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City lights to red dirt: Connecting with audiences across Australia

In this Audience Outlook Monitor report, ‘City Lights to Red Dirt’, we look at the geographic trends in data collected from past attendees to cultural events, comparing audiences in big cities, outer suburbs and the regions.

Our cities, suburbs and regions are different places today and audiences are responding in interesting ways.

Attendees of arts and cultural events are feeling the pressure of the housing crisis, changing work and commuting patterns, navigating weather events and approaching travel and leisure differently.

In this new report, ‘City Lights to Red Dirt’, we look at the geographic trends in data collected from past audiences of cultural events.

 

Click the buttons below to download the report, as a PDF or accessible Word version, or read on for more of the findings.

 
 

Three chapters, three geographic audience segments

The report compares audiences in three main geographic areas, providing insights for connecting people with culture where they live and the places they visit.

Download the chapters as separate fact sheets below.

 

Audiences in Big Cities

Arts audiences in big cities are experiencing the arts at high levels, but with market saturation and the shifting dynamics of Australia's CBDs post-pandemic, new challenges have emerged for organisations to cut through.

  • In Australia’s big cities, more people are attending arts events more often, but resident arts organisations are competing in a congested market. The data from past attendees shows that:

    • 85% of big city audiences said they attended at least one kind of cultural event in the fortnight before data collection. Attendance is also more frequent amongst big city arts audiences: 38% attend a gallery or museum at least once a month, compared to outer suburbs (27%) and regional audiences (29%).

    • Arts audiences living in big cities are spending more on tickets to in-person live events and cultural activities: 7 in 10 spent more than $50 the fortnight before data collection (69%), compared to 65% of outer suburb audiences and 57% of regional audiences.

    • While most audiences are drawn to fun, uplifting and even escapist content right now, big city audiences are showing a greater appetite for challenging, topical content in the next 12 months (52%), compared to audiences living in outer suburbs and regional areas (both 41%). With more options on offer, they are also more likely to tune into reviews when considering what to attend.

 
 

Audiences in Outer Suburbs

Outer suburbs are the biggest growth areas in Australia right now, and have an expanding arts audience looking for more cultural experiences closer to home — but don't yet have enough venues nearby to accommodate.

  • In the outskirts and outer suburbs of big cities, the rate and frequency of attendance are slightly lower than big cities, but the market is growing, as more people move to more affordable areas where families can enjoy different lifestyles. The data from past attendees of events shows:

    • Audiences in outer suburbs are feeling slightly more pessimistic than optimistic about their financial situation, with almost half (46%) say they’re worse off than they were a year ago, and 25% expect to be financially worse off in the coming year.

    • Audiences in outer suburbs (combining both residents and visitors) were most likely to attend a cinema locally (59%), whereas big city audiences were comparatively more likely to attend a local live performance. Audiences in the regions were most likely to attend a fair/festival locally (40%) or visit a museum or gallery (51%).

    • Audiences in outer suburban areas are the least likely to be participating in online events right now. Half of outer suburbs residents say online arts events and experiences are playing a small (43%) or substantial role (8%) in their life, while another 49% say they play no role.

 
 

Audiences in the Regions

Across Australia's diverse regions, audiences are experiencing access to arts and culture differently. Factoring in extra time and travel costs means heightened barriers in 2023, but with a decentralising trend, more options could be on the cards.

  • Regional Australia is changing, with demographic shifts seeing some regional places grow dramatically in recent years – but rising costs of travel are leaving some isolated. There are different patterns for large towns, smaller villages and bush or outback areas, but on average, the data shows that:

    • Regional audiences indicated feeling less stable financially and more pessimistic about their future finances than those in outer suburbs and big cities, and many are being selective about what they attend right now. Almost half (47%) say they are ‘worse off’ financially than they were one year ago, and 26% expect to be ‘worse off’ in the coming year.

    • Regional audiences have lower levels of access to some types of events, like live performances, and therefore attend less often: 52% of audiences in the regions said they attend performing arts events at least once a month or more, lower than proportions in big cities (77%) and outer suburbs (63%).

    • Some art forms appear to reach audiences in regional areas better than others. For instance, in the past 12 months, 51% of regional audiences have attended contemporary music and 57% have attended libraries, which are similar to attendance rates in urban areas.

    • Four in ten regional audience members say that in the coming year, they’ll be most attracted to stories that are ‘about or from my local community’ (39%), slightly higher than the rate in big cities (32%) and outer suburbs (28%).

 
 

Get the data at a glance

Click the button below to download our Fast Facts for attendance, inflationary pressures, programming preferences and ticketing and marketing behaviour.

 
 

Read the ‘Audiences 2023+’ report

In case you missed it, click the button below for the key insights from the August 2023 National Snapshot.

