Conventional Wisdom About the Audiences for the Performing Arts Questioned
October 3, 2008 | Read Time: 1 minute
Conventional wisdom about whether audiences for live performing-arts events are dwindling is debated in two articles in major newspapers today:
Whether there’s any truth to the notion that supporters of the performing arts represent a rapidly aging audience or whether such audiences consistently comprise older patrons, even as those patrons come and go, is the subject of a Los Angeles Times exploration of what it calls the “ageless audience.”
An article in The Wall Street Journal reports that ticket sales for classical music concerts are rising and the revenues of orchestras are growing. The number of orchestra concerts performed annually in the United States rose 24 percent in the past decade, to 37,000, and ticket-sale income from orchestra performances grew almost 18 percent, to $608-million, between the 2004-5 and 2005-6 seasons, the newspaper reports.
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