Ticket Sales and Revenue Benchmarking Report

New data from the League’s partnership with the Arts Advisory Board for the Arts (ABA) investigates up-to-the-minute trends in audience attendance, ticket sales, and revenue. If your orchestra took part, the person who completed the survey will have received a report specific to your budget group, via email from ABA.

The picture we see from the data is very varied – both across regions and across budget sizes. However, three cross-budget group insights are clear:

• 2022 holiday season concerts sold well, with many orchestras filling a higher proportion of seats than for 2019 holiday season concerts.
• This holiday uptick is particularly welcome news given that a significant proportion of orchestras’ pre-pandemic audiences had not returned by the end of FY22 and looked unlikely to return in the future. Subscription revenues have been especially hard hit. The silver lining is that there is a unique opportunity to engage new-to-file audiences in new ways, with offerings and retention strategies that meet audiences where they are today.
• Looking ahead, programming plans for FY23 seek to build on what worked in terms of revenue in FY22. For many orchestras, this means increasing popular, traditional, and holiday programming. At the same time, smaller to medium budget orchestras attributed a small but significant proportion of FY22 revenue to innovative programming and informal events, and they are planning to increase their investment in this work in FY23.