 

Use the dashboard to get results for your artform and region

Survey data from Phase 9, which heard from over 8,800 respondents, has been uploaded to the dashboard, which now contains insights from over 100,000 Australian participants.

You can use the dashboard to explore the findings by state/territory, artform and audience segment.

It’s freely available to access, just click the image below and use the login details provided on the dashboard page.

 
 

About the Audience Outlook Monitor

The Audience Outlook Monitor provides the results of a study that has tracked audience sentiment over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Data was collected in six phases throughout 2020-2022 and is again being tracked in 2023.

Government agencies across Australia are collaborating with research agencies Patternmakers (Sydney) and WolfBrown (USA) to produce this resource. The dashboard is freely accessible and designed to help artists and cultural organisations of all kinds to make the best possible decisions.

How to find out more

To receive new releases directly into your inbox, as soon as they are available, you can opt in to receive updates below.

If you have a question, or an idea for using this data, please contact Patternmakers at info@thepatternmakers.com.au

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About the Author

Peta Petrakis
Research Analyst

 
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Audiences at the Heart: Key takeaways from the AMA Conference 2023
Patternmakers Patternmakers

Audiences at the Heart: Key takeaways from the AMA Conference 2023

Our Senior Research Analyst, Bianca Mulet, attended the AMA Conference 2023, with the theme being ‘audiences at the heart’. Read the article for her 4 key insights from the conference.

I recently had the incredible opportunity to attend the 2023 AMA Conference in Leeds, UK. Industry professionals from around the UK gathered for a two-day melting pot of ideas and teabags, delving into this year’s theme: audiences at the heart.  

Today I’m sharing just a few of the insights from the jam-packed programme that struck me. As an Aussie in a sea of British accents, I’m grateful for the friendly faces and inspiring speakers I encountered who are paving the way for arts marketers, researchers and comms professionals in all stages of their career. 

Scroll on for my highlights from four sessions. 

Catching feelings 

In “Exploring Emotion and Audience Behaviour”, cultural researcher Dr Ron Evans uncovered the integral role of emotion in the audience experience. 

Audiences attend performances with the expectation of having an emotional experience – but only 43% report that they achieved that goal, raising a crucial question for organisations: Are your audiences finding the emotional experiences they seek? 

We might get this information from a post-show survey, but this only captures part of it. Over the length of a performance there might be a range of things experienced. So, do you measure the most recent emotion? The strongest? 

Dr Evans presented new research in measuring audience emotion during live performance. Participants wore a wristband that collected physiological data over the course of the show, including heart rate, skin conductivity and skin temperature, and at the end they were interviewed about their emotional experience at various points in the performance. 

The experiment revealed that there was an increase in physiological reaction during the climax of the performance, most people predominately felt surprise and sadness – and there was crying. Moreover, the tools revealed some valuable insights for arts organisations: 

  • Triggering content has the potential to captivate audiences and spark discussions and reflections about their own life experiences – and we cannot always predict what topics will be sensitive for individuals 

  • Encouraging post-show discussions and feedback through digital or face to face talkbacks can be an effective audience engagement tactic 

  • Organisations can experiment with innovative tools like live word clouds, asking “What do you think the main character was feeling at the end of the first act?”  

  • Monitoring the return of audiences, such as those with access needs, can help organisations tailor their content and offerings. 

The future of audiences

The Audience Agency presented the latest findings from the Cultural Participation Monitor (CPM) on what audiences are saying about how they engage with arts and culture. Similarly to our Audience Outlook Monitor, the CPM started out tracking audience sentiment throughout the pandemic and has since evolved to capture further insights around programming preferences, cost-of-living concerns and more. 

The recent wave of research shed light on some of the generational differences in audience segments and opportunities look out for when engaging future audiences, as well as insights around the rise of participatory experience and digital/hybrid formats. 

The session presented new patterns in values, taste and experiences, underscoring the prevalence of generational and life-stage factors. As the Audience Agency says, “Our future audiences are already here, they’re just younger.” 

Here’s what they found about values, tastes and experiences: 

  • Young audiences care about issues like climate change and social justice in a way that people always have – but they’re going to care whether or not the organisations they engage with care about those things (almost double that of older groups - see the British Social Attitudes survey)  

  • Arts organisations should think about how they can transition to being a community resource and a part of the conversations that are already happening 

  • The next generation are shifting from hierarchical traditional artforms to having a more eclectic and unpredictable taste and this is heightened with algorithm-driven content 

  • The experience is going to become more important as we continue to be engulfed in content. Audiences will be more discerning about the ‘how’ than the ‘what’, and there will be emphasis on things worth getting out for. 

