay what you can” options, there is at least one major Australian company working on new ways to widen audience access.
Executive Director and co-CEO of Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC), Sally Noonan, says one of the MTC’s priorities since Artistic Director and co-CEO Anne-Louise Sarks joined the company in 2021, has been to widen access to the theatre in line with the idea that “theatre is for everyone”.
Noonan says the company has recently introduced a Ways to Save page on its website as part of this effort, and while on the surface this seems a simple measure, it has so far been an important way for the company to demystify its discounted ticket offerings, especially for first-time attendees.
‘Sometimes the online journey to find available discounts can be a confusing one,’ Noonan explains. ‘And we know audiences are price sensitive, especially at the moment,’ she adds.
‘So our “Ways to Save” page has been a really important mechanism to simplify the purchasing process, especially for first-time attendees who are less familiar with our systems and price structures.’
Read: Theatre review: World Problems, MTC, Southbank Theatre
Noonan adds that while a “pay what you can” model isn’t ideal for the MTC due to its size and price points, the company has found other ways to offer discounts to people who need them, including through cleverly timed “flash sales” and weekend “rush tix” offers.
‘One of our most popular discounted ticket deals is our $35 Weekend Rush tix,’ Noonan says – referring to the $35 tickets the company releases on Thursdays for selected Friday and Saturday night shows that same weekend, and which are available only within a four-hour window (12pm to 4pm on Thursdays) or until the allocation has sold out.
‘We introduced those weekend rush tickets in late 2022, and they have proven a real hit,’ Noonan says, adding that a recent “flash sale” campaign the company ran during its season of 37 was also very successful.
‘Because of the show’s title, we decided to release some $37 tickets only for a special 37-hour window of time,’ she explains. ‘People really loved that.’
Ultimately, what’s clear from Noonan’s comments is that efforts to widen audience access to the theatre over the long term takes strong organisational commitment, including dedicating staff time and resources to the cause.
‘We do spend a huge amount of time thinking about these things,’ Noonan says.
‘We know that different people are looking for different things from us in terms of when and how they book their tickets, so we are continually trying to refine and improve this aspect of what we do in line with our pledge,’ she concludes.