  • The post-pandemic era means having a mix of FOMO (fear of missing out) and FOGO (fear of going out). If people are going out it needs to be something different - liveness, presence in a place, intensity: “It’s just a bit harder to get around to doing things. In the past if it was 6.5/10 it would be worth going to – and now it needs to be an 8/10, it has to really grab you”.

What it means for arts organisations: 

  • Don’t shy away from prototyping, testing and experimenting with different audience experience formats, alongside your new content ideas. As the experience takes centre-stage, it’s worthwhile to trial what works for different audience segments.  

  • Become a place of conversation and engage in dialogue with your audiences. Asking “Do you enjoy things that feel and look like this?” instead of “do you like opera?” could reveal more about your audiences habits, desires and interests. 

  • Keep being curious, creative and courageous! 

AI: friend, not foe? 

AI is demanding our attention, whether we love it or loathe it. Marketing consultant Jo Burnham described how we’re currently in a golden moment to acquaint ourselves with the nuances of AI - even if it's just a few minutes of trialling and testing here and there. Burnham’s session delved into the pragmatic uses of different AI tools to empower arts marketing professionals, along with delving into the crucial aspects of its ethics and challenges. 

Burnham asserted that arts marketers hold a distinctive advantage to embolden how we communicate with our audiences in new and captivating ways – and encouraged them to: 

  • Be curious: Most AI tools are free to use – don’t let yourself be sold. A key platform Burnham shared is www.futuretools.io, which collects all the emerging AI software in a user-friendly interface, equipped with categories and audience up-votes. Don’t get deterred by the ‘taboo’ – experiment to build up your own knowledge and even explore how using multiple tools together could empower your work. 

  • Be creative: GPT4, Ask Your PDF, Bing Chat, MidJourney and DALL-E2 are just a few examples of tools that Burnham says arts marketers should be aware of. In terms of what they’re good for, getting a handle on prompt engineering for GPT4, for instance, can assist you with creating social media posts to signpost longform content, critiquing your own copywriting, reducing copy length, directing your own learning and helping you plan marketing outputs. 

  • Be critical: As with any new way of working, it’s important to continually interrogate AI and weigh up its costs and benefits. When traversing this unfamiliar path, some aspects and questions Burnham invited us to start think about include: Is this tool actually producing good content? What’s real and what’s hype? What am I being sold? Data security (when in doubt – don’t!) and systemic bias. 

Here are a few reflections from arts marketers shared via Burnham’s presentation: 

“These tools are useful for getting keyword and hashtags without paying for an expensive service. It often comes out with answers that are far too verbose. You must be specific.” – Anna Whelan, Head of Marketing and Communications at Tara Theatre 

“AI speeds up writing and it sounds more engaging than what I write, but you have to be careful with the accuracy of info and plagiarism.” – Marketing and Communications Manager at a theatre in Wales. 

“There is potential that in 10 years’ time, people will look back on his moment and see AI as a transformative event in culture. It feels like there are huge developments happening at phenomenal speed. It feels like a refocusing or a re-framing taking place.” – Steven Franklin, Social Media Manager at the National Archives. 

Be Bold; Be Brave 

The Conference keynote by Leeds5 – a group of female black and brown cultural leaders – underscored the importance of getting to know your audience before inviting them to buy your tickets. 

An analogy by Keranjeet Kaur Virdee, from South Asian Arts and one-fifth of Leeds5, summed it up perfectly: Would you accept an invitation to a wedding if you didn’t know the bride and groom? (Short answer: no.) 

It takes time, effort and energy to develop relationships with diverse communities that you want to reach, ensuring you’re conscious of cultural sensitivities requires an on-stage and off-stage approach. Here are some things to consider: 

  • Ditch the familiar: Cultural exchange thrives when we step outside of our comfort zones and reach beyond our safe space. Complacency keeps us tethered to what we know – and hampers our ability to understand the unique needs and perspectives of diverse audiences. 

  • Unlock new perspectives: Kully Thiari of Leeds5 said ‘We know audiences are at the heart, but we continue to make assumptions about them.’ Listening and understanding the community you want to engage with is more than ticking a box – it’s an invitation to take part in real dialogue, absorb diverse experiences and foster meaningful connections. 

  • Solutions over symbols: Leeds5 used the example of Blackout Tuesday to remind us of the importance of moving beyond grand gestures towards concrete actions – and be proactive to foster positive change in our accessibility, inclusivity and sustainability goals. 

Despite the challenges of post-pandemic rebuilding and cost-of-living pressures, I left the AMA conference feeling affirmed that the future is as promising as it is dynamic. Armed with inspiration from our colleagues across the pond, I’m excited about how Patternmakers can help shift and shape the landscape of audience research as we look to the next chapter. 

About the Author

Bianca Mulet
Senior Research Analyst

 
 

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